It’s no secret that Millennials have high expectations.
This next generation workforce will cause change in HR, but remains a mystery in many ways.
For our 2015 HR Scholarship Contest, we decided:
Let’s find a young, bright, and creative voice to shed light on the future of HR.
Although many predictions are borderline sci-fi, they’re actually not far from what’s already happening.
For the spring of 2015, Better Buys (formerly HR Software Insight) offered a $1,000 scholarship prize to the best essay on the future of HR.
Students from around the country sent us their submissions. They were asked to give us their take on how technology will affect the way companies recruit, hire, and train.
The Runner-ups
All from various backgrounds and degrees, students related HR technology to their own experiences through refreshing anecdotes and surprising applications.
Before announcing our winner, the following three excerpts come from the creative minds of finalists:
Our First Impressions
Our first impressions are now based on how we present our social networking site rather than how we present ourselves when walking into the organization, unannounced to drop off our resume. In fact, organizations now search for us to develop their first impression. And this is just the beginning of the process. So much of the hiring is filtered out before an organization and the individual ever even speak to one another. The future of HR is sure to evolve with technology just as it has been. Newer processes of first impressions will develop and simpler methods of job hunting are sure to formulate. The real question will be, how much of the decision making will we let technology do for us?” -Laura Sheldon
Law Enforcement Evaluations
Having a strong passion and interest in Law Enforcement, I was able to attend a ride-along with a Police Officer at my local Police Department. While talking to the officer she showed me a program where her Sergeant evaluates her at the end of each quarter throughout the year. This evaluation is available to her and the upper level administration. If she or other officers do something that is worth a compliment, then the Sergeant simply enters the program and gives them positive feedback. If she did something that wasn’t correct, then he enters the program and gives her a negative evaluation and how she can correct the problem if she ever encounters it again. This is one of the most useful programs that the department has. If she were to ever to want a promotion within the department, they could simply pull her online “file” and look at her evaluations and see how she is doing. Based on the review of her evaluation this determines whether she gets the promotion or not. This also encourages the officers to perform well and stay on track. I feel as though if programs such as this were to be implicated into companies all across the United States, it would make it easier for companies to evaluate and promote employees within the company.” – Dylan M. Prather
Applicant Statistics in Actionable Formats
Hiring managers will have access to a dashboard of their top candidates ranked by statistical models based on how well each candidate will do the job. By the time a candidate is invited to an interview, the hiring manager will know what to expect from them. For example, candidates applying for programming roles will be automatically evaluated based on their published code, perhaps even to the point of being checked by static validation tools. One could even imagine a filtering service that automatically contacts the references of top candidates for a small fee. All of this information will be displayed to hiring managers and HR personnel in an appropriate and actionable format. The ability to attract and process more applications with less effort will allow companies to be extremely selective with who they interview and hire. This will allow hiring departments to further optimize for company and employee success, which will ultimately result in a broad range of cost savings for the company.” -George Hahn
The Winner
Without further ado, the following 900-word essay by Tim Christovich, a senior at Stanton College Preparatory High School in Jacksonville, Florida, has won this year’s $1,000 scholarship prize:
Some Things Change, Others Stay the Same
Some things change, others stay the same. The last century has been painted with city streets dominated by ever-familiar skyscrapers and towering office buildings. It seems the nature of these establishments never change. Despite the consistent presence of corporate offices and business institutions in our lives, there is one key component of modern companies that can’t be neglected — the evolution of technology. The Human Resources department of any respectable institution is especially notable to have been a benefactor of these developments. The many tasks of those employed in a company’s HR department include endless paper processing, communication with potential and current employees, as well as consistent evaluations of employees. Without Human Resources, the integrity and credibility of any given business or institution would be staggeringly questionable. It’s thanks to today’s technology that HR is able to work smarter, not harder, to create a truly productive and effective employee workforce within any company.
It all starts with sorting through applications and interviewing potential employees for the organization in question. Through online (and print) job postings, eager (and potentially unemployed) candidates rush to fill out the provided employee application. As all 20 potential co-workers make haste to have the application in first, the system overloads and crashes – leaving an HR worker without any applicants and leaving the potential employee discouraged and unmotivated. It’s through anecdotes such as this one that the process of accepting and receiving employee applications has been improved upon and made much more fluid by enhanced web technologies as well as faster processing platforms. This only scratches the surface of how companies are able to have an enhanced hiring experience as a result of technological developments in HR.
Another theoretical situation: Once an employee’s application has been received and processed, the head of HR decides that the applicant is worthy of an interview. One catch – the office is in Daytona Beach, Florida and the future employee is all the way on the Jersey Shore. Thankfully, the development of Voice-over-IP technologies (VOIP) in the last ten years makes it so that the applicant can still conduct his interview over the internet. In the HR department, a relatively inexpensive webcam and desktop computer creates an incredible interface for communicating quickly and easily with valuable members of the workforce that are long distances away. With just a few clicks in an effective database management system, the employee can be hired and appropriate paperwork can be requested without a hitch.
The HR department of any company plays an important role in administration of all company employees. With modern technology, an employee can scan and upload signed paperwork and forms to a digital database straight from their smartphone – allowing HR to receive and process documents quickly and securely. Gone are the days of an endless filing cabinet edifice – everything can be stored on a company server and managed with intuitive database software. Employee records can be retrieved almost instantly and from anywhere as a result of the widespread availability of cloud storage. Human error is no longer a factor in this either, as documents can be automatically backed up to prevent data loss.
One may be concerned with the security of using cloud based data storage, but ultimately, it is more secure than physical information storage systems. Once a perpetrator has a key or other way inside your physical filing cabinet, the documents are ready to be taken and used maliciously. With a digital file storage system, however, files can be stored in a locked and secure location as well as encrypted, so that even if a perpetrator gains access to sensitive files they will be completely unable to read the documents. This is a result of the encryption used to distort the content of the files for anyone without a second key or passphrase. This paperwork could hold employee social security numbers, banking information, or sensitive salary data. Thankfully, not even HR employees would need to see this data with their own eyes to process an employee paycheck. By using authorized company mobile devices, an employee could clock-in and out of the office each day just by tapping their device to a designated plate on a wall, using the latest near field communications (NFC) technology. These clock-in and clock-out times would then be pushed directly to the employees database and record, without any involvement from HR — allowing these valuable employees to focus even more on person-to-person interactions that truly give a company depth and personality.
The future of human resources and technology is unpredictable but undoubtedly positive. With improvements being made every day in the fields of encryption and database platforms, anxiety will be close-to-none in using entirely digital storage for data and information. Developing employee talent can also be enhanced in the future through telepresence systems that allow the company to receive lectures and presentations on effective workplace habits over the internet, from the comfort of their cubicle – no airfare, hotel fees, or rental cars. Just a trusty USB webcam peripheral and an internet connection. Employee performance can only skyrocket as a result of technology in the human resources department – going as far as to process employee activity data with specialized algorithms, the HR department can match employees to work that will fully utilize their potential. An enriching work environment makes for productivity as well as a happy CEO — and hey, who doesn’t want an internet connected coffee maker in the office?”
-Tim Christovich
Many outstanding essays were sent to our editorial team.
Some common trends throughout the scholarship submissions:
- Performance reviews will become evidence based, backed by systematic task tracking.
- HR will become one with social media while competing for global talent.
- Trends that have previously been observed but never measured will come to life through complex databases, giving HR all the information needed to make fully data-backed decisions.
Congratulations, Tim, on winning our $1,000 scholarship. We wish you best of luck pursuing a degree in Computer Science, on the road to Cybersecurity Engineering!
