COVID-19 has changed the world as we know, no area of our lives has remained untouched by its impact.  It has blurred lines between our lives and our work seamlessly giving rise to a hybrid model of working across industries, across levels and across the world. It may seem all is still on the surface but a quiet paradigm shift is happening in the way we work and the way we relate to our workplaces. 

Organizations are slowly rising to the need of nurturing and maximizing the potential of their greatest asset – its people. HR functions, earlier relegated to as support have emerged to the frontline in leading efforts to facilitate employees. From helping the workforce to adjust to a remote work environment to managing recruitment, promotions and talent mobility from home. Organizations and individuals have gone through an entire annual cycle of hiring and talent management in the past year, all remotely. These changes are no longer a defense mechanism against COVID, but the future of work for the generations to come. 

LinkedIn's Future of Recruiting survey, which was released late last year, observed that 81 percent talent professionals think that virtual hiring will continue post-COVID and 70 percent believe that the change is here to stay. A fact that is being witnessed by the emergence of intelligent and disruptive hiring technologies, as the focus area in the HR space. Application of AI in automating and augmenting processes is facilitating recruiters with newer and efficient approaches for hiring. A.I., Machine Learning and RPA are helping to streamline processes by making it more result-oriented and productive. Another survey that covered more than 700 small, medium and large organizations across 21 sectors, showed that 34% of these organizations showed hiring intent for the April-June quarter, which is the highest in the past twelve months. As companies have started hiring people over virtual interviews and assessments, there is an increased need to implement robust technological transformation in the process of talent acquisition and management.  

According to LinkedIn's report on Future of Talent, 93% of companies in India are looking at internal hiring for new vacancies. Tools like Mobility Solutions can ease the process of employee assessment for organizations by enabling end-to-end talent mobility solutions for accurate, immediate, and agile decision-making helping to increase the accuracy of one’s leadership mobility decisions. With such technology we are equipped to harness the strength of people-science that focuses more on talent rather than their credentials. The analytical approach of these tools provides a clear evaluation on predetermined parameters and examines them with respect to the requirements of a job role. These solutions encourage automation and standardization in employee-organization relationships. Leveraging the combination of psychometrics, data science, and machine learning, these HR Tech solutions offer a wholesome, immersive experience for both parties across the complete employment life cycle. From finding new talent and managing teams, to choosing the deserving candidates for extended responsibilities, such tools provide an in-depth analysis of the potential candidates and thus promote efficiency.

Even as India’s economy takes slow but sure strides towards recovery, one change that will remain is the precedence of automation technologies such as advanced robotics and artificial intelligence as powerful drivers of productivity.  These cognitive technologies will help enable organizational talent to grow into new and more rewarding roles, in effect HR automation is becoming the key to drive organizational growth in a post Covid world.