The document discusses how HR technologies can help organizations maximize their talent investments. It describes big trends in the workplace like multi-generational workforces and rapid technological change. It then discusses how technologies like CRM, social sourcing, and social learning can help organizations source, engage, and develop talent. Specifically, CRM allows organizations to personalize at scale, social sourcing expands talent pools, and social learning makes learning collaborative and continuous. The document urges considering user experience, vendor viability, and flexibility when choosing HR technologies.

1. The Talent/Technology
Balance
How HR Technologies Can Help You Get the
Most From Your Talent
Steve Boese – April 2014

2. Presenter Info
• Steve Boese
• Co-Chair HR Technology Conference
• HR Exec Magazine Technology Editor
• Host of HR Happy Hour Show and Podcast
• Blogger at Steve’s HR Tech
• Your new best friend

3. There are two ways to think about the future.
One way is to plan for a future that will be only
incrementally different and almost
indistinguishable from the present.
The better, (and more interesting) way is to
envision a future that will be almost
unrecognizable from today.
“The future will be new enough that we will be
uncomfortable, we will be unprepared.”

4. So what does that really mean for the HR/Talent
professional?
It means new ways of working, new sources of
talent, and increasingly, new technologies that will
make enable us to maximize our talent
investments.
Today, we’ll discuss how just a few of these
technology trends and how they fit in your
HR/Talent programs.
And by the end of the hour you will think I am crazy,

5. Agenda
• Big Trends
• CRM
• Social Sourcing
• Social Learning
• Keys to making the best choices
• Wrap-up, Q&A

7. Big Trends
<Believe the hype. Mostly.>

8. What’s happening in the workplace?

9. Multiple Generations at Work

10. Rapid pace of change

12. Technology adoption

13. Implications for HR/Talent
• Workforce composition– Multi-generational workforces, aging
workforces in specific industries and skill types, regional labor
market disparity, succession planning and knowledge transfer
• Talent scarcity– Who has a ‘hard to fill’ job open right now? Probably
everyone. Tech, skilled trades, even entry-level roles in many fields
are becoming difficult to source and fill. ‘Top’ talent always, always
has options.
• Technology proficiency – Natives, immigrants, lurkers, holdouts,
disengaged – all types of relationships with technology in the
workforce
• Employee Development – Learning new skills and career
development are primary concerns for the best talent.

15. It’s all about relationships
<Candidate relationships, I mean>

16. What is CRM?
• Think “Salesforce.com” but for prospects, candidates, and
applicants
• Search through and create talent pools, group and tag prospects,
keep activity logs, set reminders, collaborate on opportunities
• Create specific and targeted messaging campaigns in support of
general outreach activities as well as specific recruitment
initiatives
• Gain visibility and insights into candidate/applicant pipelines and
flow, understand success rates of various marketing and outreach
efforts
• Identify potential and emerging issues flow, supply, process
effectiveness, and messaging strategies
• Think like a marketer, not like an order taker

17. How CRM empowers talent (and let’s
you scale)
• Allows you to still be “personal”
while scaling recruiting efforts
• Balances need to extend your
internal resources to support an
ever-growing number of
prospects/candidates
• Helps meet heightened
candidate experience
expectations for personal touch
• Allows organization to look and
think critically, objectively, and
with data at their recruiting
process and efforts

19. Social Sourcing
<You mean LinkedIn, right?>

20. Social Sourcing - Expanded
• Simple definition: Process of locating active and passive
candidates via the use of social networks, platforms ,and
communities for recruiting purposes.
• Initially, site-specific tools (like LinkedIn search) were the primary
mechanism for talent identification
• But not everyone is on LinkedIn, (or Twitter or Facebook…)
• Next generation set of technologies offer enhanced capabilities
to find, aggregate, and present consolidated “social talent
profiles” that extend to numerous online outposts, (LinkedIn,
Twitter, Quora, GitHub, etc.)
• Additionally, tools now offer extended capability for social job
sharing, social referral programs, opt-in talent communities, and
targeted recruiting campaign micro-sites

21. Turning Social Data into Opportunity
• Search: Consolidated profile
information saves enormous time
for internal resources
• Assessment: Candidates who
share content on sites like GitHub
offer great insight into their ability
• Engagement: People spend more
time on social networks than
anywhere else online, social
outreach and sourcing puts you
where candidates reside
• Referrals: Leverage existing
employees, alumni, candidates
own social circles for leads

23. Learning Gets Social
<What happened to the book?>

24. Learning as a Social Process
• All learning can be social: Imbue commonly accepted social
networking concepts into employee learning – sharing,
commenting, co-creating, discovering, ranking and rating
• Mobile phenomenon: Everyone is carrying a personal computing
device at all times – push content creation and consumption
there
• Breaking down content: into more targeted and easier to
consume pieces, moving away from ‘training’ as an event, to
‘learning/sharing’ as a continuous process
• Gaming culture: A generation of video gamers are now entering
the workplace, collaboration in video games is amazing, tools are
now leveraging gaming mechanics to encourage and support
learning objectives

25. The Social Learning Opportunity
• Ease of Use: Makes content
creation and sharing seamless and
easy since it ‘feels like Facebook’
• Personalized: Using concepts like
tagging, group creation, and
featuring, each user’s experience
is their own
• Democratizing: Enabling everyone
to create content empowers and
supports a culture of learning
• Collaboration: Embrace fast, easy
collaboration to speed time to
competency and productivity

27. Making the right choices
<believe me, you should>

28. HR Tech Rules of Thumb
• There isn’t (yet) a “Yelp” for HR Technology : Be very careful of
motivations and biases of your research sources
• User Experience is Important (and not universal) : What
constitutes great UX for one user will be ‘too simple’ for
others
• It’s on the roadmap: Solution providers have to navigate a
tricky balance between simplicity and capability. Ability to
deliver new features is critical.
• Vendor viability is sometimes tough to measure: Factor in
financials, investors, talent flows, industry presence
• Ecosystems matter: Systems Integrators, consultants, user
groups, customer forums all impact your ability to implement,
support, and get value from your HR tech investments

29. Five Closing Thoughts…

30. • Empowerment – HR Tech, especially ‘self-service’ HR Tech, has to be about
empowering people, not transferring responsibility for task completion
• Simplicity – As we have become accustomed to our smart phones and single-
purpose apps, thus HR tech needs to at least feel almost equally simple and
targeted to help ensure adoption. No user guides, no hour-long training courses
• Personalized Data – Every user of HR Tech expects a personalized and intelligent
experience. The tech should ‘know’ the user – what they are doing, what matters
to them, and most importantly – how it will help them to do their job better. It
should help them find the right questions to ask as well
• Flexibility – HR Tech solutions have to provide for and support myriad device
access, multi-media content, widely varying user roles and preferences, regional
and local requirements as well as being rigid enough to set and ensure overall
organizational process needs.
• Agility– HR Tech solutions also have to be able to support sometimes rapid
scaling up or down, integration with numerous and diverse corporate systems,
and fit within an evolving overall organizational IT framework. The best systems
will be open, adaptable, and able to fit new ways of working
To help get more from your HR Tech

31. One last thing…
How do you get your
HR organization and
your leaders to think
about HR technology
and people with a
slightly longer view?

33. Don’t you forget about me…
steveboese@gmail.com
steveboese.squarespace.com
HRTechConference.com
hrhappyhour.net
Twitter: @SteveBoese
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/steveboese