HR Technology Brings New Insights To Human Capital Investment

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a six-post series on the whitepaper, “Six Factors Influencing the Future of Tech Talent.“

When you’re in the people business, by definition, your work is complex.

Talent acquisition and RPO (recruitment process outsourcing), organizational development, labor relations, contingent workforce management, employee wellness, compensation & benefits – these and many other HR functions are tangled up in the complicated matter of making people happy and productive at a sustainable cost to the company.

In 2023, we’re at a crossroads: people are rethinking what makes them happy at work, and companies are racing to catch up.  Consider the many by-products of workplace change during (and immediately after) the COVID-19 pandemic:

  • Workers across industries, especially among Millennials and Gen Z, accelerated their pursuit of a strong connection between their work and their values and personal sense of mission.
  • An unexpected decline in labor force participation created ripples of supply and demand in labor markets.
  • Technology companies, flush with cash from abnormal shifts in consumer lifestyles, doubled down on game-changing technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, cloud services and IoT (internet of things).
  • Entire workforces woke up to the reality that for many kinds of work, remote employees could be as effective and productive (if not more so) as their counterparts.
  • Countless workers began to rethink their priorities and overall career direction.

It’s not surprising that, in a span of just a few years, major capital investments have flown in the direction of Talent Management solutions, which alone represent a $12 billion opportunity.  Embedded in this technology is the promise to solve a great many problems in human capital management with HR technology:

  • Anticipating future talent needs
  • Assessing skill levels (for both recruiting and talent management)
  • Sourcing talent and matching internal candidates to opportunities
  • Developing the skills and capabilities of the current workforce
  • Embedding workers in the organization
  • Managing employee performance and engagement

According to The Society of Human Resource Management, what we see now is only the beginning. The industry continues to innovate, with the potential to transform entire HR functions:

Learning and Development: Virtual reality applications, personalized learning and advanced analytics are only a few of the ways that L&D is being boosted by technology. By creating adaptive, responsive and meaningful learning experiences, aligned to employee career interests and goals, as well as giving employees simulation opportunities to practice new skills, and forming actionable insights from learning data, HR leaders will be well positioned to address employee experience through L&D.

Recruiting Technology: Targeted programmatic job advertisements, an increase in employee-created videos designed for potential candidates, and broad marketing automation are all growing in 2023, as employers experiencing the talent crunch or labor shortage aim to increase the size of their funnels in the race for the top candidates.

Management Training: Virtual and app-based performance management programs and training have long served employee skill gaps, but as front-line managers are faced with challenging and high-pressure circumstances, online training and learning targeting these roles specifically will continue to proliferate.

Facilitation of Hybrid Work: To avoid the erosion of trust driven by surveillance, HR leaders are turning towards benchmarking tools and results-focused performance measures to track and analyze data points from employee sentiment to utilization of key collaboration tools and beyond.

Monitoring Employee Productivity: There’s a notable difference between surveillance and measuring productivity. While surveillance can be perceived as invasive, measuring productivity is strictly focused on output.

Leaders are feeling increasingly pressured to demonstrate that their team is productive and valuable to the organization, especially amid high-profile layoffs. When executed ethically and transparently, employee productivity monitoring technologies can focus and report on time spent on various activities in addition to working patterns to identify shortfalls and increase overall productivity and time management.

This last item, workforce productivity, figures to weigh heavily on companies’ financial outlook in 2023.  With a volatile stock market and inflation still running hot, risk-averse investors are holding their cards while high-interest rates are raising borrowing costs.  The average corporation’s bottom line is getting squeezed at the same time the global economy is slowing down, putting a dent in demand for goods and services.

Growing Pressure on HR Departments to Deliver

Large-scale corporate investments in technologies have already been made, and the HR department will feel more pressure to help their companies tell a compelling profitability story to Wall Street. Success as an HR leader is becoming increasingly linked to efficient sourcing, placement and management of productive high performers. They’re being told to move fast while avoiding costly bad hires.

Tech Elevator helps companies insulate themselves from talent risk, to maintain a productive workforce. We offer our graduates free of charge to Talent Acquisition teams. We also offer employee reskilling programs to help fill talent gaps, augment internal mobility initiatives, support employee retention and ensure strong ROI from investments in human capital management – and digital transformation overall.

Our students start with no technical background and become job-ready full-stack developers in as little as 14 weeks.  They tend to hit the ground running; more than eight in ten graduates land in software engineer or testing/QA roles, receiving a promotion within 1.8 years on average.

To learn more about how we can help you maintain a productive workforce, read about our solutions for talent acquisition and workforce transformation.

Written by Paul Burani, Tech Elevator’s VP of Enterprise