With automation on the way to reach its peak and AI rising slowly in the horizon, whatever we knew about human resources or talent management has been challenged.
Access to global opportunities is open for every one of us and no one is locked to a home market at this point. So, everything from attracting, hiring, nurturing and empowering teams to leading distributed teams has taken a digital twist.
In these times, where HR-tech is moving towards, is incredibly interesting to follow not just for HR professionals but every single one of us as its stakeholders.
What are some of the key problems HR-tech is solving now?
1) Well-being
How do we ensure physical and mental health of our employees?
Office gyms, zumba and yoga trainings at work have been on a constant rise. Meditation has also joined the game where employees in many companies are recommended to take time few minutes off during the day to take a deep breath. But how do we digitally nurture, support and incentivize wellbeing?
Challengize is an interesting company from Stockholm within the niche of physical health at workplace where it creates a platform for teams within an organization to challenge each other on healthier habits and workouts.
Adding on to employee assistantships programs (EAP) at work, platforms like BlueCall are also on the rise increasing accessibility to informal and formal therapists and support for mental health.
Feedr, a London-based startup calls themselves cloud canteen where offices that doesn’t have an in-house canteen can subscribe to Feedr that delivers healthier work lunch options to employees.
There is a huge potential within this niche.
2) Continuous performance management
Why should performance analysis happen only once or twice a year in this digital age of instant gratification? How can we create instantaneous and real-time performance management system for our employees?
From setting up expectation and goals till supporting progress and incentivizing success, unlimited digital possibilities exist today to calibrate and create the best process that works for our company.
This includes Continuous Feedback, Competency Mapping, Unique Assessment and Compensation Modeling.
Companies like Benify and PushAppy work within this niche in Stockholm.
3) Standardising Skill evaluation
How do we create an unbiased standardised skill assessment within recruitments?
Our networks and skill sets are limited and that’s why during recruitments, many-a-times we feel we are looking into the same pool of people again and again. The minute we try to reach out to a talent pool outside our trusted network, we have very little idea on how to move forward with evaluation.
This is where the bots are saying, “You don’t know what you’re doing. We’ll take it from here”.
There is a huge need within this area of skill evaluation and several interesting companies are popping up that are automating candidate assessment.
TripleByte which comes from YCombinator launched their “Background-blind tech evaluation platform” automating evaluation of developers in 2015. The biggest motivators for talents to take up these standardized tests are,
1) Their highly reputable client base like Google, CoinBase, Facebook, etc.
2) One assessment score being valid for a huge range of companies within that expertise saving time for both parties.
This year in 2018, TriplyByte released a report saying they have a placement rate of 40% from interview to hires compared to the market average of 20% in the US.
The area of online skill assessment is also growing fast starting with technical/ software development coding tests performed through platforms like TestDome and Codility.Technically Compatible from UK joins the race here as a fast-growing startup within this area.
4) AI-Driven Personality & Compatibility assessment
This is an extension of the above segment of evaluation. But here we focus on the softer side of skills — personality and compatibility.
Resumes do not give enough data points to make concrete decision in a recruitment process since it completely misses out on the personality points of the candidate.
How effectively can we gather data points on personality through automated text-based or video-based candidate assessments with AI?
HireVue, AI-driven video-based pre-hire assessment platform, is one of the fastest growing hr-tech companies making the list of 500 fastest growing tech companies in the US by Deloitte. They combine AI-driven video assessment with game-based problem-solving exercises to evaluate candidates compatibility for different roles.
MyInterview, another AI-driven video interview platform from Tel-Aviv is joining the race within this area.
From the text-based Q&A side of things, we have Stockholm’s own Happyr analyzing candidate personality and compatibility traits through automated question and answer analysis.
5) HR operation automations — from continuous employee interaction to payroll management
How do we continuously interact with employees to understand their feedbacks and grievances?
How do we create a standardised and effective on-boarding for new team members?
How do we manage HR operations digitally from leave requests, exit policies and payroll?
There have been quite some HR-tech startups within this area.
Within continuous employee engagement for feedback and effective on-boarding automation, we have Stockholm’s own HiHenry who have created HR assistant Henry who reaches out to employees through chatbots.
Within this space of chatbot driven automation within HR-tech there are so many interesting companies popping up solving several HR administrative tasks easily. Leena AI is another startup in this area of conversational AI, who is backed by Y Combinator.
Enboarder from Australia is another startup within on-boarding that is growing fast. Flare from Australia as well, seems to have been growing within payroll automation.
6) Job platforms for Gigs
Which are the best platforms for gigs jobs? How do we hire gigsters?
With on-demand or access economy on the rise, the temporary work employment opportunities have also been on a steady increase. These temporary, on-demand, freelance, independent jobs are called the gigs.
Gigs can be anything from foodora or uber delivery jobs to design, development, marketing, event management and anything and everything today technically.
The platforms for finding these gigs are on the rise and more development is happening in reinventing simpler recruitment and administrative processes for employers to access the “gigsters”.
We have Gigstr and Appjobs in Stockholm who are gigs platforms. ZenJob from Berlin is doing great as well. But there are specific gigs platforms for different skillsets and niches available today and they’re on the rise.
7) Affiliate/ Referral Recruiting
How do we empower and incentivise our network to generate quality recruitment leads?
Referral recruitment has more benefits than what is at its surface which is lowering cost per candidate acquisition. It also greatly increases the retention of both referee and the referred (if hired).
Also creating a work culture where every person is happy to contribute and participate in bringing in future teammates is highly positive.
We have some really interesting startups within Stockholm building great referral platforms. iRecommend and GreatPeople are definitely amongst them.
8) Integrating Social Media and Recruitment
How do we integrate our social media channels and job boards? How do we bring our marketing intelligence into recruitment?
We always thought LinkedIn is the professional/ career platform and Facebook is personal/social platform but today we’re seeing more jobs posted in Facebook and shared in Facebook groups than ever.
So, from a traditional view point of there are job boards where jobs exist and there are communities where people exist, the integration of presenting jobs to the right pool of people in multiple social media is happening right now.
Posting jobs in Twitter with different dedicated twitter handles for niched recruitment is already happening. Soon, reaching interesting influencers for jobs in Instagram and Snapchat could become mainstream.
Also, programmatic marketing is meeting recruitment where data-driven marketing campaigns roll out in reducing cost of talent acquisition.
Inbound recruitment is gaining more popularity in this stream and companies like Talently in Stockholm are doing interesting work in this area.
9) Offshore recruitment
How do we recruit offshore teams effectively?
Global expansion of teams has been around for ages but the digital platforms have extended this possibility to SMEs.
YouTeam, a UK-based startup and a recent graduate from YCombinator has created a marketplace for offshore talents through what they call dev shops.
They released an interesting report that said, 93% of the world contract developers are not freelancers but hired through IT consulting firms. So, they wanted to create online dev shops through which verified and validated freelancers can be hired with trust, flexibility and transparency similar to consulting firms that we trust today.
So, this space of creating the best offshore recruitment and team building marketplace has considerable market space left to conquer.
10) Hiring automation tools — advanced ATS systems
How do we improve our hiring efficiencies? What tools minimize our administrative efforts in recruitment?
Application Tracking Systems, as the name suggests were traditionally systems that populated all candidate applications in one place making it easier to manage.
But today they have transitioned into hiring software systems, offering:
designer job ad editors, requirement templates, hiring pipeline design, email & social media integration, job board integration, marketing campaign performance analytics, interview scheduling, recruiting report generating and maximising hiring team collaboration.
Workable, Greek-American company has been one of the fast-growing systems within this area.
In Stockholm we have our own solutions like TeamTailor and Jobylon doing an excellent job providing advanced ATS support.
But still how much can we advance in this area for next year is up to the competitors within this space.
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HR-tech is an ocean with variety of challenges and opportunities in multiple domains and I’ve just tried to touch the surface. So, if you have some other intriguing challenges or problems within HR that you’d like to bring to light, please comment them below.
Also, if there are more HR-tech companies doing interesting stuffs, please add them below as well. 🙂
If you find this article interesting, please share it in your network and let us gather all the hr-tech aspirants around.
