Experience and Beyond: Redesigning Work & Talent With Intelligence

The pandemic has ushered in the future of HR faster than most companies anticipated — but with advances in technology, artificial intelligence and automation, we can be ready. But how?

Our CEO & co-founder, Mahe Bayireddi, compares the pandemic to a time machine, ushering in paradigm shifts more quickly than ever anticipated to the HR digital ecosystem and the workplace. But advances in technology, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can help HR leaders steer their organizations toward a new future of work.

Bayireddi’s perspective set the tone for our virtual IAMHR event, which featured nearly 30 visionary CHROs and HR leaders across the globe. With concise, actionable insights, IAMHR presenters explored how to face unprecedented HR challenges.

Get Bayireddi’s key takeaways below — and be sure to check out the full on-demand session!

Watch Experience & Beyond: Redesigning Work & Talent With Intelligence — and unlock access to all IAMHR sessions!

Focus on Talent Redesign

In Bayireddi’s view, the single most important economic impact wrought by COVID-19 is how significantly it changed the nature of work. CHROs and HR departments need to respond by undertaking a talent redesign, Bayireddi said. “What is talent redesign all about? It's thinking about individual talent — what their needs are, what their wants are. Based on that, every organization has to reimagine work.”

This redesign will shape your organization’s progress in the post-COVID era.

Reimagine Work

With that in perspective, enterprises have to reimagine work.

“There are three components you have to think about,” Bayireddi said. “The first one is the workplace itself. What is the workplace going to look like? The second one is the workforce. How do we think, as an organization, about our workforce? The third one is more about work life — the people who work for us and the people who want to work for us. How do we think about their work life?”

Workplace implications. Remote work is great – for the percentage of the workforce able to perform their jobs from home. For frontline workers (more than 60% of the workforce) in retail, fulfillment, healthcare, and other industries, a safe workplace is paramount.

Workforce implications. Demographic changes (the majority of the workforce will comprise of Millennials and Gen Zers; conversely, people also are working later into their lives) mean that workers’ expectations and needs are shifting. The shelf life of knowledge and skills is shorter – people need to learn new skills constantly, and HR needs to understand how to redeploy knowledge to build enterprise agility.

Work-life implications. Even post-COVID, feelings of fear, isolation, and purposelessness will persist. How can leaders address this? “We need to think about bringing a sense of purpose to instill trust and belonging to every person in the talent experience,” Bayireddi said. “And we need to deliver an experience for every individual in a thoughtful and relevant way.”

That’s quite a challenge for HR, but there is a solution that can help.

Using AI to Deliver Experience and Intelligence at Scale – for the Entire Talent Lifecycle

COVID-19 has acted as an accelerant in the digital transformation of nearly every aspect of life. Ecommerce, for example, jumped from 16% in January 2020 to 27% of all purchases eight weeks after the pandemic hit the United States.

The digital transformation of HR is happening at similar warp speed. Traditionally, HR focused on process design, with efficiency and effectiveness as the chief goals. But now HR must shift to designing the experience and intelligence of the work environment.

The spotlight is on CHROs and HR departments to lead a redesign of the talent experience that meets the evolving needs of all four stakeholders in the talent lifecycle: candidates, recruiters, hiring managers, and employees.

The four stakeholders in the talent lifecycle have different needs that AI-supported tools can help meet.

Candidates and Employees: AI for personalization. On the front end, candidates and employees need tailored experiences that help them connect with your organization and each other. The goal of deploying AI on the front stage is experience design. You’re creating personalized experiences for individuals and delivering them at scale.

Recruiters and Managers: AI for productivity. On the back end of the talent lifecycle, AI is best leveraged for automation capabilities to save time. After all, recruiters and managers need to connect and build relationships with the front-end stakeholders who significantly outnumber them: candidates and employees. Recruiters and managers will benefit from AI that enables intelligent service design: Automation for increased productivity and data-driven insights for better, faster decision-making.

Looking Ahead: Unifying Every Talent Experience

Connecting these four experiences of HR – candidate, recruiter, employee and hiring manager – is how companies can adapt to a data-driven world fueled by AI and automation. And that’s what we work to deliver every day.

Our team has built a back-end network of data comprising a billion profiles from more than one million companies. This infrastructure powers our Talent Experience Management platform, which supports our mission of helping people find the right job.

“Technology can do a lot, but post-COVID, there is a lot of pressure on leadership and the HR organization to evolve,” Bayireddi concluded. “That leaves us with two questions: What kind of talent experience are you going to provide post-COVID? How do you reimagine work for your organization so that talent can benefit and thrive within your company?”

By figuring out the answers and driving meaningful change, HR teams and their organizations will be better positioned for success.