HR 3.0 is coming. It will champion the individual in a way that no one does today.

Again, I find myself on a long-haul flight (that is the plight of us Aussies), with time to reflect on how the conversations I am having and hearing with HR leaders are changing.

First up, if you missed my last newsletter, you can find it here.

I have mixed feelings right now about these ‘AI conversations’.

Frustrated that HR/TA leaders are being too micro around the way they are seeing AI- ‘we are using it to write our job descriptions’, (I have written in the past about how risky it is to use GenAI in this way), or, our training programs, verging on optimistic some days when I hear leaders recognise that AI above all else creates intelligence at scale. AI is a tool that feeds off data, elevates data in our decisioning process and makes transparent the data around all sorts of critical HR objectives:

How inclusive are we as an organisation?

What kind of skills are we hiring? not hiring?

Are our hiring and promotion decisions fair?

What is the ‘human’ skill set of our most successful leaders?

Are we getting any better at hiring the right people?

What kind of leadership talent do we have in our frontline hiring teams?

Are we hiring the right people who stick around for the long haul?

Where are our big capability and skill gaps?

Using AI is a massive accelerant for HR to being more intelligent. It gives visibility to the above and a lot more.

To make this real, think about what lack of data about your talent costs you if you are a retailer...

The ideal pipeline for your future store supervisors and managers is your frontline talent.

They know the business, your people, your culture and your product. A retailer with 100 stores will typically run with 300 to 500 leader roles, which means building a pipeline of around 150 - 250 leaders per annum once you take into account growth and turnover.

It is typical in retail to invite store leaders to be the scout for potential managers. Due to human biases, this limits your talent pool and may disengage those workers who feel overlooked. Given the scale of some retail stores where managers are running million-dollar turnover stores, a more scientific way to identify this talent pool matters to the business and to your culture.

What holds so many retailers back from doing this is the invisibility of manager talent.

This is where AI is your friend. Using AI to screen and interview your frontline roles simultaneously gives you instant visibility of potential manager talent. You can even go one step further with Chat Interview and invite your new hires to self-nominate for manager roles down the track and be coached via the chat on how to be an effective manager. AI used in this context ticks all the boxes - it’s inclusive, it’s exhaustively reaching all of your employees, it’s empowering, and scientific.

 When applying the power of machine learning to your manager profiles, you can go one giant leap further and improve the accuracy of your manager appointments with store performance data. This is where AI bridges people data and business performance.

Ever retailer ought to have the objective of Using AI to unlock your leadership pipeline at scale – to never hire externally again.

If you are in the retail sector, this is essential reading (IMHO). Think of it as a cheat sheet to HR 3.0 for retail HR.

In the image below, AI is giving visibility to leadership potential across your retail operations (indicated by the intensity of colour and number of people by the size of the square under each store function)

AI that gives people agency. Control moves from HR to the people.

Last week, sapia.ai was profiled as one of the pure play AI companies in Australia on a panel at the inaugural AI innovation summit sponsored by the Australian Financial Review.

My favourite question of the day was “Are we regulating AI because its dumber than us or smarter than us?”.

I was asked by the host to imagine what HR will look like in 3-5 years.

HR 3.0 is a vision that truly excites me.

It is a world where AI will (finally) give your people agency where so much of AI, at least in our consumer lives, takes our data and uses it against us (if you are a cynic) or uses it to consume way too much of our attention.

HR 3.0 means your people are in the driver’s seat aided by a smart intelligence system that facilitates thousands of conversations a day across your organisation.

It’s technology that’s:

Human – private, empowering, personalised

Smart – always on, always learning

Chat as the medium. AI as the fuel.

HR 3.0 is highly disruptive to the traditional HR tech stack which is designed around processes that are fixed to a HR driven timetable – performance management, talent reviews, engagement surveys – all designed to give HR and the company data that helps them see what’s going on and design the right interventions. It’s been that way for decades. I believe it’s also driven by the need for HR to show its worth. ‘Here is a calendar of all the processes we run annually’. To provide some vanity metrics. E.g., are company engagement scores anything more than a vanity metric?

Now that 60% of your employees are being empowered through tapping into ChatGPT, this operating model will quickly become the expectation for all people processes. As it stands now, the big HRIS systems are not known for their human-like experiences.

A lot of HR is done to us and the careers are done for us, but people want to own their own career and determine their career path. 

Ultimately, HR 3.0 will champion the individual in a way that no one does today.