Recruiting Future is a podcast designed to help Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology.
This episode is about technology.
Most HR tech projects end in disappointment because organizations focus all their energy on implementation rather than adoption. If successful transformation is dependent on what happens after the go-live date, how can employers build sustainable tech adoption that delivers lasting business value?
My guest this week is Melissa Hojwall, Global HR Tech Leader at H&M. H&M has over 100,000 employees, the majority of whom are frontline workers, making internal tech adoption both challenging and high impact. In conversation, Melissa talks about the strategies around implementation, adoption, and continuous change management that help make TA and HR Tech projects successful.
In the interview, we discuss:
• HR Digitisation at H&M
• How AI can solve TA & HR challenges
• Predictive analytics
• The skills needed to get the right balance between humans and AI
• Tech adoption and change agility
• Investing in what happens after the go-live date
• Using resistance as a superpower
• Finding and showcasing the benefits to the bottom line
• Disrupting how we interface with technology
• What does the future of HR Tech look like?
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Follow this podcast on Spotify.
00:00
Matt Alder
95% of the budget for HR tech projects is typically spent before the Go live date. With such a lack of focus on adoption, it’s unsurprising that many projects end in dissatisfaction or failure. So what happens when employers include tech adoption as an integral part of the project? Keep listening to find out.
00:25
Matt Alder
Support for this podcast comes from Vonk. Vonk is transforming recruitment advertising with a results driven platform that helps employers attract vet and shortlist top quality candidates. Efficiently trusted by global leaders like Danone, Bayer, Randstadt and PwC, Vonk combines AI powered technology, deep ATS integrations and recruitment expertise to streamline hiring workflows, enhance employer branding and deliver measurable outcomes. With Vonk, you can streamline your recruitment process, improve ROI and build diverse high performing teams. Hire Smarter, faster.
01:26
Matt Alder
Hi there. Welcome to episode 706 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Recruiting Future is a podcast designed to help talent acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing strategic capability in foresight, influence talent and technology. This episode is about technology. Most HR tech projects end in disappointment because organizations focus all their energy on implement rather than adoption. If successful transformation is dependent on what happens after the go live date, how can employers build tech adoption strategies that deliver lasting business value? My guest this week is Melissa Hojwall, global HR Tech leader at H&M. H&M has over 100,000 employees, the majority of whom are frontline workers, making internal tech adoption both a challenge and something with enormous impact. In our conversation, Melissa talks about the strategies around implementation, adoption and continuous change management that help make TA and HR tech projects successful.
02:41
Matt Alder
Hello Melissa, and welcome to the podcast.
02:44
Melissa Hojwall
Why thank you.
02:46
Matt Alder
It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
02:52
Melissa Hojwall
Sure. My name is Melissa Hojwall and I am globally responsible for HR digitalization at H&M.
03:01
Matt Alder
Fantastic. And it’s such an interesting time when it comes to HR technology at the moment with AI and everything that’s going on. And I guess you’re in quite a sort of unique position to give us some insights on it. I mean, how do you think AI is going to be used to solve sort of challenges in the future in talent acquisition and hr? And which are the kind of applications are you most excited about?
03:26
Melissa Hojwall
That’s a really good question. I think the way I see it is that AI is truly breaking boundaries and not just boundaries within companies, between functions and silos. But I think it’s also breaking down boundaries between companies and across the globe. And just to give some examples of what that means and opportunities, I think that we’re going to see a lot more companies using AI tools for headhunting. Just to give an example, there are tools on the market today that can help you to looking at like a job requisition or and the skills that you’re looking for. They can actually search all like open resources out there like LinkedIn and other resources to find and suggest candidates that you might not ever even have thought of to contact when you’re recruiting. So I think headhunting is really an exciting field.
04:24
Melissa Hojwall
I also think there’s a lot of cool AI applications within groundbreaking tools within volume assessment. I mean you don’t really need AI to make volume assessment more efficient. What you can do in volume assessment with AI is to for example, create AI avatars that almost like make like a kind of simulated interview with candidates where you can test in live scenarios that they actually will meet on their job and see how they actually do this, which has a larger validity than a lot of other testing methods out there. So that’s another really exciting thing. But I think the applications in broad HR tech that I’m most excited about is predictive analysis and reporting and also the ability to use agentic AI combining data and summaries cross process to help managers.
05:18
Melissa Hojwall
For example, a manager with a big team who wants to prepare for a salary review, who maybe has taken over people that they don’t know and they want to get a good summary of what has happened with this employee, both performance wise, salary wise, etc. To get just more information so that they themselves can take decisions on next steps.
05:39
Matt Alder
Absolutely. I mean there’s some kind of amazing possibilities out there I suppose and really sort of picking up on that the avatar bit of what you were talking about there, but also kind of more broadly across the whole of HR tech. What’s the, what do you feel the right balance is between humans and AI when it comes to these kind of systems And I suppose as a sort of supplementary question to that, what new skills do humans need to be able to kind of operate in this new world?
06:08
Melissa Hojwall
Yeah, that’s a really common question. I would say I think AI is rightly balanced when it’s freeing up our time so that we can be more strategic. And, and I think if we look back at the learnings now from the past one to two years of actually working with AI. I think this has proven that you still need to know what you’re doing when you work with AI. I mean, the core competence of understanding an area is still absolutely necessary because you need to be able to tweak things. You need to be able to judge whether the data or suggestions that AI is giving you with that is reasonable for the area that you’re working with. And I think the past two years or one and a half years have also shown that you still need to work with the basics.
06:55
Melissa Hojwall
If you have crappy data going into AI, you will get crappy data coming out of AI. So data quality and also working with integrations and these kind of baseline things are still important. So if I would move to your sub question about like, okay, what tasks or sorry, what skills do you need to develop? I would say that. And actually I’d like to quote Josh Burchin here. He’s talking about the fact that it’s not going to be possible for us humans to keep track of all the technology that is happening. So I think what’s more important is that we actually adopt strong change agility skills. Skills being able to adopt, to use new things and to go with the flow and feel comfortable with that.
07:49
Melissa Hojwall
And that’s not something that every person has automatically, but I think that’s something that needs to be trained and practiced.
07:56
Matt Alder
Yeah, 100%. I think it’s something that we certainly be focused on a lot more moving forward. Obviously, particularly in a large organization implementing sort of new technology, particularly kind of like really innovative, groundbreaking technology like this is never kind of easy. What are the main challenges that you see when you’re implementing new HR and TA technologies across an organization as big as the one that you work for?
08:24
Melissa Hojwall
Yeah, that is always exciting. And I think for us, we need to always keep in mind that the large majority of our colleagues, they’re working in our stores and in our warehouses. So they are frontline workers. And I think for us it’s really important to enable and make sure that they can have a really good experience out in the field where they are. So that is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about and working on how to bring communication tools and support to the frontline part of the business.
09:02
Matt Alder
Obviously we talked a little bit about the skills that are important within this, but one of the biggest challenges is obviously the shift in workflows, the change in work, the different ways of thinking that come with technology. How should organizations kind of work on that human side? How should they prepare teams and managers for the Sort of the shifts in process and thinking that happen when this type of technology comes online.
09:31
Melissa Hojwall
That’s one of my favorite topics, to be honest. I think it comes down to change. Maybe I shouldn’t say change management, but rather change agility. And I think what surprises me the most of having worked with technology projects and system projects throughout basically the whole of my career is that most companies spend about 95% of their budgets when it comes to technology for all the phases up until go live and shortly thereafter, and then the project is ended. And I think that the projects and companies that succeed with driving change successfully with digital solutions are the ones that actually invest in what happens after you launch something.
10:15
Melissa Hojwall
And what I mean by that is that you need to have ambassadors or bright lights, you know, people who are proactively encouraging and supporting their colleagues to get started with new technology, to inspire them every day, not just in the initial training before you try something out. And I think that is an investment because those colleagues that would do that, they need to have backfills or you need to have maybe a few more people doing the other day job so that you can actually have ambassadors that have it as part of their job to be like agility coaches or technology coaches, especially when working with AI. So that would be my top tip, and a bonus tip, which I have used a lot throughout my career, is to actually use junior mentors.
11:07
Melissa Hojwall
I think we’ve talked a lot historically about having senior mentors, people you can learn from. But when it comes to technology and what’s happening in the space, I tend to learn a lot more from younger colleagues that have been brought up in this new digital world where that is just a reality. So I think a lot of leaders could benefit from learning from their junior colleagues.
11:32
Matt Alder
And I suppose typically in these type of projects, how long do you think it takes to do that part of it, to get people to adopt and to get it kind of working and delivering the value to the business that it should.
11:45
Melissa Hojwall
I think it very much depends on what it is that you’re implementing. If you want to implement AI tools and work methods and like getting it into our core backbone to use AI, that’s kind of a continuous journey. So it is wise, I think, to invest in people who have AI skills and AI interests that can like, encourage and have time to encourage and teach and upskill other colleagues. So that’s kind of a continuous journey. If you’re more talking about implementing new tools for volume assessment or whatever it could be, then I think it is a couple of months from when you launch something and really investing in getting people to get started and supporting them, that doesn’t happen over a week or two weeks. It is a couple of months process.
12:36
Melissa Hojwall
And it’s about also getting to the tipping point where there are enough people who have started to use the new tools and start to like them and talk about them. That’s when you actually can really make the change happen in reality.
12:48
Matt Alder
And obviously one of the biggest challenges with this is whenever there’s any kind of change, people can be reluctant or fearful. And I suppose with AI this is sort of 10 times the case because people may feel that AI is taking parts of their job or is threatening their role or their career. How do you manage that kind of resistance to change on an organizational basis to make sure that people aren’t ignoring the technology or sabotaging the process?
13:19
Melissa Hojwall
That’s a good question. I have always seen resistance as a superpower that you can use to drive change. What I mean by that is that usually the people that are the most vocal against a change or about a change are the people that really care about their jobs and really care about the business and they want things to succeed. And I often find that when you talk to them, they usually have really good reasons for showing resistance. And if managed well, where one of the main parts is just about listening and encouraging that person to share their views, you can actually turn this around and create some of the strongest ambassadors that you could imagine.
14:04
Melissa Hojwall
So I think that it is important to involve not just people who are like always the first adapters, but also to involve some people who are, you know, very knowledgeable in the old processes that, that really are these informal leaders that really care and try to involve them and let them shape the new solution partly so that they feel that this becomes their own solution, so that they become ambassadors. And I also think it’s important to think about your arguments because a lot of companies make the mistake of selling this, oh, fantastic castle in the sky. If we do this, then top management will get fantastic reports to make and the employees in, you know, in the business are kind of like, well, that doesn’t really help me and actually could even scare them.
14:56
Melissa Hojwall
They’re like, oh no, then management will use that data to, you know, get rid of me or whatever. So I think that it’s important to kind of really find and showcase the benefits that solutions actually make to the bottom line, to the business. I’ll give a good example. My team are currently working with a couple of initiatives that are going to reduce the administrative time needed by managers in the hiring process. And I mean, that is a very easy sell when you can show that if we implement this worldwide, we will save X amount of hours for our managers that they could use being on the shop floor. Right. So I think that’s really important. And if you can’t find those arguments, I would ask myself, is this the right change to make? Is this the right technology to work with?
15:50
Matt Alder
Yeah, that’s a really good point. And as a final question for you, where do you think AI’s taking us? What’s HR tech going to look like in 3 years time?
16:00
Melissa Hojwall
This is what excites me the most, to be honest, Matt, because I think HR tech is heading in the same direction as all tech when it comes to AI. And I think the main thing I see is that it is totally disrupting how we as humans interact with systems. And I’ll explain what I mean by that I see in the near future, maybe not the next two years, but maybe in the next five years, I don’t think our users will even know what system they are interacting with. I think that they will be interacting with AI chatbots and they will be interacting with AI chatbots from the place where they do their work. So, for example, a lot of us office rats, if I may use that term, we are working in teams or in Slack or whatever.
16:51
Melissa Hojwall
And I think that in the future we will access different bots from those from teams or from Slack or from other points of work, and we will do our work there. So the AI agents, they will answer questions and even perform tasks for us that we previously would have done by going into a system and doing the task in that system. So one very concrete example, there are already global HR solutions where you can go into a chatbot as an employee and say, hi, I need to change my address. Okay, what’s your new address? You type it in and then the system gets updated in the back end, if that is allowed in how they’ve set up the authorizations.
17:36
Melissa Hojwall
And I think that’s what excites me the most, because in the future, I don’t want our managers or employees to even know that they’re working in an HR system. I think they just should have a tool that helps them do their daily jobs 100%.
17:51
Matt Alder
And I’m really looking forward to the day that happens because I think that’s the kind of real game changer in all of this. Melissa, thank you very much for talking to me.
18:00
Melissa Hojwall
Thank you, Matt. It’s been a pleasure.
18:03
Matt Alder
My thanks to Melissa. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruiting future.com on that site. You can also register for our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
