Mike Erlin, co-founder and CEO of AbilityMap and member of the 3Sixty Insights Global Executive Advisory Board, has the esteemed distinction of being the first-ever repeat guest on #HRTechChat. In the previous episode with Mike, we dove into the deep end of psychometrics, which have advanced considerably since the old days of Myers-Briggs (considered for many years now a largely ineffective instrument).

In this, the latest episode, we went down the rabbit hole to ponder the future impact of artificial intelligence in hiring and human capital management generally. It's of paramount importance and urgent, we agreed, that humans develop and apply the soundest psychometrics possible to the evaluation and hiring of people, lest AI eventually apply its own and, possibly, prioritize profits and cost containment in ways our imagination can barely fathom. AI-driven criteria for hiring certainly wouldn't necessarily be ethical or value the human purpose in work, but a human-driven psychometrics model just might. And, in veering into these topics, Mike and I talked about whether civilization just might be putting too much faith, proverbially and literally, in AI.

Watch the video to catch our full conversation -- and thank you, Mike, for your wise contributions to these conversations.

Jennifer Ravalli was our guest for the latest episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat podcast. Following long stints at ADP and, most recently, iCIMS, Jenn joined PandoLogic in September 2020 to head all marketing efforts.

Jenn and I met and first spoke at the Spring 2021 HR Technology Conference & Exposition. It's when we delved specifically into PandoLogic's solution, a programmatic job advertising platform with underpinnings in artificial intelligence and available on the iCIMS marketplace.

Naturally, this episode of #HRTechChat covers much ground in the areas of AI, the future of work, and more -- among our favorite topics at 3Sixty Insights. (Go here and here for our blogging on these ideas.)

Jenn sees AI transforming the roles of recruiting (and sourcing, for that matter). Drawing on lessons learned from the analysis of massive data sets, AI will eventually become just plain better than even the most seasoned, savvy, innovative professionals at certain things in recruiting and sourcing.

Some of that will the machine learning part of things -- the repetitive things recruiters would rather not do anyway. But AI will also be better at other things, such as being far more accurate than human intuition when it comes to knowing where the best candidates for an open requisition are likely to be and where they're likely to look.

Who exactly these candidates are or should be is another thing AI will get better and better at determining, eventually better than any human ever could be. And AI will make organizations better at producing job descriptions that attract the most qualified, most diverse candidates for the job.

In sum, soft skills, skills such as people skills, will grow ever more critical to recruiting professionals' success as their day-to-day work grows to encompass mostly this aspect of their roles.

And that's just a small peek into my conversation with Jenn. I encourage you to give this episode a listen.

For this, the latest episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat, Core-Mark International Senior Director of Human Resources Ahmad Noordin joined us. Responsible specifically for systems, payroll and people analytics at Core-Mark, Amhad is also a member of our Global Executive Advisory Council. During our chat, he and I discussed the many factors employers must consider when attempting to bring order to critical aspects of human capital management at a geographically dispersed, decentralized organization. A Fortune 250 company, Core-Mark is one such entity, a behind-the-scenes supplier to thousands of convenience stores across North America.

When thinking about centralizing certain HCM functions at an organization that services a broad geographic footprint and possesses a commensurate physical presence to accommodate this, Noordin says it's important to understand that balance is critical. Satellite offices bring much to the table in terms of boots-on-the-ground intelligence on what works, and what doesn't. At the same time, the HR department absolutely needs deep visibility into activity such as, for example, compensation planning -- whose UKG module Noordin and his team are presently implementing. And, workforce-related compliance overall must hew centrally lest the organization lose control of it entirely -- and suffer the risk.

Our conversation was wide-ranging, and we got quite introspective as to the role and mission of HCM. Be sure to watch the video.

For the latest episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat video podcast, my guest was David Barak, chief marketing officer of CloudPay. Through a unified cloud platform, CloudPay provides managed global payroll in more than 130 countries. The company also offers treasury services across this geographic footprint. Here's a sampling of the ideas we covered:

Virtually no employer ever really, truly plans for global payroll in advance. At some point, most organizations that get large enough and global enough get to a place where their company-wide payroll is practically unmanageable. This becomes the official outset of a typically three-stage process that eventually gets them to a straightforward scenario wherein their global payroll is under control and working for, not against, them. The journey there is almost always backward. You'll have to watch the video to learn what these stages are.

Sure, there are vendors of full-suite software for human capital management who offer a substantial ability to deliver in the grand theater of global payroll. What's intriguing, however, is that global payroll is really a point-solution deployment. The complexity of it just lends itself to this. There is a need for so-called best-of-breed providers because the expertise in it must be deep and ability to deliver, broad.

Global payroll is never a technology-only exercise. If the software isn't up to task, yes, insurmountable problems will scuttle efforts. Deploy highly capable technology that is just right for global payroll, however, and the constantly evolving, highly complex regulatory environment remains. This is why employers ready to get their global payroll in order behoove themselves to partner with a provider that has a cadre of subject matter experts on hand to help the user navigate the span of local, regional, and national laws applicable to processing payroll internationally.

If global payroll is at all interesting to you or important to your work, then you will definitely enjoy this episode of #HRTechChat. I know that I did. Enjoy the podcast

For our latest episode of #HRTechChat, my guest is Theresa Harkins-Schulz, senior vice president of customer experience at Inspirus. And this is where our conversation began, with Theresa's sharing of her philosophy around the customer journey. Because of its customer-centered connotations, she prefers the term customer experience over customer success and other monikers denoting the realm of activities organizations carry out in tending to their customers.

From there, our discussion expanded to ponder the similarities between the customer experience and the employee experience and to what extent organizations can approach both similarly, look at them through the same lens, or even coordinate their efforts. A member of the 3Sixty Insights Global Executive Advisory Council and long-time board member (and past president and past education chair) for Recognition Professionals International, Theresa has trained her focus on the art and practice of employee recognition for much of her career -- several years ago, designing an employee recognition program for Delta Airlines.

Following is a short elaboration on just three of the many additional ideas we explored:

Campfire Girls: HR can get so wrapped up in planning and throwing great events for employees -- kind of like being "campfire girls" -- that they confuse this for the practice of giving employees recognition, which is an attitude. This aligns nicely with an idea, discussed in a previous episode of #HRTechChat, that providing pizza and beer on Friday does not equate to cultivating employer culture. It's nice to do nice things like this for employees, but it is not a substitute for the hard work.

The Components of Good Employer Culture: What are they? It's a challenging question. Unequivocally, Theresa believes trust is the essential, bedrock ingredient. Another fundamental component of employer culture is purpose and understanding of the job that needs to be done. You can't really argue with any of these, which provide as good of a calculus as any to understanding what underlies a good employer culture. "Some of this really goes back to [...] Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and establishing that psychological safety in the workplace," she says.

Pandemic, Hierarchies, Speed, and HCM Technology: The pandemic has laid bare the need for agility in working together and in catering to employees' needs. Hierarchies that have settled into existence over long periods of time slow this down. So does old, bad or no technology. There is a demand for immediacy, and there's a symbiosis to the flexible of an organizational structure and the technology in place to facilitate cooperation and promote positive culture. This need, today. for flexibility to deliver on immediacy is exponentially more pressing than it was ahead of the pandemic, and it will only increase in importance moving forward.

There is much more to our conversation.

3Sixty Insights welcomed James La Brash late last week to the latest episode of #HRTechChat. James is founding managing director of InFlight. Truth be told, James and I have had the pleasure of engaging in several conversations, and we finally concluded that we should try to capture in the podcast as many of the great ideas we've discussed as possible. As anyone can imagine, there just wasn't enough time to cover everything, but we did get to a lot of it.

The launching pad for our discussion in the video here is the idea that there just might be some room for human capital management and marketing -- the CHRO and CMO -- to cooperate, benefiting from mutual data analytics wherever possible. Furthermore, we noted that marketing has a roughly 10-year head start on HCM in the former's appreciation for measuring its effectiveness, and that CHROs may therefore learn a few things from CMOs in the interest of accelerating HCM's own foray into measuring its effectiveness. The conversation took off from there. Here's a sampling of the subject matter James and I have covered since first speaking, much of it captured in the podcast:

With good intentions, many in talent acquisition have recognized the similarities (beyond the acronyms) of systems for customer relationship management and candidate relationship management. It's a good impulse. It's also good not to follow it to the extreme, as the parallels between customers' and candidates' needs are there, but limited.

Are the employer and consumer brand separate? Or, are they one and the same? If it's the latter, is it preferable for HCM and marketing alike to treat them as one or as two. Is the answer, "sometimes"?

In some industries, it makes especially good sense for HCM and marketing to partner. Examples are when the typical employee is desk-less or semi-desk-less or otherwise interacts directly with customers day-to-day. These employees become the expression of the brand, so employer and company brand are one and the same

We all know that great marketing and a great employee experience contribute mightily to organizational success, in and outside the general ledger, but it’s notoriously difficult or impossible to quantify financially these domains’ overall benefits to the organization. Could it be that it’s because in order to prove that financially quantifiable connection, you have to measure the totality of HCM or marketing, and this just isn’t possible because of the many moving parts within these domains?

One way to chip away at this apparent impasse is to introduce leadership to the idea of brand damage -- i.e., that it's potentially expensive and avoidable. This may be a viable bridge to get us to the ideal future, when organizations understand the benefits of positive brand (employer or consumer) as a point of excellence to pursue.

There's much more. You just have to watch. We again thank James for joining #HRTechChat.

Our latest guest on #HRTechChat is Josh Rock, talent acquisition manager at Nuss Truck Group Inc. With locations in Minnesota and Wisconsin, the company sells and services various brands of medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks and heavy equipment for construction. Before entering the field of recruiting at organizations of various sizes and in a number of industries, Josh spent the better part of a decade in sales at JobDig Media. He brings an uncommon perspective to the podcast, and following is an elaboration on three of the many areas of interest we covered:

In many key ways, recruiters are your organization's ambassadors. In many instances, they're the first representatives of your organizations that your prospective employees (and, at times, future customers) meet. As part of an effort to maximize their positive impact, it's important to equip your front-line emissaries in talent acquisition with technology that makes them as efficient as possible in their work.

It may be obvious, but it bears underscoring: Small organizations are more apt to adopt new thinking faster, and this is because bureaucracy has yet to set in and become an impediment to innovation when it comes to products and services or procedure, approach and process. Josh witnessed this firsthand in proposing the production of high-quality videos to help recruiters and Nuss Truck Group itself present a unified, rich depiction of the employer brand not only to prospective employees (for whom there is significant competition regionally with others in the organization's same business), but also existing employees. Josh notes that he was pleasantly surprised by the speed with which leadership gave him the go-ahead for this program and leeway to make it happen as he sees fit.

The mix of technology for talent acquisition is really, really important and hinges on factors such as the size, geographic footprint, and industry of the business. At Nuss Truck Group, Josh inherited an applicant tracking system (ATS) from Ceridian Dayforce and recently implemented Emissary.ai, a text recruiting software, to help anyone recruiting for the organization reach prospects via the media where those candidates are most apt to respond. (Service techs tend not to do email, for example.) In our conversation, Josh mentioned that a solution such as iCIMS or other "Cadillacs" of talent acquisition, as good as they are, wouldn't make sense for his employer. For a similar reason, solutions such as Zip Recruiter, which may create an extra step in the recruiting process, may be advantageous for some organizations, but not for his.

As noted, Josh used to work in business development in the HCM space and knows how vendors sell their technology. He brought a fresh, interesting perspective to #HRTechChat, and it was a pleasure to have him as our guest.

3Sixty Insights welcomed Jeanniey Walden, chief innovation and marketing officer of DailyPay, Inc., to the latest episode of #HRTechChat, where we explored the idea that the act of paying employees is much more than the operational aspects of running payroll. Any employer that solves frustrations related to pay can be exceptionally effective in influencing employees' feelings and, related, their motivation to be productive. Following are a few of the interesting ideas we covered during our illuminating conversation:

The exchange of physical or mental energy for pay is arguably the single most important aspect of employment.

Even so, employees have for years experimented or interacted with pay very little on a daily basis. Limitations of technology have been the largest impediment.

Mobile technology and social media have played a key role in catalyzing an expansion of our attitudes toward pay -- and can make getting paid a sharing experience not unlike getting coffee. (Jeanniey explains....)

Put differently, pay can be much, much more than a number to set and forget, more than an event that takes place in the background every one or two weeks.

Pay can and should also be an experience, and a good place to start making pay more than a number is to make the receiving of it as flexible as possible.

There is very little excuse today, with the state of technology, for the operational aspects of pay to be rigid.

COVID-19 has helped show just how much flexibility is necessary in pay.

The focus of regulations today in the realm of pay is mostly on more concrete aspects of it, and that is because society prioritizes the idea of getting paid on time.

It will be interesting when and whether regulatory bodies decide that humans are entitled to more abstract aspects of employment in pay and elsewhere.

Everyone is always fighting extinction or moving forward; this relates profoundly and inescapably to pay.

With the picturesque Australian outdoors as his backdrop, Mike Erlin, CEO and co-founder of AbilityMap, joined 3Sixty Insights in the early morning his time for this episode of #HRTechChat. A fellow alum of Cornerstone OnDemand, Mike brings ideas that slot right into the future of work. Employers today have the tools to understand their organizational culture like never before. Mike delves into some specifics and explains why any company can ward off a plethora of related challenges before they even take root. Much of the way forward distills down to the deployment of the right psychometric instrument. But there's much more to it, and if you enjoy geeking out on human capital management, then you'll have fun following our conversation. Here's some of what we covered:

How can organizations start getting deliberate and methodical about changing an employer culture?

Why are pizza Fridays, though a nice gesture, not an effective way to build an employer culture?

What are some of the attitudes that may have held the world of work back in resolving to evaluate and train for soft skills?

Why is now the time to start doing so?

How can learning benefit to become far more efficient?

How does Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs fit into this?

What do our basic vs. aspirational needs have to do with the history and timeline of the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions?

What matters to a CFO when it comes to investing in the development of soft skills?

How did COVID-19 surprise organizations in terms of inventorying and understanding the capabilities existing in their workforce?

Is it really possible to have an entire team of individuals who truly dig what they're doing for work?

Nicole Roberts, vice president of people and culture at MVAH Partners, joined 3Sixty Insights for this episode of #HRTechChat. A member of the 3Sixty Insights Global Executive Advisory Council, Nicole started in her leadership role at MVAH a year ago, in March 2020 -- just as the flurry of pandemic-related restrictions unfolded in the United States. The disruption profoundly affected the nature of her first several months on the job. On day one, for example, she took over internal employee communications. MVAH, a developer of affordable housing, has 7,000 units under its management across 15 states. The logistics around managing an already dispersed workforce suddenly under unprecedented, unique circumstances were significant and necessitated the expansion of her focus.

Amidst all this, Nicole and her team also put in the hard work to implement the following:

Paycom for suite-wide human capital management

Paycor as a point solution particularly well-suited for applicant tracking at a company the size of MVAH

Paycor partner Spark Hire for video interviewing, which was essential to scale to hiring needs under impeded candidate mobility

Nicole sat down with us for a wide-ranging discussion -- employer culture, the intrinsic drive most employees have to produce good work, her philosophy behind employee recognition, and more. Our conversation yielded several gems:

The HR department should not be the high school principal's office.

For them to realize their potential on the job, staff need approachable leaders -- mentors and coaches, not scolds and nags.

Leaders in the organization set and influence employer culture.

Technology isn't just about efficiency. It's also about communication.

Regular communication between HR and all its organizational stakeholders is paramount to success.

Effective technology can be the deciding factor in facilitating or impeding this communication.

In other words, most organizations need strong leadership and strong technology for HCM (and communication) to be successful in perpetuating a strong, healthy employer culture

Every customer interaction presents a microcosm of some expression of that employer culture.

Organizations with positive, healthy employer cultures have positive, healthy interactions with customers.

By the way...

At the Spring HR Technology Conference, a virtual event, Nicole is on the hunt this week for information on the latest thinking in employee recognition and innovative vendors providing related technology.

3Sixty Insights is happy to announce that our #HRTechChat Series is now available as a podcast on the following platforms:

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