My predictions for HR tech 2023

The art of setting yearly predictions ..

Is a prediction a wish, or a?statement based on some combination of science, data and gut?

When I was young, I remember my friends and me almost religiously reading Nostradamus predictions for the year ahead.?When did that go out of fashion?

Like most, I am captive to my own experience and what I am exposed to. For what its worth, here are my predictions for HRTech in 2023

1. Connection is the new culture and we will see a flood of HR tech companies looking to become that new connection layer. 26% of U.S. employees now work remotely, which is four times the number who worked remotely before. By 2025, there could be as many as 36.2 million Americans working remotely. No one has thought through hard enough about the massive disruption that remote work presents to everything people related.
2. Normalisation of machine learning / AI as a core feature of the HR tech stack now that so many of us have experienced the humanness of ChatGPT and the fun of Dall-e?That same brilliance of large-scale language models that have fuelled Sapia.ai ’s tech and empowered and motivated 2m candidates across 47 countries, will?massively accelerate candidate and employee expectations for personalised, always on, and intelligent tools at work.
3. Flowing from that, CHROs will finally realise that all this data they have,?the refrain I often hear: ‘we are drowning in data – engagement data, exit leaver data, performance?data’, is actually pretty useless. It doesn't go anywhere. It doesn’t feed into any learning either for the individual?or the organisation. Learning fast is the definition of intelligence and there are few HR teams who have seen the light that is AI to deliver that speed and scale of organisational intelligence. The fast-follower CHROs will see that their people processes are a means to train an “ML model”. i.e. a key objective of all people?processes will be “to capture training data” and “models that learn alongside humans (reinforcement learning enabled by conversations)”. ?Companies that do this increase their own intelligence.

What could this look like?

From bots that are static, like closed loops of information, to intelligent bots that ask questions from humans in Slack and reinforce their knowledge just like humans. Bots that will then join in on conversations pointing to useful content/coaching / and even having 1:1 follow-up sessions.? ?

ML as a form of automation is not new. Google,?Amazon, Walmart, Mcdonald's have been doing this for years in their business processes. However, what is new is the human-like interaction that will turn every conversation into a “learning conversation” for both the human and the machine.

2023 will start to see this discipline emerging in HR- for those who are brave enough to upend the way HR works

4. Personalisation will finally make its way into the candidate journey. No longer a static experience, everyone entering into and going through the same ‘fixed’ career site, or a standardised ‘one size fits all’ digital journey through to a job. Instead, a guided tour enabled by smart chatbots to chart your own journey into the organisation.?This personalised journey will be laden with rich content. The candidate chooses?the journey and the ending. In a world of virtual work and frictionless resignation, candidates are craving to get closer to the organisation and dynamic experiences?that cater to the diversity of interests of your candidate pool will be a competitive tool in the competitive talent market.?

5. This is perhaps more a personal wish than a prediction- the beginning of the end for the resume. It limits the pool of talent you are reaching big time. It leads to sample bias as we can't help but pay attention to heuristics like the schools listed on the resume.?The signs are already out there.?Replaced by contextualised objective?insights about the individual that both force and empower?people leaders?to really THINK about what the role needs, what the team needs, simultaneously making better and fairer people decisions.

?6. Augmenting internal people decisions- promotions and internal mobility with smart AI tools. Nowhere is it more important to be seen to make fair decisions as well as actually make good and fair decisions than when it comes to ‘who gets that leadership role’ and that ‘sweet international transfer’. A fast track to disengagement is when decisions, like these lack transparency and lack objectivity.

?Maybe I'm influenced by a form of recency bias thanks to the flurry of AI innovations in 2022 or by the halo effect of Sapia.ai’s own success in implementing bias-free candidate screening where millions of candidates have received insights and coaching tips. But I'm sure you’d agree that it is no bias to state AI is going to be a disruptive force in 2023, and it's time every CHRO has an AI strategy for their people processes.??