HR Connection blog

Please allow me the luxury of taking you on a trip down memory lane that has led us to the modern-day highway of horror. It was 2006 and Manpower published its first Talent Shortage Survey. Yes, you read that correctly – 2006.

The volume and variety of talent acquisition technologies on the market would lead even experienced HR professionals to believe that at least one of those technologies must be the key to improving the speed and quality of hiring. In fact, in 2019 experts predicted that the market for human capital–related technology (mostly related to hiring and retention) would approach $30 billion by 2025.  Even during the difficult economic times of the past year and a half, much of the talent acquisition chatter continues to have a strong technology bent. 

Chatbots (or digital assistants) have been around for a while, but their use has soared in recent years, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, and is expected to climb even higher. Not only are these AI-powered automated software robots rapidly growing smarter, but they're also becoming increasingly capable of handling recruitment tasks such as answering job seekers' questions, prescreening candidates, and scheduling interviews. (One of their most valuable contributions toward recruitment is their ability to recruit 24-7: at any time of day or night, a chatbot can connect a job seeker with positions that best match their skills, experience, and interests.) In order to best leverage chatbots for their own recruitment, though, hiring managers and HR staff first need a basic understanding of what they do and how they work.

Long before the pandemic forced everyone into working from their kitchens, home offices, or bedrooms, the world was very much on its way to eliminating the need for conventional workspaces. Today's younger generations have grown up in digital environments and already feel pretty comfortable doing much of their work online. But even though those digital natives probably find the prospect of working from home less intimidating than many members of older generations, in 2020 people of all ages are facing the same challenge: familiarizing themselves with the digital workplace.

Many industries undergo transformations every few years, and talent acquisition is no exception. Rapid change followed the arrival of applicant-tracking systems in the late 1990s, and today it’s AI-enabled tools that are set to fundamentally reengineer how hiring is done. The adoption of those new tools is being driven in large part by candidates’ constantly shifting expectations. (In the 1990s, for example, companies didn’t need career sites but in the 2000s they did—and by 2012 companies that didn’t have mobile-optimized sites were in trouble.) Therefore, organizations that want to provide consistently great candidate experiences must adopt a forward-looking mindset.

Technology has been called the greatest disruptor of happiness in human history. Is this really true? For all of our technological connectivity in the digital era, we have never felt so overwhelmed and fragmented as a society. We find ourselves stressed out by the size of our inboxes, by our social media feeds, by the tangle of wires on our nightstands. We find ourselves constantly connected to our devices–afraid to be without them, but also afraid of what being with them will mean for us. And we worry that artificial intelligence will soon outsmart us and that robots will take over our jobs. Although, to be honest, I am more scared of humans turning into robots than I am of robots taking over for humans.

The end of the last century saw the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, marked by the technology-based fusion of biological, digital, and physical worlds that is not changing the way people work but is in fact driven by the way people work. In recent decades, the business landscape has undergone tremendous change. People rarely stay in one job for decades, for example. Changes in social behavior and demographic shifts (notably, the arrival of Millennials, who gravitate toward flexible and entrepreneurial careers) have altered the shape of the workforce. In the wake of the Great Recession, the gig economy has arisen to help workers achieve independent “job security,” and personal marketability, and better work-life balance (with the standard “9 to 5” schedule is on its way out). And digitally connected work environments are displacing traditional brick-and-mortar office space.

It’s no longer news–to employers or to potential employees–that social media accounts offer a glimpse into the lives of applicants that has never before been possible. At least, that’s the case for those whose information is made available to the public, whether by design or by accident. This enables hiring managers to approach their applicant pool with more information than ever. But using these tools comes with several caveats–some cons to balance out the pros, both from legal and ethical standpoints. Here are some potential pitfalls as well as some good ideas to make sure you’re using these tools wisely.

I have read and written about, the coming wave of robotic workers displacing human workers. The unfortunate truth is that this is not going to go away. Many workers, including those in the C-suite, may be replaced by robots if they do routine, repetitive work. Much of HR is included in that prognostication. However, there may be a bright side to this story.

The fears of workers being replaced en masse by robots has been well documented in the press. Rather than replace them however, how about if technology allowed companies to retain workers by melding them with machinery to make them much more efficient and productive?