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Over the past decade, HR has truly evolved into a dynamic, strategic department shaping organizations’ success and the world of work at large. HR tech played—and will continue to play—a pivotal role in this evolution. Today’s HR tech is reshaping how businesses attract, retain, engage, and nurture their talent in ways that drive revenue and other business goals.
HR technology has become the linchpin in our digital age that bridges the gap between human capital and organizational success.
- 89% of C-Suite executives and 83% of HR leaders say HR tech enables them to be more flexible and responsive to the constantly shifting world of work.
- Workplace leaders agree HR tech is a worthy investment—80% of HR professionals believe investing in it has improved their business.
- Zippia reports that 97% of employers plan to increase their investments in recruiting technology.
While we’re in the business of talent here at HiringThing, the white and private label partnership aspect of our business means that we must be well-versed in all HR tech trends to be the best private label talent organization and partner we can be. Holistically approaching HR is becoming more and more pivotal to HR and HR tech success–the best outcomes don’t happen in siloes—so we’ve made it our mission to be well-versed in today’s most pivotal HR tech concerns and arbitrators of the HR tech trends that will impact us all in the future.
Based on our experience, collaboration with partners, the insights of industry thought leaders, and analyzing the best HR tech stats and data, we want to share the HR tech trends that will impact our industry—and help delight HR tech customers—as we move into 2024.
HR Tech Trends to Know Going Into 2024
- Optimize The User Experience
- Help Customers Attract and Retain High-Quality Talent
- Navigate the Remote/Hybrid Argument
- Engage and Retain Employees Via Wellness and Benefits
Optimizing the User Experience
In a recent podcast, HR tech thought leader Josh Bersin addressed how there might be too much HR tech at play, in some cases warring with or cannibalizing one another. “The average large company has 80+ HR tools and many global companies have twice that,” he says.
This isn’t exactly new news. Last year, we covered how the average worker uses 6 to 8 apps to perform a single business process and toggles between apps and websites an average of 1200 times a day. Still, it’s concerning for those of us deploying HR tech.
Too many tools—and too much toggling—isn’t a good user experience and can contribute to higher-than-average churn. It’s probably the reason that PwC found that 82% of HR tech users struggle to use their technology or why only half of most companies’ apps are regularly used.
“We’re going to see an uptick in HR tech platforms offering multiple solutions,” says HiringThing CEO and cofounder Joshua Siler. “By offering multiple solutions, platforms can increase customer usage, stickiness, and satisfaction and can worry less about being the half of the apps that go unused. That’s why we offer white label HR tech for our clients—it allows them to quickly and efficiently add talent solutions to their tech stacks, expanding what they can offer customers, while keeping focus on their core competencies since we’re the ones upkeeping and evolving their talent functions. Full-service HR tech platforms are the future of the industry.”
Other industry experts agree. Kara Yarnot, vice president of strategic consulting services for HireClix, a talent acquisition consulting firm in Gloucester, Mass., told SHRM that
"Stand-alone, nonintegrated systems create manual work and increase the likelihood of errors…they also can negatively impact the employee and candidate experience."
Competitive HR tech vendors should work to ensure that they offer multiple HR solutions, and if they aren’t planning on doing that, their product is easily embeddable. We’re aware that adding new solutions is easier said than done—check out our blog, The Cost of Building an MVP, to see what we mean—which is why partnering with an organization that already has prebuilt HR solutions is a savvy move for HR tech vendors.
“Gartner research shows that for 2024, the HR tech buying cycle will be elongated,” says HiringThing’s Director of Partner Development, Tevis Paxton. “We’ve been noticing this happening. Today’s customers aren’t looking to piecemeal their operations. They’re looking for broader platforms and solutions that can support their customers throughout the entire talent lifecycle. This has become a top selling point for our white and private label recruiting partnerships. We are helping our fellow HR tech platforms solve a more comprehensive suite of challenges for their customers, starting with embedded recruiting, applicant tracking, and onboarding experiences.”
20% of applicant tracking systems—hiring software built to streamline and automate recruiting—users are looking to replace their current solution, and a top reason for replacement is consolidating providers. Additionally, 50% of applicant tracking system (ATS) users wish their platform had more functionality. It’s a market ripe for the picking. At HiringThing, we can help HR tech platforms add their own ATS and get up and running within weeks if that’s what’s needed.
Helping Customers Attract and Retain High-Quality Employees
Hiring and retention continued being a top HR concern in 2023 and will remain so in 2024. It still remains a job seeker’s market, and specifically, attracting, hiring, and retaining high-quality candidates will dominate 2024—attracting and retaining hires is one of the top reason companies invested in HR tech in 2023, with 70% explicitly saying they wanted to improve the quality of their hires.
“Adding or integrating talent solutions to their suites of solutions is of paramount importance for competitive HR tech platforms,” says Joanna Campa, Director of Marketing at HiringThing, “but one thing we’ve seen is that many HR tech vendors focus on recruiting and hiring, and forget that dedicated onboarding resources are a key part of the talent equation. The market research we’ve been doing indicates that onboarding can be the key to setting platforms apart from competitors.”
According to Aptitude Research’s 2023 Talent Acquisition Buyer’s Guide:
- Companies are twice as likely to spend on talent acquisition and employee experience than onboarding.
- 42% of companies don’t have dedicated onboarding technology.
- Only 26% of companies entirely automate onboarding.
- Only 50% of companies want to increase their investment in onboarding tech.
Good employee onboarding increases employee engagement, productivity, satisfaction, and retention. Great onboarding increases employee retention by 82%, yet 88% of companies admit they aren’t great at executing a solid onboarding experience.
“Despite this,” Campa says, “both HR departments and HR tech platforms overlook this crucial part of the HR process. It will probably take some education on the part of the HR tech platforms, but from our point of view, it’s well worth it when you realize both the market opportunity for your organization and benefits this could give your customers.”
Navigating the Remote/Hybrid Argument
There’s still a significant disparity between what employers and employees want regarding remote work. Despite an onslaught of major business heads and thought leaders appearing demanding that employees return to the offices, Gartner found that 75% of employees expect more options for flexible work as we go into 2024, not less.
“Regarding finding higher quality candidates, it surprises me that so many employers still have such a polarized view of remote work,” says HiringThing HR Manager Becca Noland. “I know there are some industries where remote work isn’t possible, but if you do work in an industry where it can easily be achieved, allowing remote or hybrid work improves your retention in a competitive labor market. You’re catering—reasonably—to what today’s job seekers want—and you have no geographic limitations on talent! My last two great hires were from Oregon and Texas. If we weren’t remote here at HiringThing, I might not have been able to help the company assemble this particular team.”
U.S. unemployment is at an all-time low. Despite the public protestations of a handful of high-profile CEOs, forward-thinking organizations are beginning to adapt to, if not fully remote, at least a hybrid work modality. More than 40% of jobs posted now at least cite “hybrid work” as an option.
How does this affect HR Tech? Let HiringThing’s Marketing Director, Joanna Campa, take it away again.
“Savvy HR tech companies will realize that hybrid work is the work of the future and equip their customers with the tools and solutions to help them navigate this new world more easily. When we saw that remote work was increasing—even before the pandemic—we started adding more video interview integration options to our recruiting software. It’s the same reason we just debuted a self-scheduling feature. It’s product-first marketing to add solutions that will benefit your clients. HR tech customers will want help transitioning and engaging remote workforces. Brainstorm how your platform can assist with that.”
Use People-Centric Solutions to Engage and Retain Employees
According to the findings of Virgin Pulse's 2023 Global Survey on Workplace Health and Wellbeing Priorities, employee health and well-being have emerged as the top concerns for HR leaders regarding retention strategies in 2024.
The survey also finds that over 70% of participating HR execs found a positive ROI on wellness strategies they’ve implemented, including retention. The survey discusses how, pre-pandemic, only 23% of respondents could clearly measure the ROI of their well-being investments, which tells us that either the technology or the way it’s implemented has improved.
Either way, it should be a lesson for forward-thinking HR tech vendors: provide technology solutions that support employee-centric initiatives because this will help your customers engage and retain employees, two critical challenges they face.
- Gallup has been tracking employee engagement—affecting recruiting, retention, productivity, and profitability—for years. It’s slowly been declining since 2020.
- Highly engaged workplaces have 23% more profitability, 18% more productivity, and 81% less absenteeism than workplaces with lower levels of engagement. Teams with low engagement have turnover rates that are 18% to 43% higher than highly engaged teams.
- You engage employees when you give them the environment and work benefits they crave. Betterworks’ State of Performance Enablement report shows that career development is increasingly important. Companies need to provide meaningful opportunities for growth and career advancement for employees.
- Meaningful DEI initiatives are another way to engage talent. More than 90% of respondents agree companies with strong DEI commitments are more trustworthy to customers and employees. A similarly overwhelming majority agree they would feel more loyal to a company with a proven track record of prioritizing DEI. 78% of employees agree they would not consider working for a company that fails to commit significant resources to prioritizing DEI initiatives.
- Fostering a sense of belonging is also a critical part of employee engagement. If employees don’t feel like they belong, they’ll try and find a new employer—Randstad found that 54% of employees say they’ll leave a job if they feel they don’t belong.
“It’s incredibly important to keep today’s employees engaged,” says HiringThing HR Manager Becca Noland. “We spend a lot of time and resources ensuring that HiringThing is somewhere people like and value working and have found that it’s paid off—our team is incredibly productive, creative, and adept at solving problems, and in turn, we have a high retention rate, which helps us grow the company in meaningful ways. It would be wise for HR tech vendors to see how their product could help provide employees meaning and employers ways to keep their team engaged.”
About HiringThing
HiringThing is a modern recruiting and onboarding platform as a service that creates seamless talent experiences. Our embeddable private label solutions and open API enable technology and service providers to offer hiring and onboarding to their clients. Approachable and adaptable, the platform empowers anyone, anywhere, to build their dream team.
