PANGEO: The future of HR Tech

As part of Globalization Partner’s PANGEO event, numerous HR and tech specialists have discussed the future as well as the challenges of the pandemic for companies.

One of the sessions saw UNLEASH’s CEO and founder Marc Coleman join a roundtable with SVP sales & business development consultant Shane Gray, CEO of SocialTalent Johnny Campbell, and VP of Ceridian Europe Wendy Muirhead.

Diane Albano chief revenue & marketing officer at Globalization Partners facilitated the conversation, which initially focused on the pains in the HR tech space, as well as its rapid growth during the pandemic.

Coleman noted that: “The emerging tech space is on fire at the moment.”

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t issues with remote working. In an effort to introduce new models of working, there are often HR tech implementations, nonetheless, they aren’t always successful.

Coleman added: “The research that we’ve done at UNLEASH identifies that only 16% of the Fortune 2000 considered their existing HR tech implementations highly successful.”

Aside from tech implementations, other areas of pain that were identified were pay, benefits, and instilling company culture. These issues have been closely aligned with staff shortages on the back of the “Great Resignation’.

In terms of growing areas for the HR tech space, education platforms, benefits software, talent management, and recruitment applications were all discussed by the panel. These areas were identified as ways to attract and maintain talent amidst shortages.

Remote hiring 

Gray talked about the challenges of hiring remotely and commented: “I think that’s the first thing that you got to [do is] align with the overall business strategy.”

He added: “It’s now more important than ever to communicate to a much wider audience [and] tell the story of the job.

“The good news is that values didn’t vanish during periods of remote work, it just changed. And if that’s the case refresh that story, because now we’re talking about different things, or trying to attract talent to come work with us.”

On top of this challenge, there are also difficulties in identifying key skills in virtual recruitment, and it is hard to keep communication clear with dispersed teams.

Gray recommends “different communication methods” in a business so that priorities can be set and discussions can be fluid.

Education and the remote workforce

Communication is also essential in training and SocialTalent’s Campbell discussed how professional education has changed: “We’re living in a time when digital learnings almost the only learning that’s available to organizations.

“This wasn’t the way two years ago, when one of the biggest competitors of digital learning was in-person training, and you find a lot of resistance to digital learning in many enterprises in particular.”

This kind of training has been a large investment by the likes of Microsoft over the pandemic, but Campbell stresses its complexity.

Campbell noted: “To me, a lot of folks would look at how can we better engage our current talent to try and retain them, which I think is absolutely a great thing to do.

“But when you look at the bigger picture of retention. To me, it’s a formula that has three components as hiring, multiplied by onboarding, multiplied by engagement.

How can tech help remote employees?

Shortly after Campbell talked about talent retention, Ceridian’s Muirhead offered her expertise on keeping remote employees content through technology.

Muirhead notes that there are “many ways the technology can help foster culture and engagement in global and hybrid workforces.”

She added: “I always think about keeping it simple. If you ensure that your core values are at the front and center of everything that you do, and that that’s interwoven in everything that you do, then that helps the employees with the onboarding experience, the candidate experience and actually driving that forward.”

On the point of embedding technology and supporting teams, Muirhead commented that employees are “part of the organization and from a technology point of view, you know, collaboration using tools that help to focus on that adoption and technology is great for connecting people.

“We’re all connected across the world today, through technology, it makes it easier for people to interact digitally. And it’s already in, we use Microsoft Teams and Zoom to be able to do that.”

If you are interested in finding more about what the experts had to say and the future of HR tech, catch up with Globalization Partners’ PANGEO event.