F: Knock knock!
H: HR’s here, who’s there?
F: Hi HR, I’m the Future!
H: Hi Future, come here and have fun with me!
F: Thank you HR, may I also invite my friend Magic?
H: Sure, I like Magic, tell him to hurry up, the party is starting!
If we imagine the future of the HR world, we would think at a dialog like that.
What’s going on in the People divisions all around the companies? Easy, the Magic is coming, and all together they will have lots of fun!!!
Let’s see how…
HR, talent and learning divisions are facing a positive change. The HR evolving it’s like “how do you speak business” and it seems that talents are the core business now. HR leaders, who drive decisions about their future, might say to put talents on top and make them become the number one priority in the organization. The talent acquisition department starts being considered helping the company to define the future. This means that the recruiters need to think strategically about how to find the magical talent pools and engage the best one. They need to be creative and to increase the company’s image becoming employer branding specialists. Especially in sales, operations and engineering, that are the highest priority roles at the moment, the company claims that the hire volumes is going to increase and the HR teams should focus mostly on finding full life cycle recruiters and get automate their workflow. Social media are top to promote the brand and also to identify the hidden talent pools where skills are top-notch.
What is really important is to differentiate the company’s strategy from the competitors by working on the employer brand and focusing on the culture trying to pick up the interest of talents. A solution could be partnering with marketing and communication divisions. Candidates are interested the most in the company’s long term vision and in its reputation (here the importance of corporate social responsibility Is it a new global Corporate Social Responsibility developing?). HR teams are required to create an outstanding employee experience “keeping the magic”. We need to bring the magic in our companies, in the HR world. We need to be creative while experiencing the phenomenon of “hyper-personalization”, which is another new trend in HRs. Candidates want to have choice and to have a personalization of benefit, the expectations are “what I can offer you and want You can offer me”. What attracts talents mostly (especially the millennials) is the career growth both financially and intellectually, through benefits but also through work challenges.
If talent acquisition is so important then, why there isn’t so much budget in the companies? The reason is because it’s hard to measure its ROI and to show the correlation between the candidate success and the recruiters efforts. For that reason, in the future, an important attention it will be on the automatization and engineering of recruitment process. The technology will permeate more and more in the HR management making easier the recruiters’ lives and demonstrating the great job they are doing. Recruiters should perceive technology in HR as an extension of the existing applications and an artificial assistant that can make their lives easier. For examples, it could increase the speed of screening candidates, saving time for scheduling them, everything through an automated process. We already have examples. IBM Watson can predict the likelihood of candidate being successful, perform analytics to help recruiters decide which one to focus first. AFFECTIVA evaluates candidate’s emotional intelligence, the confidence and truthfulness during video interviews by analyzing facial expressions, word choices, speech rate and vocal tones. ENGAGE TALENT is to predict how likely a passive candidate will feel engaged in a recruiting discussion. We are experiencing the arousal of the people analytics profile, which merge HR information with data coming, for examples, from mobile apps and providing a huge database about people experience at work and their career.
Also in the the L&D department we will experience changes. It will continue to be a strategic business asset in companies and it will see its business improved towards a personalization of trainings and, of course, trying to prove its ROI as a worth one.
Finally, last but not least, in our cosmopolitan world the diversity and inclusion departments will become even more a successful business strategy. The hiring process has to ensure fairness and equity, due to the diverse nature of the global workforce.
So, for the next future, HR will be more creative, talent focused, customized and assisted by technology.
An advice?
Just open our minds, be brave enough to be ourselves and release our personality. The world needs us to be disruptors and we need to feel the magic inside the world!