HRTech Insights and Tweets by Ward Christman

Ward Christman is a name familiar to everyone in the HR fraternity, especially HRTech space. His views are damn straight to the point where technology is influencing HR and making an impact. Currently, he is Chief Advisor at HRTech Advisor, advising HRTech vendors how to grow sales via partnerships and alliances with other vendors in the HCM and HR Software Industry.

His tweets express brilliant and bird’s-eye view of the technology disrupting HR and how the shift is making space for new-age entrepreneurs, keen to build sophisticated solutions for the modern workforce.

Though his every tweet marks a distinct representation and offers a valuable insight, we would like to showcase the ones which are relevant to our Industry. Please have a look!

Why Does Partnering Succeed/Fail in TAtechSolutions Space

The original post germinates from Jobboarders.com where both Ward Christman and Larry Cummings have shared their thoughts on the keys to successful partnering in TAtech industry. Today’s HR wants solutions that work well together and are easy to procure. For e.g. in ATS ecosystem where open APIs and venues like marketplaces can empower partnerships to reach customers more easily. Today’s ATS partners  with background screening providers, assessments analysis, job distribution and other capabilities to do “solution stacking” which is bundling of offerings for the customer that addresses a market need by bringing multiple solutions under one roof.

This arrangement won’t work in one-way benefit scheme. Both the vendors have to exchange leads in return to make this partnership run or even survive. After leads, it comes down to poor communication and lack of follow up. This all happens because of poor coordination between referral and recipient. In fact, all parties should know where referrals are and who needs to be engaged to help close the deal, as mentioned in the post.

In partnership, both the parties want to know how you or your product/service can help them to sell more of their product or retain their customers. The parties should resemble each other in terms of customer size, target industry, culture and future ambitions. Here success looks like more of collaboration than just a mere press release like more money, new customers, increase of market share, visibility and finally enhanced reach amongst the potential buyers.

Why Employees are your Most Important Customers

Sharing this post as a tweet, Ward Christman was right in making an effective start in 2017; from employees. Employee Experience is going to possess a serious challenge than it seems in coming days as much of the workforce (70% as per Gallup Poll) feels disengaged at the workplace.

In words of Richard Branson, “Your Employees are your company’s real competitive advantage. They’re the ones making the magic happen, so long as their needs are met.”

To sum up in 3 simple reasons why your treatment to employees as first and most important customers make sense would be:

• Your employees are your most valuable brand ambassadors, and they must “buy” into your brand at the workplace. Tell them “why of work” before “how” and “what.” This would help them understand the importance of the task at hand and do it more effectively.

• Your employees can drive revenues or sink them. So treat them right always as they will treat the outside customers right which has remained a competitive weapon for Southwest Airlines. A perfect example setter for employee experience. Remember long -term customers come from long-term employees.

• Great businesses emphasize customer experience and Great managers emphasize employee experience. Happy employees bring accolades to your organization work culture and unhappy ones puts a dent in your employer brand. Time is right to put all your efforts in building a good workplace culture which is more likely to host best and top talent.

What Happens When HR Becomes Fully Automated?

This is what we most agree with; Automated HR. We’ve been consistently working on this theme since 2010, and now it has started giving us the desired results. Be it Social Recruiting, CV searching, Semantic, Analytics, Resume Parsing; we’ve compiled all into powerful add-ons that can run with any software. Yes, I mean any software.

In this post, it is iterated again, technology will never replace humans but will always enable us to accomplish more, and find an approach we need to possess in getting new ways to integrate it. Technology is never a hindrance to growth but rather an aid to efficiency and productivity.

Time is now for us to start preparing for the future before our staff is left idle to do menial jobs. Automation can help develop analytical skills in employees. They can extract much value from their work using automation.

Now, what’s your take? Is your business able to take the plunge in HR Automation or you’d still prefer wait-n- watch mode from outside? As rightly said, our decisions shape the way our future progresses.

We’d love to hear your thoughts, views, experience and take, no matter how discerning they may be.