As students of HR, a pressing question that kept coming to our minds was
“Is technology making HR redundant?”
This question cropping up in GDs, PIs and subsequently in company PPTs. As we moved down the line the question didn’t go away. Now aspirants ask me the same question everyday and I wasn’t sure how to respond till I started my summer internship.
Hi, my name is Sailesh and I am doing my summer internship with OYO. Although it is in the hospitality industry, OYO is a tech startup at its heart. The beauty of OYO’s design lies in its proprietary software packages that are developed by its highly talented in-house tech team.
After 2 weeks in the company, I am beginning to understand how beautifully automation enables HR rather than making it redundant. During this period, I have talked to my fellow classmates interning in various other companies and many of them are working in the HR digitization/automation process. So,
how is technology enabling the HR function?
1. Recruitment:
Technology has made it easier to map candidates to job roles. Candidate data can now be scanned to identify particular competencies that are suitable for a particular role. With online platforms becoming prevalent and digital CVs being the
in-thing in the industry, it now is easier to filter candidates. You can filter out 1000s of applications digitally so that only the relevant CVs are left and you have to go through them only instead of poring over thousands of sheets of paper.
Also, HR analytics is helping with manpower planning and is letting us plan our hiring better. Talent management portals have become very important in this day and age.
2. Employee Engagement/Attrition Management:
Chatbots/HR Portals are helping HR personnel gather a eNPS score for their companies. Employee Net Promoter Score or eNPS is a necessary metric at present to understand the health and attractiveness of your organization. With digital platforms, it is easy to send out small surveys at fixed intervals of time to know how employees feel about the company. This digital feedback is then being used to better the processes and reinvent HR policies to suit the employee of the 21st century.
3. Performance Management:
Technology has now made it possible to track the progress of employees as frequently as an employer wants. Instead of having annual reviews, it is now possible to have monthly or bi-monthly reviews of employees. This makes sure a dip in productivity is countered as soon as possible and not after an entire cycle. Especially on the business side, people can track their targets and also do things to improve their performance.
4. Learning and Development:
Learning Management Sytems or LMS are becoming increasingly important to part necessary training and develop important programs for employees. Companies are constantly looking at virtual solutions to enable employee training.
But the actual execution is known to be effective when you create a dipstick in the form of a quiz or a test and get it filled to employees. Training in itself is not good enough till we understand how much employees have actually learnt from it. This has become much much easier with the advent of LMS.
I am sure as time keeps passing and technology keeps evolving HR processes will keep getting better and better ushering in a new era of transformational HR.
I strongly feel that HR is benefiting from automation at the end of the day. These are my 2 cents.