There are plenty of buzzwords for leaders to navigate, especially when it comes to the AI-dominated technology landscape.
To help provide HR leaders with more clarity, the latest EN:Insights Forum previewed key findings from an upcoming report being released during SHRM26. The report, HR Tech Trends: Navigating Today and Shaping Tomorrow, identifies research insights that cut through the buzz using data from job postings as well as results from a combined survey of 894 HR professionals and 2,598 non-HR workers.
The results show what HR is really adopting and prioritizing when it comes to HR technology, providing leaders with a clearer picture that can help them make more strategic and informed decisions for their organizations.
Here are three key insights from the research previewed by Kenny Pyle, SHRM’s lead HR technology analyst.
Research Insight No. 1: Technology can do a lot for an organization, but workers have drawn a few lines.
When asked what technology should never do in an organization, perhaps unsurprisingly, workers set a boundary around employee discipline and terminations: Exactly half of respondents said that technology should never perform these tasks.
Key data points:
- 49% said that technology should never auto-track an employee’s mood or mental health.
- 43% said that technology should neither detect conflict through email exchanges nor make recommendations on who employees should or shouldn’t work with.
- 26% said that technology shouldn’t assess productivity.
These findings demonstrate that there are simply some tasks employees don’t believe technology can replace. Pyle noted that it’s up to HR to facilitate conversations about what those human-centered tasks are.
“We need to understand what our employees care about and have an honest and open conversation with them about how HR technology will be used in your organization,” he said.
Additionally, Pyle advises HR leaders create an HR technology charter to set guidelines at their organization. “Make sure it’s transparent and provides that accountability that will promote trust within your organization,” he said.
Research Insight No. 2: The demand for AI skills in HR is rising, but so is the demand for human skills.
The research explored the HR skills that have grown in demand by looking through HR job postings from the past three years, and overwhelmingly, AI stands as the top in-demand skill with an increase of more than 1,400% within total job postings.
At the same time, the results showed that personal and interpersonal skills also had significant demand. Cross-functional collaboration, stakeholder engagement, and customer relationship building all saw spikes in demand among total job postings.
Pyle attributed the rise in these interpersonal skills to the rise in AI.
“Because of this technology, we’re seeing those human components really matter,” he said. “We’re also seeing the need to actually maximize the impact of these skills. AI is here, people are expecting results.”
Research Insight No. 3: Organizations don’t have to be considered high-tech to become optimized.
The research found that organizations will fall into different levels of HR tech maturity. Those on the lower end of the maturity scale will likely have impulsive technology selections, passive awareness of trends, reactive implementation, and minimal adoption efforts, according to Pyle.
“And for organizations with lower HR technology maturity, we're seeing that when it comes to finding some type of HR technology optimization that helps them work more efficiently, they're falling behind,” he said.
At the same time, even the low maturity organizations have been able to find value in their tech. One-third have discovered optimizations that work for them, and 48% said they find tech solutions through experimentation. While there may be more efficient ways of optimizing HR tech, such as utilizing vendor relationships, organizations on the lower end of the maturity scale haven’t given up.
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