By using “Crap” in the title I’m guaranteed to get at least 3 emails this morning unsubscribing from my blog!

You still with me? Hey, gang! What’s up!?

I’ve been to three conferences in the past two weeks and have gathered a bunch of new HR and TA tech I will be talking about in the coming weeks, but I need to spend some time and write all of this stuff up. Before I do that I had to first share some major themes coming out of the HR Tech space that you should keep an eye on.

1. Customization! 

Historically, great HR and TA functions were built on great processes.  Those processes were put in place to treat everyone and everything, exactly the same. If you would ask an HR or Talent pro to change or adjust their process, you might actually lose your life!

Now, all of this started because treating everyone and everything as unique, special unicorns takes a ton of work, and it’s extremely complex.  We don’t have that kind of capacity, so we had to lock it all up in tight processes, to ensure things got done on time, and were accurate.

Technology is changing all of this for both HR and TA! The great technology of today allows you to customize your processes and policies by employee, so the employee gets an experience unique to them, and you don’t have the pain of trying to track it all.

The HR and TA Leaders of the future are not about one great process. They’re about delivering customization to the masses. Not customization of software! That’s still the devil and will break your new shiny toys! 

2. Analytics Gone Wild

It appears that HR and TA analytics are still as big as ever, even though it also seems like the understanding of these continues to be at an all time low! So many systems. So many possible analytics. The Data Science folks love it. The HR and TA folks are lost.

We now have more analytics. I can’t say we have better analytics. We continue to struggle as a community, primarily because we all continue to do our own thing, which really only means something to us, and not anyone else.

What would really help this whole analytics nightmare would be one common version of the truth?  Here are the analytics we almost all agree will move the needle, and here’s a common way we are all going to measure these.

I will say the predictive analytic models that are coming out, are very impressive, and within five years almost all major companies will be using these to anticipate turnover, determine job fit, etc. The science is unbiased. We are forever biased. Something needs to change.

3.  We’re still scared of Saas

We actually aren’t scared of Saas software. Most of it is really great tech, and we love it. We are still scared that Saas is a big lie and these systems and their Open APIs still won’t work together well. So, we continue to think we need big bad giant full suit enterprise level systems.

This is usually some of the worse tech on the market as a whole, and even within these systems, there are major issues with the modules working together. Eventually, we are going to have to trust these Saas plays and their misunderstood Open APIs and see if what they claim to do, they can really do.

I have a feeling you’ll be pleasantly surprised. But, like everyone in technology loves to say, “No one ever got fired for hiring IBM.” Until they did…