From AI-powered recruiting tools to virtual employee training and development platforms, HR technology is offering new and innovative ways to streamline processes and optimize employee management. To help you make sense of all these developments, we’ll explore some crucial future trends in human resource management and how they’re transforming the HR landscape.

If you have HR duties and are looking to stay ahead of the curve or a business owner wanting to enhance your HR strategy, this is for you.

What is driving HR trends in 2023?

About four out of five executives believe a recession is on the horizon, with 81% of CHROs considering strategies to reduce headcount. Some of the actions they’re contemplating include layoffs, performance-based cuts, and hiring freezes—which are already prevalent in the tech industry. But businesses also understand that they can’t rely on cutting talent to keep growing, which is why in 2023 and beyond, 44% of company executives are focusing on hiring talent with skills that can drive growth.

According to Gartner, 50% of organizations still expect the competition for talent to climb significantly in 2023, regardless of the broader conditions of the economy. Fostering a better employee experience has become a priority for 47% of HR leaders who recognize the employee experience as the key to not only keeping talent but also appealing to better hires.

Companies have used a variety of tactics to make the workplace more attractive to current and potential employees, including remote work, increased pay, and better DEI practices. While these tactics aren’t going anywhere in 2023, 44% of HR leaders believe their businesses lack attractive career paths and 36% say their strategies for finding talent are insufficient for the skills the companies need.

To stay competitive, HR leaders will need to aim their strategies toward recruiting for current business needs, using data to make decisions with stronger confidence, and planning for a range of potential outcomes as the market changes.

Here are some of the HR industry trends businesses are capitalizing on to carry out these strategies.

4 emerging technology trends in HR management

1. AI for hiring and talent assessment

AI has become all the rage this year. From ChatGPT to AI-generated art to even AI-generated news reporters—but AI has also worked its way into the world of HR.

AI can be used to automate certain aspects of the recruitment process to speed up tasks with more accuracy and less bias. This helps free up time for HR managers to focus on other areas such as providing a better employee experience. For years, AI-based tools have been developed to scan CVs, provide automated online assessments, and weed out applicants who don’t fit positions on paper.

However, businesses have also shifted towards favoring candidates with soft skills. The five top soft skills employers are looking for in 2023 include good communication, a willingness to learn, teamwork, enthusiasm, and problem-solving—skills that aren’t always easy to pick out from a list of former positions and accomplishments on a resume. Soft skills have become so crucial in the talent assessment process that 89% of hiring managers attribute “bad hires” to a lack of these skills.

But HR recruitment software like Pymetrics is helping businesses pick up on candidates with these traits. Pymetrics uses gamified behavioral assessments to gauge how a candidate may perform throughout the whole talent cycle. Instead of relying on resumes or biased questionnaires, the software provides businesses with data-driven insights to make hiring more efficient and keep the process fair.

2. Automated onboarding

You know the drill: you send a candidate an offer letter, they accept, and everyone’s happy, but you also dread the stacks of onboarding paperwork that need to be filled out. Turns out, 36% of HR professionals struggle to automate and organize onboarding flows due to a lack of sufficient technology. With recession fears on the minds of HR professionals, businesses are looking to adopt more automated processes in order to hire more sustainably but also empower employees to do their best work.

Companies are now taking advantage of tools that not only speed up the onboarding process for new hires, but also take the bulk of the work out of the hands of HR staff. eSignature solutions like Dropbox Sign help HR teams minimize the use of paper and move the hiring process online.

From their applicant tracking systems, HR teams can templatize documents, auto-fill those documents with candidate information, and request signatures from candidates remotely. With the added benefit of automatic email reminders, HR professionals also don’t have to chase down candidates for signatures.

As a result, new hires are completing paperwork three times faster on average and shaving 3-5 days off the hiring process.

3. Employee wellness software

With 77% of employees experiencing burnout at least once at their current companies, employee wellness and mental health will be a priority for businesses in the coming year. A study by Workable showed that 62% of employers are already placing mental health in the workplace front and center, but 24% plan to focus on mental health in the future.

One method businesses are using is the implementation of employee wellness software. These tools come with a number of features and capabilities such as activity tracking, sleep monitoring, stress management exercises, and nutrition coaching. These elements allow employers to monitor their employees’ overall health from one central platform and develop custom interventions based on individual needs.

Headspace, for example, is already a popular meditation app for the general public but it has also spread its reach to businesses. Well-known companies like Starbucks now use Headspace for Work to help employees with “managing stress and anxiety, personal growth, productivity, life challenges, kids and parenting and physical health”.

4. Data-driven HR decision-making

Businesses thrive on collecting data about customers that can be used to provide better, more personalized experiences—and the same should be true when managing and engaging employees.

According to HR Research Firm McLean & Company, organizations with data-driven HR analytics are 45% more likely to have successful results than organizations that ignore data. This is because data-driven analytics enable HR teams to gain valuable insight into workplace trends and make smarter decisions about hiring, leadership development, and other processes.

To improve its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices, the company Lovelytics used Tableau’s data visualization software to build an HR diversity scorecard. Within a dashboard, the company can measure how its hiring practices fare in terms of gender and race across all job levels, tenures, job satisfaction levels, and performance ratings.

The platform Visier is also helping companies retain talent and manage turnover by providing analytics on resignation risk rates and underlying causes to proactively address concerns.

Staying competitive in the future of HR

As we continue to navigate through the digital age, teams need to embrace these future HR trends to be ahead of the curve. By leveraging technology to automate routine tasks, analyze data, and improve the employee experience, HR managers can create a more agile and responsive workforce that is better equipped to meet the challenges of the future.

Dropbox Sign is helping HR teams stay competitive by streamlining the employee experience, one signature at a time. With Dropbox Sign, you can draft, send, sign, and store all your hiring documents from anywhere, ensuring a quick, organized experience for both your staff and new employees.

Whether you’re hiring new team members or onboarding remote employees, Dropbox Sign helps you get through the process faster, ensuring a seamless signing process and helping you retain the best talent.

Try Dropbox Sign for free.

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