Covid fast tracks tech adoption in HR by five years

Which interesting trends have you witnessed regarding tech adoption in HR, as a result of the Covid crisis?

Covid had forced all of us to move towards no touch and completely virtual and remote processes. In fact , today tech is at the heart of all HR processes. Apart from ensuring business continuity, the usage of emerging technologies like AI, ML algorithms to gain insights about the HR processes have also witnessed a quantum leap owing to the Covid-19.

Which key areas of HR function have you seen maximum tech implementations in the last few months, and the reasons for it?

Key HR functions include – recruitment, this was so personalised with physical presence, this has converted into 100 per cent virtual now. Onboarding, documentation, induction and training.

Which industries / sectors, according to you, will lead this trend in India ? Also, size of the companies?

IT & ITES are at forefront, apart from that: Manufacturing, automotive, labour intensive industries, and smaller businesses.

What is your perception regarding the future of HR tech in India, including the many startups in this space?

HR tech is set to grow more than 100 per cent, this was to grow in the next five years and we had a roadmap till 2025. But this will be done by the end of 2020-21. Most of the HR tech systems are live and making some good business already.

As a leading staffing company, how has the pandemic brought about a change in how you are operating? Are you also looking at an increase in tech implementations in business?

We are 100 per cent tech oriented now, we have embraced tech like never before, most of our systems are automated. Due to Covid, and further lockdown, we were one of the quick and hassle free business units which enabled WFH options to the entire workforce in a single day! About 70 per cent of our workforce can continue to WFH and deliver things, we have also seen some increase in productivity during lockdown.

We have recently upgraded to the best possible technology infrastructure to provide great customer experience to our users – both candidates and corporates. We are looking to come up with some interesting technology tools, products and solutions for some unique problems due to Covid-19.

As for our internal company hiring & HR activities, it is 100 per cent tech driven from dourcing (ATS), onboarding (e-onboarding app), induction and training (via Hangouts & Lurningo).

For our customers and users we are coming up with Virtual Job Fair, WFH based jobs on our portals, job matching algorithms, auto email trigger for matched jobs to candidates and many such tech advancements.

Your view / any other significant factor

The significant factor why HR tech is able to skyrocket now, is due to a lot of ground work done between 2018-2020. We had most of the AI, ML, automation tools mature and come of age and we are now packaging the products together for the client as per their use cases and requirements. We have a simple chatbot which can take care of simple questions, FAQs, schedule interviews, assign tasks, directly and with less amount of time to be spent on the internet. This otherwise required painstakingly research, Google, sort data, put it together and make sense of it.