The human resources industry has been deeply reflecting on how issues regarding culture and performance need to be handled in the workplace. As an outcome of this awareness, huge shifts are expected in the way in which technology can be utilised to identify, engage, connect, and replace people and the steps to be taken thereafter.

Until recently, the role of technology has been limited only to facilitate the daily HR tasks. However, with time, technology is now all geared up to embrace an all-inclusive role in your organisation. Listed below are the five directions in which HR is likely to evolve with technology being at the heart of each:

Blind Hiring

The US IT industry mainly the Silicon Valley has been prevalent with accusations and counter-accusations related to bias at the workplace. The quite obvious question that is looming large on the psyche of the HR managers is how to deal with and minimise such controversies. To deal with it, a lot of organisations seemed to have adopted the practice of blind hiring.

In a typical interview process and screening, recruiters seem to become biased based on the information about a candidate’s background, gender, age, race, and sometimes even the candidate’s alma mater. Another example is the film industry which has been under immense pressure to ensure good representation at the time of the casting process.

In a blind hiring process, resumes of candidates are stripped of demographic data. This ensures that the primary screening process will be strictly carried out by the candidate’s level of skill and abilities and achievements. Also, a lot of organisations which utilise the HR software goes a step further to automate the screening process and makes the candidate anonymous. The outcome of this process of screening is an increasingly diversified staff which is recruited purely by merit instead of rapport or bias which usually occurs at the time of screening of candidates.

Passive Candidates

Headhunters seem to always to have a preference of targeting passive candidates. However, nowadays the recruitment process entails much more than merely reviewing resumes of candidates on a company’s career website. Recruiters nowadays largely depend on social media to get in touch with candidates directly.

Similarly, recruiters also resort to online communication methods such as hashtags and sub-forums to identify talent pools. When these candidates are engaged either as groups or individuals based on the platform, headhunters get a clear idea of their potential candidates and whether these candidates are all set to make a career change.

A Remote Workforce

Working remotely primarily entails working from the comforts of your home, or coffee shop or even a co-working space is an increasingly popular trend these days. In the last two decades, the amount of employees who work under some form of telecommuting arrangement seems to have increased over the years. The contributing factor towards this is the progress made in the field of VPN technology. This technology facilitates remote employees to easily access their organisation’s systems irrespective of the location which has a good internet connection. As an outcome, organisations can now quickly hire talent from across locations all over the world. In fact, of startups these days function with remote teams.

This concept of remote working provides HR managers with access to a larger and growing resource pool. By offering the present employees with the remote working option, organisations can retain their employees and enhance their job satisfaction level by providing an improved work-life balance. Moreover, with the evolution of collaboration tools such as video conferencing, this trend of remote working continues to grow.

Future-Proofing Employees

Politicians seem to be making promises regarding increasing the number of manual labour jobs, particularly in the manufacturing industry. However, the harsh reality is that of the few jobs that are left; they may not survive long owing to organisations opting for automation technology. A lot of industrial working environments are witnessing the growing trend of artificial intelligence which is replacing humans slowly.

In the recent years the intellectual capacity of predictive analysis seems to have greatly increased. This brought about radical shifts in the manufacturing industry which has led to increased level of production. The rate at which manufacturers tend to adopt predictive analytics reflects the country’s performance on the modern global manufacturing scale. If they fail to make predictive analytics one of their top priorities, it results in losing opportunities and supply chain inefficiencies.

With the adoption of artificial intelligence, it has led to the creation, loss, and transformation of jobs. The demand for specific skills seems to be on the rise as HR experts expect the company employees to work along with the robots. Specific functions need to be added and removed from a lot of current jobs as algorithms have taken over routine tasks thereby freeing up human to take up creative tasks.

With growing automation, a pertinent question which arises is what needs to be done with the present workforce that is vulnerable to automation. HR managers need to identify employees who are ready to take up various aspects of jobs such as management, problem-solving, troubleshooting etc which still require a human touch. With careful planning, future-proofing staff needs to ensure that organisations need to save on transition costs about automation while making the most out of the prevailing conditions.

Gamification

The latest trend of gamification has been adopted by a lot of industries in the past few years. With gamification, the concept of spinning engagement into a kind of competitive activity has proved to be quite useful in a lot of ways that entails the field of training, marketing, and even recruitment.

A lot of brands nowadays utilise gamification to promote healthy competition amongst teams, encourage loyalty amongst customers, motivate employees, and create a buzz. Various gamification techniques are available which can be easily implemented while there are others which need a high level of technical expertise and an advanced level of planning.

In the HR field, gamification has been used in the screening process where tests about cognitive abilities and important skills have been converted into a fun-filled engagement. With the help of mobile apps nowadays you can make your candidates play games which have underlying algorithms which help in generating critical analytics about the participants of the game.

Gamification benefits both the employees as well as the candidates. While the employers can tap into a lot of data which can be quite useful to determine a candidate’s weaknesses and strengths, candidates also have an incentive to participate. By participating it offers the candidates the opportunity to demonstrate their skills to their potential recruiters.

There is no doubt that these technology-centric trends are likely to have a great deal of impact on the HR industry moving forward. Artificial intelligence has already gained prominence in many industries, and its role is likely to increase in the future. Future focussed companies have already made sizeable investments towards these technologies and trends to stay ahead in the race. All of the above discussed technology trends have a learning curve associated with them. Hence it is important that the management of organisations take these trends seriously and start making immediate preparations to gear up for the future of HR.