About 50 of 425 exhibitors at the HR Tech Conference in Las Vegas showcased platforms that assist executives with functions that begin with recruiting, follow the employee through their time with the company and end with offboarding. The end-to-end technologies leverage some combination of AI,
Consumer experience is driving this trend, says Jack Berkowitz, vice president of products and data science for Oracle’s adaptive intelligence program. He lists what he calls, “a confluence of factors,” such as the consumerization, technology including the processing power that is currently available.
“It’s the explosion of data we have available to set the context, and it’s the understanding that things are changing so fast, you can’t hard code this stuff,” he says.
Just as employers are looking to drive employee engagement in their day-to-day operations, HR executives want technologies that will create a system to track a prospective employee through recruiting, the interview and background check phases and eventually hiring, while letting the employee know that the company cares about them. The desire for personalization stems from a millennial-driven experience with consumer products and the expectation it will seep into their work lives, says Berkowitz.
“When we look at what’s happening in recruiting, it’s about the one-on-one personalization of that experience,” says Berkowitz. “It’s not just about approaching the company or the company approaching you. It’s contingent on us as technology providers is to let that shine.”
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The current offerings focus on UX design, the underlying data collected from clients and third parties, and the capability to remain agile as HR expectations change.
One example is Ascendify, an AI-enabled platform that assists with talent acquisition and talent management, was built in 2012 during this wave of personalized technology. It has focused not only on what employers want in a hiring process now but also what they may need in the future.
“In today’s world, it’s about hiring one person for one job, but we really should think more broadly about hiring one person into a team,” says Matt Hendrickson, founder and CEO of Ascendify. “Why not, in that recruiting process, understand the skills gaps of the team and then use the job requisition to then fill some of those gaps? We call it dynamic teaming.”
Know the talent pool
The ability to determine the skills gaps in employees requires contextual data, Berkowitz adds. Similarly, employers need to understand the workforce and what their talent pool looks like.
Data firms like CareerBuilder, maker of an applicant tracking system that uses semantic recruitment technology with a matching algorithm and document parsing technology, supplies data to give clients a sense of their applicant pool. The data shows the 150 million employees in the market, while signal data shows employees who are actively looking for a new job.
Other third-party data, such as benchmark, travel, weather, location and social calendar data, is instrumental in guiding conversations and other interactions with candidates and employees.
“I think it’s important for people in HR to understand that they are that partner to the company end-to-end,” Berkowitz says. “It’s not just about reporting or hiring or terminating. I think HR people don’t just want to hear it, but they believe that as well.”
