Achieving HR Tech Agility

How the smartest organizations build HR tech stacks that allow them to rapidly adapt their strategies to any market conditions

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Every successful organization needs to frequently adapt to changing market conditions.  For HR Tech to support effective adaptation with agility, Talent and HR Tech teams must ask themselves these questions: 

The answer to each of these questions needs to be a resounding YES!

Business agility is an organization's ability to effectively adapt to market changes and to rapidly respond to customer demands.  Same with HR Tech agility - it's the ability to adapt to the market, your organization and ever-shifting priorities, with ease.

You may want to use a chatbot that isn't yet connected to your core ATS - no problem, connect it with your hub.  You may have custom data that standard integrations don't support - no problem, solve that with your hub.  You might want to be able to see the structured data of your ATS with unstructured data from an AI tool - no problem, display it via your hub. Data limits no longer constrain your HR tech agility.

To confirm you have a very agile HR Tech stack, see how many of these are true for you:

You probably don’t have that level of flexibility and control, but there should be at least a few aspects of that list that you need.  

For an HR Tech team to be agile enough to quickly adapt to business changes and market swings, they need to be able to manage their tech stacks with ease.

Every part of your HR Tech stack is creating and using data, so as you think about the stack, you need to also think strategically about the data.  All medium and large enterprises have a variety of talent data sets inside the organization, both current and inactive. If you have a large organization, you likely have dozens of talent datasets! When you combine this with all of the information that is available publicly on the Internet, in social media platforms and professional sites, you have a dataset that lets you really think differently.  And today’s data management technology lets you easily connect it all.

Centralized data will make it easier for your team to learn about employees and potential employees. It will also allow you to act faster because data will be analyzed for you. You can gain insights and respond to some of the most competitive dynamics.

Investing in artificial intelligence-driven data solutions may be just what is needed to help you take your talent processes to the next level. Talent decisions can be made faster and more effectively by being able to tap into all of the data that is around you.  And you will open up a whole new world of agility, both with data and with the tech that depends upon it.

Most integrations in HR Tech are point to point or “spiderweb” integrations, so systems are connected to each other directly, and the core systems are connected to many others.  This is very limiting, not least because there’s nowhere that they are all tracked and monitored very well, and no way you can access all the systems in one fell swoop.  Agility is vastly easier when integrations are done in a hub and spoke format, where everything talks to a central hub.  Here’s the difference:



Imagine each of those six systems are talent systems.  One the left, the usual spiderweb – when you try to replace one system, you have a bunch of integrations to change.  Adding a new system is complex.  LOTS of problems.  Now, look at the right.  Replace a spoke and all the other spokes aren’t harmed, it all just keeps singing. 

By providing a completely flexible platform and the ability to plug and play systems and data as rapidly as you need to - then use and see it all wherever you need to, you give yourself real agility. And if your integration hub is sitting on top of a data lake, then you also have copies of every piece of data as it moves around the systems – a complete platform.   Intelligent integration is the key.

The secret to building your dream HR Tech stack is all in the foundation you build: one that gives you the flexibility to pick and choose what you use, and how they connect – and gives you the control.  That’s HR Tech Agility.  But almost nobody thinks to lay the agile foundation first – rather, they try to force agility around other systems after the fact.  That’s ok, you can put a data hub and lake around existing systems…but eventually if you DON’T sort out the infrastructure, you will run into a wall.  And it will be an expensive, important and painful wall. 

The more that you want to:

Then the more you need a highly flexible system and data infrastructure, where the infrastructure itself is a key part of your strategy. Time to stop leaving the infrastructure as an afterthought.

Tomorrow’s HR Tech teams will become more agile by being able to plug in and out systems and data whenever they need to. At least that’s what we expect. AI and, especially, ML are shaping up to be very important in business and talent. Data will continue to be ammunition to make quick and smart talent decisions. 

Switching between systems to do the same work, inconsistent data ultimately crushes productivity. We believe access to talent data should be easy. Choosing the right technology partner will act as a co-pilot to drive as you want to. Organizations should think of private talent data clouds so that employers can seamlessly combine all of their systems and datasets with all available talent data from across the web.