On humanising human capital

Welcome to Hiring Highlights, the newsletter that isn’t brought to you by ChatGPT. This week, we look at how to put the human in HR at this most topsy-turvy of times.

Podcast: Insights on human-centric HR

In this week’s Scaling Stories we were pleased to catch up with Stela Lupushor, a renowned HR leader and author whose books include Humans at Work and Humanazing Human Capital.

Our discussion centered on what it means to work in HR in 2023. So much has changed since BC, or “Before Covid”, as Stela puts it. Whether it’s the adoption of remote working, the emergence of new technologies, or questions about how diversity and inclusion programs are deployed, running an HR team has not exactly been straightforward lately.

Some changes have been profound. Remote working has caused a rupture in how HR interacts with staff, and in fact changed the make-up of a typical workforce.

Meanwhile, salary expectations have rocketed in the past couple of years, albeit there are now signs that wage growth is slowing.

And as the chair of the US Federal Reserve noted, one reason the labour market remains tight is because many workers sadly passed away during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But while this rapid pace of change can take some getting used to, Stela offers some invaluable insights on how to forge a successful HR function in unpredictable times.

Rather than just mindlessly adopting technology and tools, Stela advocates “human-centric design”, or in other words, to understand “what it’s like to be a worker and how we might reimagine that journey and use technology to transform that experience so people can be productive – they can enjoy and be delighted by their experience”.

Stela suggests that HR leaders should proactively work to improve the workplace experience before a “contagion” effect takes hold. 

“I think the reward structure is what shapes behaviour,” Stela says. “And we as humans are gonna react to the context…So HR really has an opportunity to think or rethink what that reward structure looks like and how certain behaviours can be rewarded – not only for the purposes of maximising the shareholder value, but also rethinking the entire stakeholder system and designing it for all the stakeholders in mind”.

Stela’s words are echoed in a recent Fast Company article by Lars Schmidt, who writes: “The shift toward pay transparency requires HR to think more broadly about compensation, equity, and how we define total rewards”. Lars also predicts a “shift towards skill-based hiring” rather than “role-based hiring”.

In our chat, Stela touched on a range of fascinating topics: the nature of value creation; the erosion of trust in institutions; and the importance of autonomy in the workplace. Stela was even kind enough to share with us three podcast recommendations:

• The Ezra Klein Show for its exploration of topics like economics, politics and culture
• Quorum for its Web3 and crypto insights
• Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View for its analysis of exponential technologies and their impact on society.

It was great catching up with Stela, and once you’ve had a listen, hop on over to our Scaling Stories hub and check out our latest interviews with HR’s finest.

Predictions for recruitment in 2023

Just as Stela has a sixth sense for knowing which direction the HR winds are blowing, we thought we’d put our ear to the ground to ascertain which trends might affect hiring this year. In this time of flux, what can we expect from recruitment in 2023? These predictions from Hung Lee caught our eye.

Spicy takes

This week’s takes are spicier than Sean Spicer, former Whitehouse press secretary to Donald Trump.

• ‘Why The AI Ethics War Will Make The Content Moderation Fight Seem Tame’, writes Alex Kantrowitz. Alex explores some of the pitfalls of programming chatbots with moral codes. “Expect plenty of positioning, cajoling, and fighting over the ethics the big players build into their models.”
• How will social justice arguments evolve during this decade? Noah Smith forecasts a pushback and conjures the metaphor of a prairie fire, with multiple trends extinguishing “wokeness” as we know it. “Prairie fires burn hot at the edges and burn out at the center.”
• There was never a golden age where housing was abundant for all, tweets Derek Thompson, and fires off this graph on the rise of the graduates versus the gradu-nots.

Things you might have missed

• Is LinkedIn Job Search haunted? According to this blog, using double quotes around a job search, such as “recruiter”, forces the system to find an exact match. Perhaps it’s something to keep in mind when posting a job title.
• It’s official: Tuesday to Thursday is the new working week, reports the BBC. An analysis of mobile phone data in 500 UK high streets found increased activity in small towns and suburbs on WFH days.
• When is a layoff a “refinement”? On Twitter, Gergely Orosz skewers this “tone-deaf layoff email”, which you can read below in all its glory.

Recruiting fail

Forget talent, aptitude and skill – the only thing that matters is whether a candidate washes their coffee mug. Just ask this Xero tech boss featured in Lad Bible. 

“One of the things I’m always looking for at the end of the interview is, does the person doing the interview want to take that empty cup back to the kitchen?”

“You can develop skills, you can gain knowledge and experience but it really does come down to attitude, and the attitude that we talk a lot about is the concept of ‘wash your coffee cup’.”

Folks, never take Xero to Cafe Nero. For more inspiration on daft interview tests, see The Peter Serafinowicz Show.

So long!

Thanks for reading Intrro #48. We’ll be back next week as soon as the global economy has recovered and normality is restored. Until then!