In my recent interview with Tom Goodwin in Ep 172 of the show, we both agreed that the importance of hiring and developing the right talent for digital transformation is not discussed widely enough. This is a critical topic for me, and I really want to explore it in more detail over the coming weeks.
My guest on this week’s show is Dorothee El Khoury from strategic consultancy The Hackett Group. Dorothee is their HR Practice lead and has done a huge amount of work benchmarking the structural changes HR and Recruiting have to go through to deliver the talent and skills required for Digital Transformation.
In the interview we discuss:
- The Hackett’s Group’s methodology for identifying and monitoring trends
- Why HR is critical to Digital Transformation
- How structures, roles, and responsibilities are changing
- The rise of recruitment marketing
- The automation of processes and the future role of humans
- Talent concierges and employer relationship managers
- People analytics
- The rate of adoption of digital technologies by HR and Recruiting
Dorothee also talks about some of the barriers to change and the danger of digital overload.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:09]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 175 of the Recruiting Future podcast. In my recent interview with Tom Goodwin in episode 172 of the show, we both agreed that the importance of hiring and developing the right talent for digital transformation is not being discussed widely enough. This is a critical topic for me and I really want to explore it in more detail in the coming weeks. My guest on this week’s show is Dorothee El Khoury from strategic consultancy the Hackett Group. Dorothee is their HR practice lead and has done a huge amount of work benchmarking the structural changes HR and recruiting have to go through to deliver the talent and skills required for digital transformation. Enjoy the interview. Hi, Dorothee, and welcome to the podcast.
Matt Alder [00:02:04]:
Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Dorothee El Khoury [00:02:08]:
Sure. So I’m Dorothea El Khoury . I work with the Hackett Group. I have now 25 years of professional experience and I lead the HR practice for Europe.
Matt Alder [00:02:22]:
Now, could you, for those people who may not be overly familiar with the work that you guys do at the Hackett Group, could you just give us a quick sort of over the Hackett Group?
Dorothee El Khoury [00:02:33]:
Yeah, certainly. So the Hackett Group is a strategic consultancy. We’re working for a broad range of companies globally and what we focus on is enabling and measuring performance. And we’re very well known for our benchmarking capability, but also advise companies on how to transform their corporate functions.
Matt Alder [00:03:00]:
Now, in our discussion today, we’re going to be talking about HR and digital transformation, which is obviously a very hot topic at the moment. I know you guys have sort of recently done some research and some reporting in this area. Could you just give us a kind of a bit of background to the. To the research and the work that you’ve done?
Dorothee El Khoury [00:03:20]:
Yes. So as part of our activities at Hackett, we survey and we also analyze the data in our benchmarking database to understand what are the leading practices and also what are those strategies that leading companies are taking and which differentiate them from competition performance. So one of the studies we run every year is the key issue study in which for each of the functions, HR being one of them, we really ask C level executives what their expectations are, the key risks, the key challenges and the key tactics. And that’s how we know what the trends are going to be in a given year. And we also monitor the trends and look at what’s changing year on year.
Matt Alder [00:04:33]:
So I suppose the key question for me and lots of the HR professionals who listen to the show, how can HR support digital transformation within organizations?
Dorothee El Khoury [00:04:47]:
Well, maybe the first thing to say is that, you know, with digital transformation, never has HR been more challenged and never has it been as interesting to work in HR because the role and the expectations of the C level towards the HR function are extremely high. And you know, in this key issue studies that I mentioned a minute ago, what we find is in the last five years access to critical talent has been in the top five and now in the top three. Number two, in 19 of the risks that CEOs see for their company, number two, risk just after cybersecurity. So the talent question is very high in the agenda and in the agenda because of digital transformation. So the very high expectation in terms of how HR needs to help solving the talent issue. And the second thing to bear in mind is that HR functions are expected to bring this additional contribution to the strategic contribution whilst having flat headcount and flat budget or even slightly reduced headcount and budget. So there’s also a contribution to company efficiency that is required from the function. So high expectations and a function that is really central and critical to the success of the group digital transformation.
Matt Alder [00:06:44]:
I think that’s really interesting because, you know, obviously this is something that HR and recruiting, you know, need to be supporting if talent is that critical to the organization. But, but obviously with flat budgets and the digital transformation of their own kind of disciplines that there’s lots of change they’re going through themselves. So I mean, how are the sort of structures, roles and responsibility of HR sort of departments and teams changing as companies digitally trans overall because they have.
Dorothee El Khoury [00:07:19]:
Flat budgets and flat headcount. The only way that HR can succeed is not by working more or buying more services. It’s about changing the way they work. And as you pointed rightly, it is about not only the methods and the approaches changing, but it’s also about the roles evolving in HR So we see that actually there’s new roles that are appearing, some of the roles are disappearing and other roles are changing very strongly. So I probably can give you an example of how this works, focusing on a very critical role process for companies that is talent acquisition. So recruitment acquisition, talent sourcing, you can name it in different ways. So the roles disappearing would be typically the traditional roles focusing on transactions or the administrative part of HR roles like for example sorting CVs or recording transactions, answering very simple employee questions. And those are disappearing because technology is helping now deliver HR processes without needing any employee supporting. For example, for very simple employee requests, self service tools can be available. Chatbots can also do part of the communication with employees on simple topics. Work certificates, copies of payslips, all of those activities can be pretty easily automated. And even taking the example of the recruitment process, some companies are automating in self service the booking of an interview day directly between the business manager and the candidate without going through the recruitment team. And this used to be, in my experience a very heavy task for the recruitment team just to coordinate these interviews. Now there’s also new roles appearing, an example of new roles appearing, a new completely new set of activities that’s appearing in the recruitment process. There’s what now is called recruitment marketing. And this is about as companies want to target passive candidates, so people who are not actively looking for a job, but could consider moving jobs if they would be aware of an opportunity. So companies need to reach out to these candidates, they want to advertise their employer value proposition to these pool of potential candidates. And therefore they need a special team who administers, develops their presence on social media, pushes content to a community of professionals of a certain domain that they are interested in attracting and also to get in touch and identify those profiles very simply from job boards or even social media like LinkedIn for example. So completely new roles, some of which will come from hr, some of which could come from other functions. So in this case from the marketing function or even from the IT function to do all the technology support for this new activity and the roles changing again with the recruitment process in the former recruiter role. So part of it could be gone, the administrative part, but and what is remaining? You can see a specialization of the roles, for example between profiles that we really focus on looking for the right talent pools. So searching, doing a research job to really understand globally where the talent could be, what sort of candidates could be targeted and others who will more focus on building a relationship. And those building the relationship will probably not only do Recruitment in the future they will take a more end to end approach and continue the relationship even though maybe the potential candidates are still not candidates or even as they have onboarded the company and are in the first steps of their career to make sure that integration is working well and they’re happy at work. So there’s a lot, there’s really a lot changing and you know Hackett, looking at the HR function we really expect nearly I gave an example around the recruitment activity but there is probably not any area of HR that is going to be unchanged with digital.
Matt Alder [00:13:20]:
I think that’s really interesting and I think that balance between what’s going to be automated and what’s going to be done by humans is quite interesting. So you kind of mentioned the idea that someone who’s building a relationship with someone during a recruitment process could continue on that relationship through onboarding and you know, helping them with their success in the, in the business. Is that what you see the sort of role of humans within HR sort of doing moving forward, Is it a case that, you know, the administrative stuff is going to be kind of automated and the, you know, the humans are focusing on that kind of relationship piece? What’s your sort of view on that?
Dorothee El Khoury [00:14:07]:
There will certainly be be part of the HR function which will need to focus on so the relationship and also very strongly on the customer experience. The customer for HR being three kinds of customer. There’s the candidates, so people outside of the company that the company may want to attract and hire at some point. The employee so working in the company on different roles and also the management of the company. So the hiring managers, but also the operations managers who need support in their people management tasks and more and more HR functions in the service that they’re delivering to candidates and also inside their organization will need to adapt to their internal customers as you would adapt to a tech consumer and customizing as you would do with an external customer, customizing the service to the needs of the segment of the population that they’re managing, understanding their expectations, innovating to bring them better experience. And as part of these new roles, actually we see some companies creating employee relationship managers. So person specifically having the ownership and the responsibility of this side of the job. So making the employee happy and the, the candidates and the managers as well. So that part is definitely going to grow. So you know, the simplistic view of because we’re automating, we’re all going to become robots and the human side of things is going to disappear. This is completely wrong actually even without outside HR Sorry. As digital transformation progresses, the problem solving skills, the communication skills are actually becoming more and more important for those activities that are not being automated.
Matt Alder [00:16:46]:
So data analytics seems to be a very big topic trend at the moment. What role will analytics play in the future as all of this, all of this develops?
Dorothee El Khoury [00:17:00]:
Well, for hr. In fact, like for most functions in the company, data will be part of everything people do. So every activity, every process will have its data analysis part. So back to recruiting. Because companies will want to target the right talents and there will be an intensified talent or knowing where the potential skills that the company needs are located would be critical. And to do this you need to be able to analyze external information to find where the profiles might be. This is also true internally. If you take the HR systems, currently there’s very limited information. There is certainly not enough information for HR to be able to identify their own talent from their own company. Because you would have limited information. You would have the degree of the person and maybe the skills that they’ve used since they joined the company. But how about the other skills that they have that they may use in their personal lives if they work for a non profit organization or some other activities? And how about the other skills that they had before they joined? Quite probably this would certainly not be in the HR system and what are their aspirations as well, because you would have nothing about an employee’s aspiration or nothing usable. So companies will also need to really get smart at collecting this information in a way that is compliant with the new privacy policy regulation. But think about, you know, really capturing information and analyzing this information real time. So really the world is going to change and it is going to be a differentiator between different companies competing with each other to be able to capture the right data, analyze the right data and insert this data driven decision making process within their ways of working.
Matt Alder [00:19:31]:
So final question.
Matt Alder [00:19:33]:
Obviously a big part of digital transformation and change within HR is the adoption of new technology. What’s your view on the current rate of adoption of digital technology within hr? You know what, what’s kind of holding people back and is this, you know, how might this change in the future?
Dorothee El Khoury [00:19:57]:
So in our research we find that some technologies have become like the use of social media, have, have been adopted by a majority of companies, others are not quite adopted by the majority, but there are very ambitious plans to develop. So the use of artificial intelligence, which you already mentioned, but also robotics and chatbots and others, companies are still wondering how to use them really would be the case, for example, in HR with blockchain what we see is slowing down the change in adopting new technologies and enabling the function digitally. I guess there’s probably two big, two big showstoppers. The first one is complexity, because when you consider technology, there is often in a company and it’s not the case in the private sphere at all. So that’s a big difference. Large corporates, they have implemented systems for years, so their IT landscape looks like, you know, a series of layers of technology. And whenever a company wants to introduce a new technology, there’s always this complexity of how is this going to integrate our landscape, how’s the data going to be exchanged or not with other applications. So that’s always something that is not easy for companies to manage. And the older the company, the more complex the issue. So that’s a constraint, sort of technical constraint that companies often have. And the other one, and it’s not really intuitive, but we find that what drives the pace of change is not the pace at which technology develops. What drives the pace of adoption is whether the people, so the employees and the managers are willing to use the technology and are willing to change the way they work to use the technology. And a mistake that some companies do is they think that because this application is very customer friendly, very user friendly, very easy to use, very simple, it will be adopted instantly. And they have bad surprises because if you use a new application, a new technology, it means that you’re working differently, that you’re doing different activities, that you’re saving time for things that you used to do in the past, but also you need to use information differently, etc. And this doesn’t go as fast as you would think. And when companies adopt the new tools, be they cloud based or on premise, one thing we always recommend them is to put the exact same amount of change management and explanation around what the tool is going to help you do differently to the users. And not to think that because it’s user friendly, it’s digital and everyone wants to go digital, is going to be adopted immediately and without any effort. So complexity and culture and maybe one last thing for our HR professionals listening to bear in mind is with digital transformation, there’s now a sort of digital overload of people. So 199 is the number of unread emails that is on average in every professional’s inbox. So that’s massive. The time that you take, that a person takes to read a webpage, on average is four seconds. So you know, beyond four seconds they move to the next one. So there’s a very big constraint, and there’s a very big need of being smart to avoid this overload in the way you communicate to your stakeholders and your internal customers. Because if you don’t bear this in mind, then you may not be able to do what you’re trying to do with your employees and your managers.
Matt Alder [00:24:53]:
Dorothee, thank you very much for talking to me.
Dorothee El Khoury [00:24:56]:
You are welcome. My pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:24:58]:
My thanks to Dorothee El Khoury . You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about Working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
