HR and Talent Acquisition Technology On the Horizon

In 2016 I demoed over 100 different HR and Talent Acquisition (TA) technologies. I started doing this three years ago with a goal to demo one new piece of HR and TA technology per week – 52 demos a year. My goal was personal development as I thought I was pretty naive when it came to HR technology as a whole.

Now, I’m full blown HR tech geek and I love it! I love the interaction of technology and people, being that what we do is such a people-oriented business. Technology is great, but when you add in people, it can get crazy!

Those companies that are building the latest and greatest HR and TA technology on the market truly get this complex relationship and the new stuff that is coming just blows me away. As I look out into the future of HR and TA technology, here are some of the trends that I’m most excited about:

• Video, Video, Video. It’s no secret at this point that we all, especially the younger generation, consume massive amounts of video! On our phones, on a plane, on a train, on a boat and on a goat, we are a world that lives in video. The video trend in HR and TA I’m most excited about is Video Job Descriptions. No longer the lame, boring text-based job descriptions that have been around since dirt. You can now have an employee doing the exact job you’re hiring for – or a hiring manager – tell the applicant via video exactly what the job is and why it’s awesome.
• Artificial Intelligence (A.I). Right now this is mostly really smart chat bots. I’m hoping eventually I’ll get my Will Smith iRobot to fire employees for me, but until then I’ll make do with great tech that’s on the market. We are to the point where A.I. can actually take a candidate from pre-apply all the way to the first in-person interview without ever being touched or communicated to via a real human on your team. That’s super exciting!
• Recruitment Marketing. Customer relationship management technology within the talent acquisition space continues to evolve and improve at a tremendous speed. The CRM technology on the market will soon be able to tell you when a great candidate is even thinking about maybe beginning to look for a job, when they stopped by to look at your career site, where they went after looking at you, and how you should go about getting them to come back and finally apply. It’s scary Big Brother stuff, and it’s so cool! Just know if you’re at work and you are looking for a job, everyone is now watching you.
• Employee Experience. It took a few years, but we finally remembered that our employees are important. Sure, candidate experience is still important, but let’s not forget those we already have! To that end, there is awesome technology helping us communicate better with our employees and collaborate better as teams. Also, I love the fact that I think we’ve finally reached the tipping point of organizations understanding that once a year employee reviews have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Our employees expect and deserve constant, ongoing feedback on their performance, or they’ll leave to find it somewhere else.

I get that the trends and technology are moving at an incredible rate of speed. The changes we are seeing on an annual basis within HR and TA now would have taken three-five years to take hold just a decade ago. Make a goal to yourself in 2017. You don’t have to be crazy like me, but do yourself a favor and demo one new technology each month. That’s one hour per month, twelve hours for the year, for your own development. You’ll be amazed at the difference it will make!

CareerBuilder’s CHRO and CTO discuss what they see as some of the biggest 2017 HR trends.