HCM Technology Report

Live at the HR Tech 2022 conference, our guest Sarah White, CEO of Aspect 43, speaks with Mark Feffer about what skills *are* and looks at the bigger picture of the whole movement.

The phrase skills has become the new buzzword of the year, but a lot of these vendors and executives don't exactly use the phrase correctly. A lot of skills development platforms don't seem to be as effective as advertised, and it has a lot to do with talent mobility being the supreme issue to tackle. Having your talents be recognized is important, but personal interest and the desire for self development is the driving force to talent mobility. Understanding how your employees want to grow is an incredibly important aspect to your company's growth.

We would like to extend a warm thank you to our friends at Fuel50 for sponsoring this podcast.

This week in HR tech: DailyPay partners to aid financial wellness, while Ceridian releases new features for Dayforce.

There's quite a prolific conversation to unpack in today's episode of PEOPLETECH.

Live at the HR tech 2022 conference, our two guest Jason Averbook (CEO of Leapgen) and Jess Von Bank (Head of Brand Strategy at Leapgen) speak with Mark Feffer about acquired and desired skills, the ebb and flow of this fluctuating industry, and the shift in employee power.

There's been massive shifts of trust, work types, empathy and humanity over the past few years. This industry has been flipped on its head and we need to rethink almost every single aspect of HR. We're in the middle of the biggest work experience shifts in human history.

Employee power has also shifted as well. The individual is finally given the opportunity to work on their own terms, in their own homes, and with little supervision. This isn't a loss for employers, they just need to figure out how to play the game differently. But these changes are not a moment in time, or based on the current economic climate, it's an evolution that's here to stay.

Every day 4 people retire and 1 person enters the workforce. Talent scarcity is only getting worse, so organizations have to cater to these new youthful archetypes that are breaching into the labor market or else they won't ever be able to keep moving forward. But do we actually have a labor shortage, or do we have a skills shortage? Skills have seemed to transition from "what you know" to "who you are" which is an even harder, more abstract concept to wrap our heads around.

We would like to extend a warm thank you to our friends at Fuel50 for sponsoring this podcast!

This week in HR technology: UKG acquires Quorbit, ServiceNow launches workplace planning solution and more. 

Live at the HR tech 2022 conference, our guest Russell Klosk (Managing Director of Accenture) speaks with Mark Feffer about rethinking compensation for up-skilled employees, and how to transition your organization into a learning oriented environment.

Russell Klosk talks about how we're finally living in a "data-driven" profession. There's been a lot of talk across ATS systems, talent marketplaces, and analytics organizations and that information has finally become accessible enough to make analytics a fundamental part of the HR space.

It's not about creating more jobs, its about the adaptability to up-skill the workers you currently have. But when it comes down to it, will this up-skilling help your employees grow? Adaptability is the new hiring technique. You already have that employee within your organization if you're patient enough to allow this individual to blossom.

We're overusing the term "AI" in this job environment. We have machine learning, massive intelligent databases, robotic processing, but if we're gauging the strict definition of the word...we are not there yet. Digging through the data trenches is a little messy, because it begs the question: at what point is this data collection pass into the creepy territory? Asking your employees to give up their freedoms for the sake of innovation is a pretty hard conversation to have in today's market. People are still quite estranged by anonymous data, as there's quite a lot of circumstantial evidence to figure out who this person is.

We would like to extend a warm thank you to our friends at Fuel50 for sponsoring this podcast!

Live at the HR tech 2022 conference, our guest Robin Schooling (VP of Growth and Innovation at Cielo) speaks with Mark Feffer about rethinking compensation for up-skilled employees, and how to transition your organization into a learning oriented environment.

We're bringing everything back to our roots at this HR Tech conference. Companies are reenforcing their core offerings, and it seems sticking to what they're good at is the best way to shine. Products and organizations are trying to stay their course and make sure they're the best product for a specific goal, instead of trying to be the "all in one" solution that does everything in mediocre fashion.

Buy, Build, or Borrow...the age old question.

Borrowing skills will never go away, because it's always going to be the most efficient and quick way to solve a unique problem you'll only encounter a few times. Buying skills is difficult, as talent is scarce nowadays. Growing skills might just be the best solution in today's market. Who would have thought that growth platforms and LMS's have become a reasonable alternative to hiring platforms?

The only issue is having to rethink titling and compensation for these up-skilled workers. Most companies want to grow their employees from within, but that comes with the added challenge of letting these blossoming employees shine in the manner that they deserve. Internal growth comes with more financial overhead than just the training process; you need to be comfortable with compensating these individuals more for their newly acquired skillset.

Getting to a point where learning is acknowledged as an important organizational goal takes a lot of restructuring. Business leaders, upper management, and the company culture all need to be on the same page so that identifying internal growth opportunities is seamless enough to even attempt it. Propping up your employees is no easy task if you never have done it before, but with the right effort and mindset any organization that puts in the effort can get there.

We would like to extend a warm thank you to our friends at Fuel50 for sponsoring this podcast!

In this week's HR technology news roundup: Paycor launches leadership program. Employees (heart) transparency.

Live at the HR tech 2022 conference, our guests Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman of Chad and Cheese riff with Mark Feffer about up-skilling, robots of the future, and communicating with younger applicants.

Chad thinks that these HCM systems and companies are so big and bloated that they're sort of broken, yet some of the smaller companies don't have the baggage of living in the past. He is hopeful that these newer organizations will help change the industry.

Joel, however, is a bit "old and grizzled," and doesn't get very excited over the newer startups in the scene. He's seen plenty of these smaller organizations rise and fall in the past, and has little faith in the small dogs. Joel is also ready to bow down to their robot overlords, and is awaiting the day when his lunch will be delivered by a pair of steel hands.

Ninety percent of candidates eject from their application simply due to the cumbersome nature of the process. Can we work toward flipping that number so that we can actually get a decent pool of candidates? The hiring process sucks right now, especially for the younger generation. They don't check email, so what other communication methods can we use to stay in touch?

We would like to extend a warm thank you to our friends at Fuel50 for sponsoring this podcast!

Live at the HR tech 2022 conference, our guest Jason Lauritsen CEO of Cultivayo sits down with Mark Feffer to talk about making the work experience more human. Fuel50 and WorkHuman have picked up the torch on this, and the rest of the industry seems to be trending in this direction. Technology solutions sometimes gets in the way of providing the genuine experience a lot of candidates are looking for.

A lot of companies will blame the technology they purchased for their own failures. If we aren't clear on what problems need to be solved, often times you end up pointing the finger in the wrong direction. New tools without the appropriate support can sometimes make things worse. It's the common issue of using a wrench to hammer in a nail, or being given a table saw without any instructions and then wondering why you only have 9 fingers.

Skills seem to be a driving force of this conference, but is this a hot topic or a relabeling of the same conversation? Skill definitions helps managers and leaders find the gaps in their workforce, and hopefully this dialogue actually pushes the industry forward. Learning has become quite the issue lately as technology platforms get so robust. Often times we're looking for a solution to a business problem, but it's buried in a package of other skillsets that you need just to do what you want.

We would like to extend a warm thank you to our friends at Fuel50 for sponsoring this podcast!

This week in HR tech: Cornerstone OnDemand expands content, HiBob launches workforce planning, and more.