ChatGPT can now see pictures and understand your voice commands!

For those who still believe Generative AI won’t change your job, take a looksie down below!

So, the AI can now see pictures and understand what we ask it!

This means no matter what your job is. You will soon be able to speak to your technology and interact with technology as we have never done before. I’m not just talking about HR or Recruiting. I’m talking about every single function and job that is available.

From highly skilled jobs to no-skill jobs. It’s truly an amazing time to be alive.

This changes the game for learning and development, how we onboard new hires, and how we develop skills for our employees. This changes the game in how we get our everyday work completed.

You no longer need to sit down with a hiring manager and do an intake meeting for the role they want to hire for. Your hiring manager will now speak to your recruiting AI assistant and tell the AI what they would like and the AI will respond with really great questions and challenges based on data and insights that it will have immediately at your disposal. “So, you are telling me you would like X, Y, and Z, but if you couple that with the salary range, you would also like to offer, you will be asking us to pull from the bottom 4% of the available candidates in our market. Do you feel that is acceptable to have a candidate from the bottom 4%?! Or if we change X, Y, and Z, to H, B, and Z, and also adjust the range up one level, we can now get candidates who are in the top 25% of our market. What would you like to do?”

Game. Changer.

Of course, this won’t happen immediately. It will take some time. But I actually demoed some new recruiting tech in Beta this week that has already added in the voice element for intake of job descriptions that will make fairly decent job postings!

Buckle up, kids! We are about to go on a wild ride!

5 Mid-Year HR Trends You Should Be Thinking About for 2024!!

Is the world moving faster after the pandemic or is it just me?! It seems like for all the bad that Covid brought, it did make us slow down a bit. Now, we are back on the treadmill running faster than ever.

I’m sitting down this week and doing a live webinar (if you can’t make the live time, just sign up and we can send you the recording) discussing the biggest trends in HR and Talent Acquisition that are happening right now but that will also have a tremendous impact to our 2024 planning!

The webcast will be live on Wednesday, July 19 at 3 pm EST.

Shout out to the amazing team at Pillar for making this happen…

Here are some more details.

We’re halfway through 2023 (crazy, right?!), so now seems like the perfect time to reflect on the top 5 trends that have shaped the year thus far. And who better to do it with thanĀ Tim Sackett, President of HRU Technical Resources & top 100 Global HR Tech Influencer?! Join us as we sit down with Tim to discuss what is trending today in the HR & talent acquisition space and what he sees as the trends that will continue into 2024 and beyond.

Here’s what you can learn during the session:

  • Practical strategies to leverage these trends for maximum impact
  • How to gain a competitive edge by understanding how these trends can transform your HR/TA practices
  • The key drivers shaping the way organizations attract, engage, and retain talent

…& more! Looking forward to seeing you on July 19th as we have the opportunity to learn from one of the industry’s most respected thought leaders! It’s also been a year since we launched our webinar series with Tim himself, so join us as we celebrate our webinar series 1-year anniversary.

The Future of Recruiting Brought to You via ChatGPT

The robots are definitely taking your job, at least my job! I got access to ChatGPT this week. ChatGPT is a chatbot that employs deep learning to produce text that resembles that of a human and is based on the GPT language model. OpenAI’s Chat GPT can respond to numerous questions in a natural way, much like a personal tutor who is well-versed in all subjects.

Basically, it’s going to change the world as we know it!!!

As a content creator (that’s what bloggers call ourselves nowadays), I pride myself on doing research and offering up to my audience some knowledge and, hopefully, some intelligent opinions. With ChatGPT, you can basically ask it any question, and within seconds it delivers a very real life-like response that seems pretty well-educated. Of course, it’s a work in progress, so it’s not perfect, but let me give you some examples:

How will hiring be impacted in the United States in 2023? (An insightful question from Tim!)

The answer from ChatGPT:

The U.S. hiring landscape is constantly changing and evolving. In 2023, we can expect to see a number of changes in the hiring process. Here are some trends we can expect to see in 2023:

1. Increase in Remote Work: More companies will embrace remote work and hire remote employees, which will open up opportunities for workers across the country.

2. Rise of Automation: Automation will continue to grow and become more prevalent in the hiring process. AI-driven recruitment and interviewing tools will streamline the hiring process.

3. Focus on Diversity and Inclusion: Companies will continue to focus on creating a diverse and inclusive workforce. Diversity and inclusion initiatives will become a priority for many organizations.

4. Increase in Automated Job Matching: Automated job matching platforms will become more popular, allowing companies to quickly match candidates with the right job openings.

5. Increased Use of Social Media: Social media will continue to be a powerful tool for recruiting and engaging with potential candidates. Companies will use social media to advertise open positions, as well as to build relationships with potential candidates.

The Response from a Real-ish Human (Tim)

God Damn, that’s pretty good!

Now, given this is exactly what you would find from major analyst houses that cover Talent Acquisition. But if you don’t have the time and want that same answer in a few seconds, it’s an outstanding answer!

Is it really groundbreaking thought leadership? No, it’s fairly vanilla, but it is accurate.

What will the future of the job of a recruiter look like? (by Tim)

The response from ChatGPT –

In the future, recruiters will continue to play a key role in the hiring process. However, the job of a recruiter will evolve and change over time. We can expect to see the following changes in the role of a recruiter in the future:

1. Increased Use of Technology: Recruiters will use a variety of technology tools to streamline the recruitment process. AI-driven recruitment tools, automated job-matching platforms, and video interviewing platforms will become more prevalent.

2. Greater Focus on Diversity and Inclusion: Recruiters will place a greater emphasis on diversity and inclusion in the recruitment process. They will use data-driven techniques to identify qualified candidates from diverse backgrounds.

3. More Strategic Role: Recruiters will take on more of a strategic role in the recruitment process. They will focus on building relationships with potential candidates and leveraging technology to find the best possible hires.

4. Increased Emphasis on Data: Recruiters will use data to inform their recruitment decisions and track the effectiveness of their recruitment efforts. They will analyze data to identify areas for improvement and make sure their recruitment processes are optimized.

The Response from a Real-ish Human (Tim)

I have a bit of a different take, but this is still a very strong response that took like two seconds to produce! I think in the future, this blog will just be Tim and GPT talking shop!

Again, you can see the responses are fairly vanilla but also pretty accurate of what most people in the industry think. In the future, recruiting technology will allow recruiters to have more capacity, and with this capacity, recruiters will have more time to be more strategic, and have very specific focuses around talent, and data will be leveraged much more than it is today.

What did it miss? Recruiters of the future, with this extra capacity, will be able to spend more time with the best candidates. Also, AI will more consistently generate a higher quality of applicants for us to select from, as most bias will be eliminated and controlled for. But that is all opinion, so still a very powerful response in two seconds!

So, will AI be taking our jobs? Probably not tomorrow, but a day is coming when your job, at the very least, will be changed by AI like ChatGPT. We made the switch from laborer to creator in our society pretty well. I think we’ll make the transition from creator to “narrator” as well in a similar fashion.

@SHRMLabs Announces 2023 HR Technology Winner! #SHRM23

This was the third year of SHRM’s Better Workplaces Challenge Cup, which is a startup competition for HR Technology companies. SHRM CEO, Johnny Taylor, has been very open about his vision for SHRM when it comes to HR Technology. It is his belief that SHRM should be the leader in HR Technology.

Part of this leadership is the Better Workplace Challenge Cup. Still, it’s also the creation and support of SHRMLabs which acts as an innovation hub for SHRM’s HR Tech aspirations, that are now seeing SHRM make actual venture capital investments into HR Technology startup companies. This is a big move for SHRM and something new for members to pay attention to. SHRMLabs is being led by Guillermo Corea, who continues to push the boundaries of what SHRM can be known for in HR Tech.

HR Technology might be the most important competency for HR Leaders of the future, but it currently stands as the weakest competency by a mile. SHRM is definitely looking to change this and bring HR technology to the forefront of its membership and HR leaders.

I spoke to a number of SHRM Executive Network attendees, and they also echoed these conversations were happening in their meetings this week as well.

Okay, what about the winner of the Better Workplace Challenge Cup?!

First, I was a judge for the finals. Along with my good friend Wiliam Tincup, SHRM Knowledge Center Director Amber Clayton, Tech Entrepreneur Jeff Wald, and author and TV personality Suzy Welch. A lot of smart folks in that judge’s panel!

The competition started with over 400 entries from around the world, and those were paired down to the top 50. From those fifty finalists, we got to one North American finalist: Maxwell, and one international finalist: Inuka.

Maxwell is led by founder Adriana Cisneros Basulto (one of the two female finalists), and it’s a work/life benefits & rewards technology. Basically, through a debit card issued to each of your employees, Maxwell allows each employee to select some select benefits/rewards that fit them specifically.

Inuka is led by founder Robin van Dalen, and it’s a combination of coaching tech and employee experience. Inuka is a technology that works to increase the resiliency of your workforce through science and expert coaching at a very competitive price point that allows all employees to receive coaching, not just those at the executive level.

The winner of the 2023 Better Workplace Challenge Cup is Maxwell.

Why?

That’s always the question. I’ve been lucky enough to be a judge in quite a few of these startup competitions, and it’s never one thing or the same thing. Each founder has just a few minutes to talk you into why they should win. That tends to work very well for technologies that are easy to explain and the judges can wrap their minds around what it is and how will the eventual buyer use the technology.

In this case, Maxwell was super easy to understand how it will work and the judges seem to believe buyers would have an interest in using it for their employees. The reality is both techs were great or they wouldn’t have made it that far. Inuka will also do well and they already have a great list of enterprise brands using the technology. It was just a bit more complex to explain.

I want to thank the SHRMLabs team for inviting me to be a judge and to be apart of SHRM’s journey to get more professionals to pay attention to HR Technology and grow the industry and their competency level. HR Tech isn’t scary or too complex for anyone in HR to understand. If IT or vendors are making it seem that way, you have the wrong IT leaders and HR Tech vendors! HR Professionals and leaders deal with some of the most complex things on a daily basis, technology is definitely something we can master.

TA Tech Vendors, You all are sleeping on #SHRMTalent!

I just returned from the SHRM Talent Conference in Orlando, and while it’s growing and getting bigger, I was somewhat shocked at the lack of big-name TA Technology vendors in our space who weren’t there.

The argument from the vendor community has been, “Well, Tim, SHRM Talent doesn’t have enterprise buyers.” The thought is that SHRM’s audience is roughly 65% SMB HR professionals. This is when the vendor community shows their lack of math skills. Or really it’s their marketing teams, so I guess we should probably have lower expectations on math skills.

Let me give you some personal data from my 2023 SHRM Talent experience. I was told there were 2300 participants at SHRM. It definitely felt that way. I had two sessions there that were packed with TA professionals, and the rooms were big (500+).

My connection numbers from SHRM Talent 2023:

Total LinkedIn connections: 163 (90% TA-specific titles)

Total downloads of an eBook offer: 141

NPS score of my talks (this is just bragging): 87%

Title level of connections by percentage: Over 50% were “Manager” or above. Of those, over 25% were “Director” titles and above.

Of the 163 connections, how many came from organizations over 5,000 people? 68 and 26 were from organizations over 20,000. Including Toyota, Boeing, Siemens, Johnson and Johnson, Gannett, large universities, large health systems, banking and finance, state and fed gov’t, and large franchise organizations.

In one of my sessions, I asked how many folks were using Workday Recruit, and more than twenty hands went up. There were massive amounts of Greenhouse users, Paradox users, and HireVue users. None of those brands cared to show up. These are some of the biggest brands in our industry.

The SHRM Talent Attendees Are My People!

They are in the trenches, real talent acquisition professionals doing the work and using the tools. They are leaders of TA in organizations that are spending real money and buying technology. In my sessions, these professionals stood up and spoke about the tools they were using. The vast majority are desperate to find recruiting technology to buy, and they believe they have limited options because they aren’t being sold options.

I get asked weekly, by recruiting technology vendors, how they can get connected to our potential buyers. Every single time I tell them they have to get out and put themselves in front of them. It takes time to build the pipeline. People have to see your brand multiple times before they buy. They just don’t get an email and buy. I tell them to go to SHRM Talent, but most don’t listen.

The SHRM Talent Conference continues to grow. When I went a few years ago, there were 50 vendors at the expo. This year there were 100. Next year, it’ll be bigger. The reality is SHRM Talent is one of the only talent acquisition-specific conferences in the US that is really delivering content for TA leaders trying to get better. The sessions aren’t sold to vendors like most conferences in our space.

We (Talent Acquisition) need a great conference in our industry. SHRM is getting close. Having the great TA tech companies show up would definitely put it over the top. It’s a huge miss for the attendees who are there not to have access to all the great tech.

SHRM Talent attendees are the top 10% of talent acquisition professionals in the world. Why? Because they are few who made a conscious commitment to investing in their development. To be at the forefront of TA. To be interested in what’s next. To be open to new ideas and new technologies. You won’t change my mind on this. The vast majority of TA professionals in our industry just show up and do the job, and don’t look for further development. These folks did and I celebrate you.

Generative AI and ChatGPT RoundUp in TA Tech! (Video)

My friends Madeline Laurano, Kyle Lagunas, and I had a big conversation about all the recent generative AI announcements happening in our industry.

We are going to hear about so many more announcements coming the rest of the year, and we’ll try to keep everyone updated as they come in.

If you haven’t had a chance to go out and test ChatGPT go do it! It’s super simple to login into Open.Ai and get an account.

Disruptive HR Technologies at #SHRM Tech 2023

I’m in San Francisco this week at SHRM Tech 2023. This is SHRM’s first time holding a technology-specific conference in the US market. They have had a SHRM Tech conference in India for a few years. My session will be talking about the most disruptive HR technologies currently in the market and those coming in the near future.

Honestly, it feels like I could spend the entire time just talking about ChatGPT (generative AI), as that seems to be the topic of conversation everywhere in the tech industry, regardless of your function. Generative AI and the large language model AI will impact all technology, including every part of HR.

But generative AI isn’t the only disruptive technology in the HR space. Since HR is overly laggard as tech consumers, it’ll take a lot of organizations some time before they even adopt a lot of the artificial technology that will hit the market first. Also, many organizations will have to really work through the ethical side of using AI across their people technology stack.

What other technologies are currently disruptive in the HR industry:

  • Marketing technology – Employees and Candidates want a “consumer-like” experience. This idea isn’t new,, but we’ve been awful and delivering this. The reason for this has basically been we are awful and using and adopting marketing-level technology. This is part automation, part conversational AI, and part communications tech and strategy. I will also throw Programmatic tech into this bucket from an advertising perspective.
  • Old School Tech We Still Don’t Use! Video, text, and employee referral automation. Some of the greatest tech built in the last 5-8 years is still not being used in mass by organizations. If I speak to 100 companies with over 1,000 employees, only about 10% will be using both text recruiting software and/or employee referral automation technology, but both have a giant ROI and help deliver more candidates quickly. So, why are we talking about ‘disruptive” tech when we don’t even use best-in-class technology for our own industry?
  • Business Intelligence – Another technology that is widely used in every other corporate function that HR has been really laggard at using. Over 90% of HR and TA pros I speak with will admit they aren’t very good “at data.” We have to be good “as data”! Part of being data literate is having an understanding of what and where is our data and then how do we pool this data into a business intelligence (BI) tool to be able to manipulate this data in a way that helps us make much better decisions,
  • Augmented and Virtual Reality – Facebook will spend billions of dollars in 2023 and beyond building dynamic AR and VR tech. Why? Because it can have massive usage by all kinds of people, including employees and candidates. The future of training will be changed forever by AR and VR. Being able to train new employees in real-time by having them wear AR glasses that will watch and show them what to do and not do is amazing tech. Having all employees, regardless of work environment, meet in the same environment on an equal footing will be a great cultural add for so many companies.
  • Artificial Intelligence – Okay, yes, we have to understand the power of AI and the different levels and kinds of AI we can build into parts of our HR tech stack. Most of the AI currently used in HR technology is machine learning. This is where the technology learns what you like and dislike based on actions taken. A simple example is an employee asking how they can change their contributions for 401K. Machine learning will see many employees asking about this, and it will reply in ways you train it to reply. But it’ll also see the additional questions, and it might ask a question back. “We see you’re looking to change your contributions. Would you like to talk to a certified financial advisor? The company pays for it, and it can help you make better financial decisions.” AI will end up replacing almost every tactical part of the HR function. That’s just reality.

Yes, ChatGPT will change how we work in HR. There is so much to come on this. But we also have so much great technology available to us that is proven that we don’t use, that we also should not be forgetting about.

I’ll be at SHRM Talent in Orlando and SHRM Annual in Las Vegas this year. Let me know if you’ll be attending and I would love to catch up and meet live!

What’s Your Favorite Layoff Tech?

Yeah, this isn’t something we like to talk about! We love talking about technology that helps our employees be better employees or technology that helps us find better and more talent. But the technology that helps us get rid of people, well, that seems a bit depressing, right?

In 2022 there have been public debates about what a recession is. We haven’t had one since the Great Recession of 2008-2009, so there is a very large part of our workforce that has never seen a downturn in the economy. We are on the precipice of an economic downturn, and companies will be laying off workers. Are you ready? How will you handle this? Spreadsheets?

Offboarding will be a major buzzword in 2023!

God bless the marketing pros who try and make termination software sound sexy! We don’t call it firing software or a termination process, we now call it “offboarding”.

At the HR Technology Conference this past year, I was a judge of the startup competition Pitchfest and one technology that was pitched was Onward HR. They actually did a great job and I really liked their pitch, but they were going up against a bunch of software that “helped” employees, not help you offboard them. Not fair to them, they had real HR software, helping solve a real HR and employee problem. A lot of the software pitched sounded positive and sexy, but it was mostly vapor. Onward had real HR stuff!

Big HCM software and payroll software will tell you they also do offboarding, but honestly, what they really do is basically just help you with the process. True offboarding should be about how do we humanely help our employees transition out of the company and quickly become re-employed. But also, a giant part of offboarding is ensuring those same employees actually might want to come back and work for us again at some point.

You see, layoffs, are an inexact science. Most organizations are bad at it because we don’t practice layoffs. We practice hiring. We practice developing employees. We practice performance management. We do not practice layoffs, so we mostly suck at layoffs. Quite frankly, I’ve never met a leader who wants to be good at layoffs!

That means the technology can help. For the most part, layoffs run like this:

  • We make the decision of how many heads we need to cut.
  • We then ask managers of people to make decisions of who specifically.
  • We then try to find a way to let people know where everyone will basically know at the same time (this almost always fails and is terrible).
  • We then try and move on and forget it all happened.

The problem with the last step is we basically move on from those departing employees, and those employees feel that, and it becomes very personal. We try not to keep a connection with previous employees. Then, two years from now, you try and launch an alumni recruiting campaign because you’re growing again and can’t figure out why so many previous employees hate you.

What is my advice for your upcoming layoffs?

Be better. Treat people like humans. I mean treat people like humans you will once again in the future want to have a positive lastly relationship with!

Your Weekly Dose of Recruiting Tech – @SmartRank_ai

Today on the Weekly Dose, I take a look at recruiting applicant ranking and automation technology SmartRank.ai. I first ran into SmartRank at the 2022 HR Technology Conference, and I was immediately interested in learning more.

I’m trying something new with the Weekly Dose, and I’m going to try doing these mini demos and Q&A. Take a look and let me know what you think:

TL;DW: (Too Long: Didn’t Watch)

SmartRank is a piece of recruiting technology you and your team have to demo! At first glimpse, it seems like it’s just an applicant ranking software, but it’s really a transformative way of hiring that is completely different than what you’re doing now. It’s one of the only recruiting technologies I’ve seen in the past five years that puts your recruiters in the driver’s seat to truly become Talent Advisors to Hiring Managers!

SmartRank also has embedded a ton of recruiter automation that they don’t really even talk about as part of their primary product, which is really state-of-the-art technology within the recruiting industry. Also, SmartRank has some of the best applicants to hire analytics on the market. Built by a former hiring manager, this is a product that will help you recruit higher quality and also one that will immediately get your hiring managers involved in a much more robust way within your hiring process.