As we start 2023, here are my five predictions for HR tech this year:
Increased Automation: Organizations seeking to do more with fewer resources will seek out opportunities to reduce swivel chair activities by introducing technology to help automate processes.
Artificial intelligence: This topic has been a mainstay over the past few years. In 2023, I see further saturation of companies using AI to drive efficiency in the front-end assessment of candidate skill fit against job requirements.
Reporting and Analytics: Companies have invested heavily in HR tech. These technologies have increased the data available to organizations. Organizations will look to drive additional value by harmonizing data across these systems to generate actionable insights.
Tech Stack Optimization: The pace and competition of the talent marketplace in the past years has been extremely fast. Talent acquisition teams have had to focus on identifying and filling an influx of needs. As this demand plateaus organizations will use this time to look internally to improve and optimize their tech stack setup and underpinning processes.
Talent Management: Given economic uncertaintycompanies will continue to look at ways to reduce costs and one way they will do this is by focusing internally on leveraging their current workforce. Companies will leverage technologies to help identify career pathways to provide clarity and enable upskilling of their internal workforce as an effort to fill internally and improve retention.
One in seven of us is neurodiverse. That is roughly 14% of us who have a different way of thinking compared to the ‘typical’ brain. That’s a sizeable number. Individuals with neurodiverse conditions include those who are Autistic, or who have ADHD, Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, Dyspraxia, Tourette’s Syndrome or Dyscalculia. These conditions might be formally diagnosed, or they might not.
Some in the neurodiverse community consider that they are disabled, whilst, for a number of reasons, many do not recognise their different way of experiencing the world as a disability. It is often personal choice and more so can depend on the difficulties the neurodiverse person faces whilst living their everyday life.
The benefits in business of cognitive diversity and neurodiversity feature across many articles and pieces of research, and include improved profitability through enhanced business performance, as well as unlocking better creativity and innovation. In this article we consider some problems that exist when attracting and retaining neurodiverse talent.
The most common barrier to understanding your neurodiverse talent (and other diverse talent) can be the lifelong expertise they have developed for ‘masking’ who they are. Masking really helps with fitting in to environments that are set up for typical brains to flourish. Masking when you’re neurodiverse can take a number of forms, including:
Having to rehearse conversations to make social interactions at work easier, including small talk
Stopping yourself from stimming – may be a movement or noise you make that has a calming effect on you but can be judged as strange to neurotypicals
Making eye contact when it makes you uncomfortable to do so
Pretending not to be bothered by things that are causing you physically painful sensory overload – sounds, smells, touch
Holding back from pointing out when someone says one thing but does another
Mirroring someone’s tone of voice and mannerisms when unsure how to behave in a certain situation
Avoiding some tasks that are more difficult to do
Hiding weaknesses to avoid stigma or judgement from those around you
To some extent or other, we all have cause to mask how we feel or what we are thinking at work from time to time. We will act professionally for the most part and according to the guidelines and policies in place. Now magnify this and consider that almost every conversation or interaction you have – will require you to consider how your mask is, because it is necessary in order to fit in at work all the time. It is stressful and can be impossible to be in an environment where you must fit in at a personal level and be someone who you are not.
In today’s modern working world, there is a growing field of choice for talent, and the opportunities to build a career that suits you are also on the rise. So how can business provide the right environment to retain neurodiverse talent in this competitive world? Here are seven ideas to consider.
Where it is possible, provide the option to work from home for at least some of the time, to release some of the ongoing pressure and stress of masking
Give people leadership responsibilities to those who are assessed as being good at working with people
Eliminate as much subjectivity as possible from individual performance reviews, and allow for measurable and clear goals and targets
Freely allow any basic accommodations at work that people may need e.g. the wearing of headphones, and the ability to work in a quiet zone for focus or sensory needs, flexible working hours and autonomy on how a job gets done
Provide leadership and management training and reinforce a focus on listening, building empathy and understanding of how to get the best out of individual team members
Actively encourage and support employee resource groups (ERGs) and their activities
Encourage sharing of the lived experiences of diverse talent inside and outside of your business, so that everyone in your business can keep hearing, listening and learning.
Your thoughts
I welcome your thoughts on this article and the topics raised, and please do comment and add to the conversation, about the problems faced and how business can provide what the neurodiverse community would value most at work. Of course, if you want to know how we can help and support with these challenge please contact us here.
About me
I work at AMS, the global workforce solutions organisation who specialize in talent acquisition and talent advisory organisation. I’ve worked in the talent arena for over 20 years, and as a people leader for more than 15 years. I also co-lead one of our internal neurodiversity ERG groups at AMS. I am coming near to the end of two years of study for a Masters in Autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions.
Recently, AMS launched the first chapter of its new Technology Whitepaper, “Exploding Digital Myths in Talent Acquisition” which focusses on exploring themes and misconceptions of digital technology used by Recruiters and Talent acquisition teams.
The first chapter argues that “Talent Technology” will never replace the need for recruiters, but that we are increasingly partnering with technology to complement our human skills. Put simply, technology is helping us to do things like provide workflow efficiencies and remove administrative tasks, so that recruiters and TA professionals can focus on more strategic objectives.
“Technology will be an enabler of recruitment; however, the people element will always remain crucial”
I wholehearted agree with this sentiment and it has certainly been my experience working on the Public Sector Resourcing (PSR) framework, which is managed by AMS.
On PSR we have harnessed everything from Chatbots to Advanced Programmatic Advertising campaigns to AI Sourcing Talent pools to list just a few. We also have access to vast amounts of data and reporting generated which we access via advanced business information tools like PowerBi as well as an incredibly useful bespoke rate analysis tool which allows us to actively assess live market trends and help our customers and delivery teams make evidence-based recruitment decisions.
The new technologies we have gradually been adding to our toolkit have helped us to work smart and make more efficient use of our time. This in turn allows us to spend more time and resources building relationships with clients and candidates, the stuff which only humans can do effectively. It’s our talented Recruiters and Sourcers who can optimise and effectively use the tools available to them. Having a good understanding of recruitment technology will certainly be crucial for recruitment teams moving forward.
One thing I learned very quickly at the start of my tech recruitment career is that long term success is down to building strong networks and relationships with people and holding on to them. Having an automated technology that can help us to stay in touch and build deeper, more meaningful relationships with candidates and hold on to these relationships for a longer period, and crucially at scale, will be a real game changer. These sorts of solutions are in their infancy but once optimised and harnessed correctly will have the potential to be revolutionary for talent acquisition.
The whitepaper argues that the impact of technology on recruitment is in its early stages and that the sheer volume of talent technology is accelerating, which as someone involved in the continuous improvement of our recruitment service at AMS is exciting.
One thing I learned very quickly at the start of my tech recruitment career is that long term success is down to building strong networks and relationships with people and holding on to them. Having an automated technology that can help us to stay in touch and build deeper, more meaningful relationships with candidates and hold on to these relationships for a longer period, and crucially at scale, will be a real game changer.
Despite the pace of hiring slowing down, in-demand skills are still in short supply. Continued planning when it comes to acquiring talent, will ensure that your organisations are equipped to deal with the ongoing requirements to deliver on tech transfomations and digitisation.
Tech Skilling takes individuals with adjacent skills and retrains them into new tech roles, before placing them with clients. Again, the aim is to diversify the sector and solve skill shortages, which has seen demand sky rocket.
“Recently I’ve heard a lot about candidates ghosting. They have so much choice that they don’t even bother to tell you they’re not turning up on day one after they’ve accepted the job. They’re getting multiple offers and buy-back from existing employers,” says Hainsworth.
The solution isn’t simply offering higher salaries, although they are yet to slow down. Rather, says Hainsworth, it’s also about organisations offering purpose at work, development opportunities and work/life balance - and recruiters knowing how to sell this. Candidate engagement and experience has never been more important.
Performance reviews are essential to employee development, and when executed well, they positively impact individual performance and overall talent goals. However, research shows that bias disproportionately affects the performance evaluations of women, Black, and Latino talent. In an article I wrote for Talent Development magazine, I discuss common biases that impact performance evaluations and ways to mitigate them.
Textio, a linguistics software company, found significant demographic bias in their research of over 25,000 performance reviews written for employees. Fortune magazine refers to the analysis: “…some stark facts emerge: different groups of people do get different kinds of feedback at work—with women, Black people, Latinx people, and older workers receiving the lowest-quality feedback. These findings cut across organizations, meaning that the patterns are not specific to just one entity or its feedback culture.”
A few of the specific findings:
Women receive 22% more feedback than men about their personality vs. their performance
Black men get 1/3 less feedback than White women on average, as measured by word count — the least input of all groups
Black women receive nearly 9x as much non-actionable feedback as white men under 40
Other marginalized groups face workplace bias, as well. A series of recent studies from Yale showed that when hiring managers listened to recorded introductions of candidates of different social classes, they judged people from a higher social class as more competent and a better fit for the role. This type of bias can impact performance evaluation and hinder social mobility.
You might ask why this all matters. It matters because people with access to constructive feedback progress faster in their careers, earn more, and have more leadership opportunities.
There is no one-off solution as reasons behind bias at the workplace lie in a complex interplay of interpersonal, individual, organizational and societal attitudes. However, more equitable actions start with accepting that we all have inherent biases. On a personal level, we each must determine which biases we hold and then intentionally set them aside when writing performance reviews. I include organizational strategies to mitigate bias in the article. While it’s available at no cost to ATD members, you can find a free checklist to combat performance review bias here from the Center for WorkLife Law.
Teach managers to recognize their biases and provide guidance on setting objective criteria to evaluate performance.
This is a further article expanding upon the insight that I presented at the LEAP TA Life Sciences conference in Boston a few weeks ago where I was proud to present alongside many Talent Acquisition (TA) leaders within the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector. The big reveal in that presentation was the new research that we have conducted in AMS demonstrating that the US Life Sciences sector will see over 1 in 3 jobs vacant by 2030 unless we start to take bold new approaches to hiring and retaining talent. You can read more on that topic here.
As I shared in my last article, the key driver behind our ongoing talent shortages is the high rate of staff turnover impacting all sectors and all geographies. We all know that attrition was particularly high in 2021, few will dispute the reality of the Great Resignation even if they are sick of the term, but evidence shows that attrition has been rising year on year for the last two decades. And that shouldn’t be a surprised given that the notion of a ‘job for life’ seems to be hugely outdated. With inflation now rampant and workers seeking increased salaries to offset the increased cost of living it’s clear that staff turnover will continue to be high for some time to come.
So we need to do a much better job of retaining our existing and highly valuable talent. And in order to do that we need to develop and progress our talent within our organizations. New research just published by LinkedIn (see the link at the bottom of this article) shows that employees who have moved internally (through a promotion or lateral change) have a 64% chance of remaining with an organization after three years compared to 45% for those who have not moved internally.
So how are companies faring when it comes to internal hiring? And given the tough labor market that we’re all facing, are we seeing an increase in internal hiring this year compared to last?
Within AMS we will support our enterprise RPO clients to make more than 240,000 permanent hires this year, across 7 key sectors and in more than 90 countries around the world. That level of hiring activity gives us rich data and real insight in to key hiring trends at a sector and regional level.
The chart below demonstrates how internal hiring, measured as a % of all hires made, has changed from 2021 to this year (January through July 2022):
Given that most sectors and geographies are facing significant talent shortages I’m sure many will be surprised that internal hiring has reduced over prior year. I would suggest that there are a couple of key factors driving this reduction.
Firstly, as I have written about before, most organizations are failing to make it easy for employees to find new internal roles. Only 40% of employees believe it’s easy to find internal opportunities and only 17% felt that their organization encouraged them to move internally. And the key statistic – only a third of employees who searched for a new opportunity in the past 12 months searched internally first.
Secondly, employee and candidate priorities are changing. According to the same LinkedIn report I referenced before, workers confidence to improve their financial situation is declining and, on top of that, remuneration and benefits are the top priorities for candidates. With high inflation and cost of living, it’s little surprise that talent is moving towards roles that offer the greater reward and, unfortunately, it’s often the case that external roles will offer a greater increase than internal ones.
So how does internal hiring differ by sector? As the chart below demonstrates, there are significant variances in internal hiring levels between both sectors and regions.
Please bear in mind that the average internal hiring rate shown above will be influenced by the mix of hiring that AMS performs for clients within regions and sectors. However the data provides some fascinating insights. It won’t be a surprise to see that internal hiring is particularly low for sectors such as Retail & Consumer – a sector in which the large majority of hiring will be made at entry level. More surprising perhaps to see the significant variances in internal hiring between regions. Whilst Retail Banking, for example, has internal hiring rates of 52% in EMEA and 41% in APAC, internal hiring rates in the US are running at just 22%. Indicative perhaps of a lower job level of hiring for retail banking in the US.
I know Talent leaders are always keen for data that helps them compare their hiring metrics to other organizations and I’m sure they will find this data useful. My plea though is for leaders to focus less on the numbers and more on the trend – whether your internal hiring is running at 10% or 30% there is an imperative to continually increase our levels of internal mobility and internal hiring. Doing so will reduce employee turnover and increase value to your business.
We need to transform the way that we approach internal mobility; we need to make it easy for employees to identify and apply for new internal roles, whether they are promotions or lateral moves. We should invest in technology to facilitate the processes, we should empower internal recruiters to better support, we should incentivize managers to progress rather than hoard their existing talent.
These are the challenges that we thrive on in AMS, if you would like to discuss how best to optimize your internal hiring, please reach out to us for a discussion.
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Employees who make an internal move are more likely to stay at their organization longer than those who stay in the same role.
Post the pandemic, we’ve seen an incredibly buoyant market, with open job requisitions at an all-time high, and significant movement in the market. I’ve asked myself numerous times if this is sustainable; wage inflation has been on the up, and at some point something has to give.
What should employers do? This is certainly a time to reflect on the value proposition that you offer to your candidates, the experience that you provide, and how you manage your internal market place. Some useful food for thought in Josh Bersin’s article.
As the economy slows (which is clearly coming soon), lots of great employees are going to stop jumping into new jobs. So the sooner you “upgrade your workforce” the better you’ll be prepared for the next few years.
I recently wrote a piece for Diversity Q on my thoughts on what HR professionals and Business Leaders need to do, to move the dial on gender equity in the UK.
Whilst we have seen significant progress in women’s representation in the UK, there is still more to be done. Some of the key initiatives organisations should be considering include:
Surveying female employees – engaging directly with women in the business offers an outlet for their thoughts and opinions and allows them to contribute to shaping the workplace culture.
Return to work programmes – women can be daunted by the return to work and I have seen how these programmes can support women by offering skilling and reskilling as well a connecting them back to peers and connecting them with new team members.
Reverse mentoring – this is a programme that works well for our leaders in AMS. The programme equips leaders with inclusive leadership skills and cultural awareness by having junior employees from under-represented groups guide leaders.
Sponsorship – this is a more active approach to mentoring female talent and is starting to take traction across many organsiations. Essentially a sponsor is a leader who is going to advocate for an individual in that organisation.
Organisations who actively consider and implement these initiatives will continue to make progress on their gender equity representation. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what more you would like to see businesses incorporating in their plans.
While the UK has certainly made significant progress in women’s representation in the workplace, with nearly 40% of UK FTSE 100 board positions now held by women, there is certainly room for improvement.
The COVID-19 pandemic left retailers scrambling for talent as employees moved on to other industries with higher wages, better job security and improved benefits.
This is a fascinating article from Josh Bersin citing a leaked memo from Amazon that suggests that the company may soon start to run out of people to hire in a number of their US warehouses. With staff turnover over 100% in many areas (and in some cases over 200%), it’s reasonable to assume that the local available workforce for some Amazon locations will be rapidly depleting; particularly given that Amazon is in competition for talent. Amazon is the second largest employer in the US with c. 1.6m global employees. Just imagine the hiring challenges if their attrition is averaging anywhere close to 100%.
According to the original article, raising salaries and increasing automation are two of 6 levers that Amazon can pull to delay the challenge. Hopefully at least one of the other levers focuses on the employee experience – optimizing roles to make them meaningful and fulfilling, providing developmental opportunities and career progression.
I’ve written a lot recently about the extraordinary hiring market that we’re in, the fact that in both the US and the UK there are now more open positions than there are unemployed people. I’ve written about the need for employers to tap in to the ‘hidden workforce‘ to gain skills and talent that may not be an immediate match if companies are looking for job-ready candidates. And in my most recent article I wrote that “It’s important to also stress that reducing employee turnover should be a strategic focus for the boardroom, not just the HR leadership team“. Can you imagine many more pressing strategic challenges than the risk of running out of employees?
I’m sure there are incredibly clever people at Amazon with a plan in place to tackle their talent challenges. They will be operating on tight margins where productivity levels are essential to maintaining profitability. And presumably they will know exactly what their employee turnover is costing them in terms of hiring costs, onboarding, ramp-up time and management focus. And I’m sure one of the first things they will have done is to speak to their employees to understand what would make them want to stay in role for longer.
There are some great examples in the market of companies gaining strategic advantage by taking innovative approaches to hiring, retaining, reskilling, redeploying and valuing talent. Now is the time to be brave, whether you’re close to running out of people to hire or merely feeling the pressure of the current hiring market. Inflation and a stagnant or receding economy may ease the hiring pressures a little but this will remain a candidate-driven market for a long time to come.
The new world of work is different. Every company is dependent on its people, and the idea of “replacing low performers with high performers” is just silly. Your job as a leader is to hire the right people, then train and motivate them to succeed. If they’re in the wrong job then that’s your problem, not their problem.
