How HR systems are impacted by new technologies and social networks

The impact of new technologies, especially the web 2.0 ones, and social networks will dramatically change many HR systems. A few examples:

Recruitment
Recruitment will be impacted by the mass of information now available on individuals via the social networks, their voluntary contributions to their profiles, the possibility to know who they are by cumbing their purchasing habits, their friends, their digital footprint, etc.

Evaluation and assessment
Evaluation will now also have to include the evaluation done by the communities (internal or external) to which individuals belong, the evaluations they will have themselves generated internally or externally via tools like rypple.com, etc.

Evaluation will also de facto include the non requested evaluation by peers or subordinates on the Internet.

Evaluation will finally include behavioral elements like the quality and quantity of contributions of an individual to forums, internal or external i.e. the digital brand of individuals.

Assessment techniques will need to take all these elements into consideration. They will also need to evaluate new skills with the growing importance of technologies like the ability to be autonomous in training or the one to work remotely.

Competencies models
Competencies will have to include more and more elements of soft competencies like social networking abilities, communication abilities, leadership abilities at all levels. They will also have to take into consideration competencies acquired on the field or via external activities.

Development
Training and development will take completely new shapes with the arrival of e-training (now really available because of the progress made with videos and with smart phones in particular), continuous tidbits of infotraining (very small units of information on one’s trade), etc.

Separation
Separation will have to take into consideration the transparency of the labor market for the individual and for the corporation, the now unstoppable development of alumni groups with all their influence power on the corporate image and even on the recruitment of new individuals (candidates increasingly contact former and current employees for building their point of view on a potential employer)

Compensation
Compensation will have to be more transparent and consistent internally and externally because they will anyway be more apparent to the labor market.

They may also soon become much more flexible with the arrival of systems comparable in nature to e-bay and to yield management.

Time capture
Time capture for many employees will become much more complex with the increase of teleworking and the rise of multiple forms of employment (partial time)

Internal directories
Internal directories will have to look much more like Facebook and will include elements like one’s skills, interests, hobbies, connections, etc. in a much more elaborated way even than the Facebook of today.

Legal relations
Issues around privacy, corporate image vs. personal image, intellectual property, etc. will generate a new number of legal issues, coming in addition of current labor laws.

Many corporations are hardly aware of these changes, and the more sophisticated their systems today the more difficulties they will have to change since the very sophistication of their current systems will be in themselves barrier to recognize the need for change and to change.

One Response

  1. Hélène RATTE 17 juin 2010

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