The Human Resource (HR) departments in business organizations have never been more significant as during and after the pandemic. Digitalization has paced suddenly ahead, which in spite the best intentions, poses several challenges.
A bootstrapped HRtech startup, GoEvals, provides analysis driven, AI-enabled, digital HR tools that focus on intelligent solutions for people management across the employee lifecycle. Founder and CEO, Dr. Gaurav Hirey, spoke to The Tech Panda about the challenges companies face while implementing HR transformational initiatives and how HR digitization can help.
Dr. Gaurav Hirey
One can go and employ the latest tech but end of the day, if your users do not adopt and embrace the new solution you are offering it will not be successful
Digitizing HR has multiple benefits, says Hirey.
“It helps organizations to connect easily and deeply with employees in a way that has never been possible before. It ensures easy access for employees to tools needed for improving effectiveness and productivity. And it promotes a culture of innovation and collaboration.”
“Within the HR function itself, it allows the function to be more effective and efficient. It creates an ability for the function to be data centric and predict outcomes. This in turn builds capability to be proactive and take action, thus impacting the business and adding value,” he adds.
Challenges Companies Face While Implementing HR Transformational Initiatives
The solutions that organizations want are the ones that can be implemented almost immediately and give results instantly. Such demand has led to multiple challenges for companies implementing HR transformational initiatives. Hirey identifies these challenges.
“Most solutions available in the market have a ´system´ approach that needs companies to design workflows and processes with layers of approvals or validations for the complete employee life cycle. This in turn means long implementation cycles,” he explains.
User adoption is a big challenge as business managers need to make the time to learn the new system and this takes them away from what they need to focus on
He also says that with high investments needed in these systems, the return on investment and the time taken to leverage them just does not meet the organization’s expectations.
“The competency needed to lead such a project of implementing the system and managing the resulting change management agenda is not easily available or absent in the existing teams,” he says.
In addition, most systems are shells and have to be built and customized for every organization. This leads to complications and even the results of implementation are never satisfactory. Moreover, systems need people to be trained and updated almost all the time.
“A dedicated team is needed to manage the system, which means more headcount and cost,” he says.
Another challenge is user adoption.
“User adoption is a big challenge as business managers need to make the time to learn the new system and this takes them away from what they need to focus on,” he says.
How GoEvals Works
The platform has several features that make it desirable. It is a plug and play platform, which the user can start using within 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the tool, with minimal setup. Users can easily customize it to their needs or personalize it to even to an individual. It allows several functions, for example, the GoEvals Compatibility Test allows easy identification of the qualities being sought in a candidate.
“Unlike other assessments where the results are all fixed and vanilla, with GoEvals compatibility test you can actually define the compatibility index that suits you the best,” Hirey explains.
Unlike other assessments where the results are all fixed and vanilla, with GoEvals compatibility test you can actually define the compatibility index that suits you the best
The platform also has an analytical core and generates insightful real time report, allowing users to make informed data-based decisions on individuals and teams. It is AI enabled, once a minimum data point is achieved, the platform will start recommending or predicting actions to help make more accurate decisions thus improving the outcome quality. It needs no training; the super responsive user interface eliminates the need to spend time in training.
“GoEvals is inspired by the word ´simple´. We aim to create digital solutions that can simplify lives by making them easy to understand and even easier to implement,” he says.
The company focuses on three critical areas of candidate selection, employee sensing and satisfaction, and organizational performance and success. Currently, they have gone live with the GoEvals Selection Tool, which guarantees up to 50% reduction in selection and hiring time, 30-minute implementation cycles, real time reports, and a 100% improvement in the quality of hire.
Multiple Technologies in Play
Efficient people management needs more than one technology for smooth functioning. As Hirey says,
“The future belongs to a world of apps and not just a single system, so there will always be multiple technologies that will be in play.”
The future belongs to a world of apps and not just a single system, so there will always be multiple technologies that will be in play
GoEvals leverages on a combination of technologies to bring a smooth and flawless experience to users. The interface uses Vue.JS, Laravel Web Framework, NoSQL Database – Monodo DB and is hosted on the AWS servers to ensure easy access, 100% uptime, and world-class security.
“Fact is – no matter what technology one uses, end of day it needs to be able to deliver the objectives it is supposed to. It needs to be easy and simple enough for users to adopt. Because one can go and employ the latest tech but end of the day, if your users do not adopt and embrace the new solution you are offering it will not be successful,” he says.
A Vision for Simplified HR Tech
Hirey has been working on a blueprint of simplifying the process of HR technology implementation for a decade and more. He realized that there is no HR tech solution out there that allows a user to pick and choose the required solutions. In fact, many of the solutions available are IT driven and follow an IT framework making it challenging for implementation and hence adoption by users.
I personally know of many good HR professionals who struggled with implementing technology and due to the complex nature of solutions they were unable to deliver, thus self-limiting their careers for no fault of theirs
“I believed there was an easier and less destructive way to do this and this inspired the idea of GoEvals. A platform that offers intelligent digital HR tools which are simple, fast, and reliable. Where clients decide what they want to use and pay as per their needs and their budgets,” he says.
As per a Josh Bersin report released in the beginning of 2020, which researched companies that had completed implementation of HR tech initiatives two years ago, 42% of them rated the effort as partially successful or failed.
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“This is a high rate of failure, which is not acceptable and is reflective of how difficult the current solutions that are being offered today are,” he says.
Having worked on multiple HR technology projects for a decade and more, he realized that the success rate of these technologies was abysmal.
“The destruction in terms of the huge investment, effort, time, and even failed careers it left behind in its wake was very serious. I personally know of many good HR professionals who struggled with implementing technology and due to the complex nature of solutions they were unable to deliver, thus self-limiting their careers for no fault of theirs,” he says.
Success So Far
The company has been working on their product framework and design for over a year. They went live in mid-October and currently are on track to onboard about 50 to 60 clients by March 2021.
“We are in talks with potential partners in UAE, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Canada and are aiming to go live in at least three international markets by the end of next year. We believe we have a strong product which will deliver exponential value to clients,” says Hirey.
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Today HR Tech is a 15 billion USD market globally and is growing at an astonishing rate. Since GoEvals offers tools across the employee lifecycle, Hirey considers any company offering digital solutions as a potential competitor.
“This is good because it will keep us on our toes to ensure we keep improving our user experience and provide value to clients at all times,” he concludes.
