Josh Bersin’s HR Tech Comments = Music To Our Ears
Recently, over at the always excellent People Matters, Josh Bersin sat down to talk about the current HR tech landscape. Bersin is a renowned industry expert and founder of Bersin by Deloitte, a membership program that delivers world-class people strategies and HR services.
Much of what Bersin had to say was music to the Wade and Wendy team’s ears, because it chimes excellently with our company and product vision.
Integratable Tools
Bersin spoke about how simplicity is becoming a key theme in HR trends: “We need HR tools that operate in the flow of work,” he said. “Vendors have to rethink their solutions as ‘experiences’ that integrate into Office 365, Teams, Slack and other tools — and operate flawlessly.”
If you were to add a new recruiter to your organization, it would be natural for you to look for someone that has experience working with the tools and systems you already have in place. With our AI Recruiter, Wendy, we wanted to ensure that she too can effectively integrate with other tools and systems within the ecosystem. The ability to operate as a part of an organization’s HR tech stack enables Wendy to coordinate processes, enrich profiles, and minimize operational disruption. CHROs “want to buy tools that are proven and integrated into the ecosystem they already have,” said Bersin. This sums up Wendy to a tee.
The Power of Chat
When asked “What are exciting new innovations to look forward to in the context of HR and new-gen technologies?”, Bersin said that one of the “big” developments was chatbots. Chatbots are an example of a tool, Bersin noted, “that now exist and work today and they didn’t even exist two years ago.”
Bersin is dead right here. At Wade and Wendy, we didn’t build chatbots because they were cool or trendy. We built chatbots because the natural interactions between recruiters and talent happen through conversation, and it just so happened to be the least scalable aspect of the recruiter’s job. Our objectives were to design an experience that feels native to both end users, to reduce friction and disruption of existing processes, and provide bandwidth and ability to scale the core functions of a recruiter’s job. With this in mind, a chatbot became the logical output.
Check out our other blog posts discussing the potential and future of the chat landscape:
- “Why AI and Personalization Can Go Hand in Hand”
- “Chatbots Like Wendy Are Defining How Humans and Machines Communicate”
- “Automation and the Future of Recruiting KPIs”
- “How AI Can Build The Trust Between Recruiter and Hiring Manager”
Getting up to Speed with the Gig Economy
Lastly, Bersin was asked about how technology can help HR to understand the needs of employees in a gig economy. Bersin said that “this is a growing area with not enough tools. My latest research shows that only 12 percent of companies even know what gig workers they have and what they’re working on.”
At Wade and Wendy, we have thought long and hard about the future of work. (See our blog on “Three Forces Shaping the Hiring Landscape of Tomorrow.”) And the gig economy is a huge part of this.
We are building our chatbots specifically to cope with the mounting demands of the gig economy. Gig work is one component of a future in which people are hungry for experiences, and traditional barriers to work like geography and mobility are dissolving. Remote and short-term work, driven by digital environments, are increasingly the norm. Only automation can help recruiters deal with this level of scalability. People have been conditioned by the speed and convenience of mobile apps; recruitment and HR needs to match that standard and that expectation. With more gig work, recruitment needs to get faster and more agile.
This is why Wendy is available on-demand, 24/7. She can conduct in-depth chats, from anywhere, that are personalized but scalable. Wade can build up a career log of candidates as they move between more transient, varied sorts of gig work. Together, Wade and Wendy are fully prepared for the growing gig economy.
