Emerging HR:
The Biggest Trends
in HR Now
HR EXPERTS SHARE THEIR PERSPECTIVES ON THE BIGGEST ISSUES,
CHALLENGES AND TRENDS FOR THE INDUSTRY
Whether your organization was grappling with how
to attract talent, how to plan for an increasingly
contingent workforce or how best to leverage tech-nology
–2017 was likely a year full of change. To
look back at the year that just wrapped, and plan and set pri-orities
for the one ahead, we spoke with industry experts who
shared their perspectives on the biggest trends and challenges in
HR right now, and the issues most likely to make an impact in
the near future.
AUTOMATION, AUGMENTATION AND IMPACTS
ON WORKFORCE PLANNING
As automation finds its way into an increasing number of organi-zational
processes, it has a direct impact on how individuals work.
“The question is not how do we replace humans with automa-tion,”
said Bill Morrow with Human Capital Trends, Deloitte and
Touche, “but how do we augment human abilities with technol-ogy?
If we have technology augmenting what a person is doing,
you’re actually making that human superhuman.”
Leveraging what technology can offer is the key to the next lev-el
of success.
“HR and organizations need to find ways to free up people to
do their highest value work, as opposed to doing traditional trans-actional
processing,” said Morrow. “When you look at that end to
end in the organization, in every single talent and HR function,
that really is a disruptive change for so many of our clients.”
“I was at an HR tech conference recently and there were at least
a dozen companies offering chat bots for talent acquisition,” said
David Mallon, head of research at Bersin by Deloitte. “That’s just
one example of many of how we start to use these new technolo-gies
to make us in HR better, to augment what we do, to make that
experience with the candidates more real time.”
Next up, says Mallon, is for HR to consider other ways to use
the technology to its advantage.
“How do we use bots, for example, to track down people that fit
a certain profile and connect them back to us so we can begin to
build long-term relationships with them? How do we all become
more effective when paired with these technologies that accelerate
us and find patterns in data that are just too big to get our heads
around?” said Mallon. These are the key questions, he says, as or-ganizations
get more and more comfortable with the idea of using
technology to augment their skills.
By Melissa Campeau
16 ❚ DECEMBER 2017 ❚ HR PROFESSIONAL