 "Balancing high-tech with human touch")
In the digital era where the world seems to have converged into a smartphone and social media is the new social hangout, HR heads are turning to technology not just to support internal systems and processes but people as well. Increasingly, for head hunters social media is becoming the most important hunting ground. "It not just allows companies to identify potential talent, but also helps in the initial screening of candidates before an interview. LinkedIn, for instance, is becoming popular with job-seekers and recruiters alike," says Mohammad Shahed, chief human resource officer, Telenor India.
For a majority of organisations, three key sources - social media, employee referrals, internal job postings - are helping fill up about 55 per cent of the positions that are falling vacant. A key reason is cost - these platforms help a company spread the net far and wide to woo potential hires without incurring high costs. Tuhin Biswas, vice-president, MTR Foods, says recruitment through LinkedIn in particular has given the company a bigger set of candidates to choose from and has resulted in huge cost savings as well.
As more and more organisations hunt for prospective hires on social media platforms, HR teams are leveraging new-age video and enterprise tools to shortlist and interview potential candidates.
Bajaj Capital, for instance, uses a mobile app, e-poise, to conduct automated interviews. The app offers both the candidate and the prospective employer the freedom to go though the interview process at a time convenient for both. For remote locations, the company uses a video recruitment solution, video select. It saves the HR team the time and money it would have otherwise spent visiting a remote location to conduct a face-to-face interview.
Vodafone India, too, has standardised and automated the hiring processes - right from receiving applications for a job to rolling out an offer. It uses tools such as Taleo and HireVue for hiring. HireVue allows managers to create a digital interview to evaluate candidates. Suvamoy Roy Choudhury, director, HR, Vodafone India, says, "HireVue uses predictive analytics to rate the responses from candidates and identify the best fit. This leads to quick turnaround and therefore savings in cost."
For its part, Housing.com uses a recruitment solution that integrates all open positions within the organisation, hosts the positions through various links at different locations. "One of the key advantages the tools offers is that interesting candidate credentials are routed back to the HR team through an integrated box that not only checks for duplication but also tracks the status of an employee's application and the developments at every step," points out Ajay Nair, chief of administration, Housing.com.
The organisation also uses a mobile app to generate employee referrals - employees can access the positions open for referral on their mobile phones and are looped backward into their individual socio-professional platforms. It recommends them the possible contacts that meet the job criteria.
Next to hiring, technology is also coming to the forefront in onboarding and engaging employees. For prospective employees, Vodafone India has "All Aboard!" a pre-joining engagement platform. This unique gamification experience is structured to help new employees get familiar with Vodafone.
Technology is also facilitating employee engagement. For example, to enhance employee engagement globally, Telenor has launched FB@Work, an internal communication tool. The collaboration tool connects the Telenor Group's more than 36,000 employees located in 13 countries. It acts as an open forum for discussions removing barriers to collaboration.
Training is another area in HR where technology deployment is gaining ground. At Vodafone India, a mobile app, MindTickle, promotes learning on the go among employees. Bite-sized videos produced in-house are showcased on MindTickle. Choudhury says these videos support agile learning, act as a performance aids and enable cultural alignment. It facilitates easy scaling up of frontline skills with quick reach across the country.
The country's leading carmaker, Maruti Suzuki, for instance, has invested heavily in online knowledge sharing platforms. The company's learning management system Wizdom is easy to access, cost-effective and saves time. Employees can create, track and raise a request for a specific classroom or online training course from its vast library of e-learning modules. The organisation also engages its workforce through Pitstop, a portal that facilitates communication, business information, entertainment and knowledge updates.
While video technology, automation and collaboration tools have streamlined hiring and engagement processes - data mining and analytics are empowering HR team to carry out performance assessment efficiently and in determining the right rewards for better performers.
Bajaj Capital's in-house platform, W.M, stores all the information related to the business garnered by a team member, his performance, his personal credentials, his earnings etc. This tool is integrated with the company's performance management system. "It has made our lives better as an HR group and we get error-free performance reports in no time," underlines Sunaina Matto Khanna, chief people officer and head, transformation, Bajaj Capital.
At Vodafone India, line managers use performance calibration tools to input ratings and view and analyse their team's performance freeing up HR time to partner with business more strategically. MTR Foods has put in place an analytics portal that provides the HR team with real-time data on performance thus enhancing an employee's bandwidth to take up more value adding work.
At Telenor India, the employee development and performance process is managed through an enterprise solution, Workday. Only recently, the company introduced a pay review life cycle process that empowers managers to engage with their teams and understand the value they need to build in for their teams.
Even as organisations enthusiastically take to technology to save time and money while identifying the right people, engaging them and pursuing objective performance reviews, HR teams need to watch out for some hurdles that lurk along the way.
One of the key challenges for organisations while they deploy technology to simplify processes is to ensure that they do not take out the "human" and "personal" element out of the process, says Choudhury of Vodafone India. For example, it is good to have an electronically generated reward letter but that needs to be backed by an effective career conversion with the employee and a fair explanation of "why you have earned what you have earned".
Abhinav Chopra, executive vice-president-chief human resource officer, Viacom18, echoes Choudhury's point as he says, "Technology should not take away or replace the conversation that needs to happen between individuals." Rather it should be used to replace and streamline mundane processes.
Another challenge pertains to the availability and integration of end-to-end HR solutions at the right costs. Mausam Mathur, chief people and operations officer of GirnarSoft, laments that the one-size-fits-all solutions offered by the average HR consultant ignores the industry, the size of the organisation, the kind of talent the organisation already has and so on. Housing.com's Nair says, "Some elements of the HR function are 'imperative' and need to exist. But many of the remaining tasks can be outsourced to technology."
A three-step approach to getting technology deployment right
For a majority of organisations, three key sources - social media, employee referrals, internal job postings - are helping fill up about 55 per cent of the positions that are falling vacant. A key reason is cost - these platforms help a company spread the net far and wide to woo potential hires without incurring high costs. Tuhin Biswas, vice-president, MTR Foods, says recruitment through LinkedIn in particular has given the company a bigger set of candidates to choose from and has resulted in huge cost savings as well.
As more and more organisations hunt for prospective hires on social media platforms, HR teams are leveraging new-age video and enterprise tools to shortlist and interview potential candidates.
Bajaj Capital, for instance, uses a mobile app, e-poise, to conduct automated interviews. The app offers both the candidate and the prospective employer the freedom to go though the interview process at a time convenient for both. For remote locations, the company uses a video recruitment solution, video select. It saves the HR team the time and money it would have otherwise spent visiting a remote location to conduct a face-to-face interview.
Vodafone India, too, has standardised and automated the hiring processes - right from receiving applications for a job to rolling out an offer. It uses tools such as Taleo and HireVue for hiring. HireVue allows managers to create a digital interview to evaluate candidates. Suvamoy Roy Choudhury, director, HR, Vodafone India, says, "HireVue uses predictive analytics to rate the responses from candidates and identify the best fit. This leads to quick turnaround and therefore savings in cost."
For its part, Housing.com uses a recruitment solution that integrates all open positions within the organisation, hosts the positions through various links at different locations. "One of the key advantages the tools offers is that interesting candidate credentials are routed back to the HR team through an integrated box that not only checks for duplication but also tracks the status of an employee's application and the developments at every step," points out Ajay Nair, chief of administration, Housing.com.
The organisation also uses a mobile app to generate employee referrals - employees can access the positions open for referral on their mobile phones and are looped backward into their individual socio-professional platforms. It recommends them the possible contacts that meet the job criteria.
Next to hiring, technology is also coming to the forefront in onboarding and engaging employees. For prospective employees, Vodafone India has "All Aboard!" a pre-joining engagement platform. This unique gamification experience is structured to help new employees get familiar with Vodafone.
Technology is also facilitating employee engagement. For example, to enhance employee engagement globally, Telenor has launched FB@Work, an internal communication tool. The collaboration tool connects the Telenor Group's more than 36,000 employees located in 13 countries. It acts as an open forum for discussions removing barriers to collaboration.
Training is another area in HR where technology deployment is gaining ground. At Vodafone India, a mobile app, MindTickle, promotes learning on the go among employees. Bite-sized videos produced in-house are showcased on MindTickle. Choudhury says these videos support agile learning, act as a performance aids and enable cultural alignment. It facilitates easy scaling up of frontline skills with quick reach across the country.
The country's leading carmaker, Maruti Suzuki, for instance, has invested heavily in online knowledge sharing platforms. The company's learning management system Wizdom is easy to access, cost-effective and saves time. Employees can create, track and raise a request for a specific classroom or online training course from its vast library of e-learning modules. The organisation also engages its workforce through Pitstop, a portal that facilitates communication, business information, entertainment and knowledge updates.
While video technology, automation and collaboration tools have streamlined hiring and engagement processes - data mining and analytics are empowering HR team to carry out performance assessment efficiently and in determining the right rewards for better performers.
Bajaj Capital's in-house platform, W.M, stores all the information related to the business garnered by a team member, his performance, his personal credentials, his earnings etc. This tool is integrated with the company's performance management system. "It has made our lives better as an HR group and we get error-free performance reports in no time," underlines Sunaina Matto Khanna, chief people officer and head, transformation, Bajaj Capital.
At Vodafone India, line managers use performance calibration tools to input ratings and view and analyse their team's performance freeing up HR time to partner with business more strategically. MTR Foods has put in place an analytics portal that provides the HR team with real-time data on performance thus enhancing an employee's bandwidth to take up more value adding work.
At Telenor India, the employee development and performance process is managed through an enterprise solution, Workday. Only recently, the company introduced a pay review life cycle process that empowers managers to engage with their teams and understand the value they need to build in for their teams.
Even as organisations enthusiastically take to technology to save time and money while identifying the right people, engaging them and pursuing objective performance reviews, HR teams need to watch out for some hurdles that lurk along the way.
One of the key challenges for organisations while they deploy technology to simplify processes is to ensure that they do not take out the "human" and "personal" element out of the process, says Choudhury of Vodafone India. For example, it is good to have an electronically generated reward letter but that needs to be backed by an effective career conversion with the employee and a fair explanation of "why you have earned what you have earned".
Abhinav Chopra, executive vice-president-chief human resource officer, Viacom18, echoes Choudhury's point as he says, "Technology should not take away or replace the conversation that needs to happen between individuals." Rather it should be used to replace and streamline mundane processes.
Another challenge pertains to the availability and integration of end-to-end HR solutions at the right costs. Mausam Mathur, chief people and operations officer of GirnarSoft, laments that the one-size-fits-all solutions offered by the average HR consultant ignores the industry, the size of the organisation, the kind of talent the organisation already has and so on. Housing.com's Nair says, "Some elements of the HR function are 'imperative' and need to exist. But many of the remaining tasks can be outsourced to technology."
| EXPERT TAKE |
| Leveraging technology |
- Data mining: Hiring and retaining the best talent is critical to any firm. Given the cost of recruiting and developing highly skilled technical talent, knowing on whom to focus retention efforts can present a significant competitive advantage. By using turnover data from the past years, along with statistical models, companies can predict which highly skilled employees are at the greatest risk of leaving.
- Measuring engagement: The process starts with measuring engagement using latest software tools like Q12 and Officevibe. If you can measure you can improve. Another lever for enhancing engagement is collaboration and new tools are available to enhance collaboration both online and offline. Apart from collaboration, gamification is another change agent. Firms could look at using game-like features in non-gaming scenarios to motivate changes in behaviour, increase sales or improve productivity.
- Performance management: Manage performance real time through automated appraisal software. Such software can help organisations systematically record all the data about employee performance, predetermined targets and the results achieved, compensation, succession planning and other related HR systems. Featherlight, for example, helps employers manage real-time performance, Weekdone enables managers to monitor employees' goals, accomplishments and challenges in a single place. PerformYard lets employers document and announce performance results and note positive interactions during employee reviews.
Anne Prabhu
Managing partner, Hunt Partners
Managing partner, Hunt Partners