From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

HR Brew

Adam DeRose

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Cassie Kozyrkov, CEO of Data Scientific, speaks at SHRM’s AI + HI Project event

This data scientist wants HR leaders to ask these three questions when shopping around for AI tools

Best known for enhancing productivity, AI tools still need a human to double-check their work.

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Technically HR: Indeed launches new tool helping TA pros match candidates to job openings

With Smart Sourcing, Indeed aims to make finding the right candidate easier and faster by using AI.

A computer processor icon denoting HR technology

Tech

The promise of AI lies in its ability to tackle the rote, mundane tasks associated with some jobs, so employees can spend more time on higher-level activities, rather than being stuck in the drudgery. But what if one of those rote, mundane tasks were completing mandatory compliance training?

In controlled testing, compliance training platform Ethena found that ChatGPT’s new agent tool completed compliance training content without any human intervention and was able to mimic real-interaction with the module and avoid detection.

“We believe at this stage it’s fairly nascent, that is, based on everything we’re seeing and hearing and understanding in the space,” said Ethena’s VP of marketing, Chris Vandermarel. “We think it’s unlikely that a lot of employees are doing this at this point in time, but as the technology matures, as the knowledge gets shared, as one colleague whispers to another colleague…We think this is one of those things that’s nascent today, but could change very quickly.”

When ChatGPT released its “agent mode” 

, Ethena’s engineers began thinking about its different use cases and understanding how it might apply to the compliance training space, according to Vandermarel, including the potential for more nefarious uses, such as the possibility of using the tool to complete a compliance training. The company tested several vendors, including Ethena, and concluded that the problem was “widespread” across the platforms.

“[We] very quickly discovered, wow, this tool is so good at mimicking human behavior, that it just does it all flawlessly,” he said.

The discovery raises issues for HR leaders too. Soon, companies and compliance pros may not be able to fully trust that training courses were actually completed by a human. Compliance and legal requirements mandated by federal, state, and local governments, or those mandated by the court or via a legal settlement, could be at risk of true compliance. Enforcement efforts and company policy might also require updating.

“It’s a very, very simple prompt, which is part of what makes this story so wild, because people skipping mandatory training is not a new concept. This is something that people have been doing for a long time,” Vandermarel said, adding that the ubiquitousness of the ChatGPT tool and AI agents more generally could prove a big risk for compliance teams.

, told HR Brew that it could be time to reassess the value of compliance training to employees, and make sure an 

 with real-world scenarios and situations that employees might actually encounter is delivered.

“From an HR perspective, what really comes to mind for me is that the fact that it’s so easy and that there are so few barriers to making it happen risks it becoming more normalized and feeling less like you’re breaking the rules,” she said.

HR teams can also offer test-out options for employees, work on building leaders’ to model behavior and demonstrate the value of trainings, and monitor training data and analytics to be on the lookout for unusual activity. If everyone in a department completed the training in the exact same amount of time, that’s worth a bit of sniffing around.

But Vandermarel pointed out that AI systems are evolving much faster than prevention methods and vendors, so simply fighting fire with fire—using AI tools to monitor and prevent this activity—probably will not succeed. It’s a more useful strategy to deliver a compliance training that’s relevant and tailored for them and respects their time and prior knowledge.

“The tech is the surface-level problem,” Naranjo said. “If you’re addressing that and nothing else, then I think what you’re actually missing is a really key opportunity to take this moment in time to take a step back and reflect on what is your actual compliance strategy, and is it effective? If it was effective, you wouldn’t have employees using AI agent mode to take their training. They would actually want to take the training. They would understand the value.”

Are AI agents taking your employee compliance trainings?

Testing reveals ChatGPT’s new agent can complete some trainings without detection, raising issues for compliance teams.

As American tech companies race to compete in the burgeoning global AI market, some startups are looking to China for inspiration.

They’re not stealing code or poaching talent, but these firms are importing employee expectations that echo the controversial 996 work system.

“996 has been around for a really long time, like decades,” said Caitlin Collins, an organizational psychologist and principal implementation consultant with Betterworks. “It really started in an environment where the ethos of winning at all cost within a market was priority.”

 Start your work at 9am, work until 9pm, repeat six days a week. The 

 popularized by some Chinese tech firms have received backlash from employees online in China and have even been 

“Those are the guardrails,” explained Collins. “The expectation around that is just constant, around-the-hour working. There’s no one checking…But the expectation is that you work around the clock, even over and beyond that.”

Hungry to compete with rivals both domestically and abroad, some tech founders are adopting the exhausting expectations as part of their dogged efforts to get ahead as Silicon Valley and the like lay down AI infrastructure, according to 

 Collins warned that companies looking for a leg up in the AI arms race won’t actually be well served by adopting a 996 ethos.

“There’s study after study about how important sleep is, but we also need to be able to step away from working and have whatever that balance looks like: family, personal life, playing video games, going out to dinner. Whatever the case is,” she said. “You have to be able to separate yourself and provide yourself variety throughout the day—including sleep—in order for your body to function and your brain to function.”

Collins pointed to research from the World Health Organization in 2021 concluding that working more than 55 hours per week can, in fact, contribute to increased risk of 

, including cardiovascular events. A Stanford University study from last year also shows 

 after 55 hours. People tend to have shorter patience, a weaker “filter,” and they become more reactionary, she added. Reactionary leadership limits our ability to coach employees with our emotional intelligence.

“Sustaining that level of intensity over a long period of time has more long-term effects on our brains and our bodies than anything else. It’s the concept of too much stress over too much time,” she said.

 Collins added that it’s possible a business may require a shorter, more intense period of work to complete a specific goal, but its leaders should understand how best to support the working styles of those employees from whom they’re asking extra. And the extra expectations can’t be limitless.

HR’s human capital management strategy has got to include wellness and well-being in the formula, she said, understanding risks related to burnout, turnover, and employee health and wellness need to be factored in when building out workplace expectations and culture.

“The focus of HR should be, and is typically, sustaining high-performing employees and making sure that they’re responsive in real time to the market needs of the business. That is the goal.” she said. “In order for them to do their best, we know that they need to be happy and rested and well fed and taken care of.”

A rear view of a man sitting at desk working at computer surrounded by giant clocks.

What HR should know about 996

The ethos making headlines in Silicon Valley impacts wellness as well as productivity.

Welp. In the age of AI, perhaps it’s time to retire the old adage, “Go big, or go home,” and replace it with, “Go micro, and then keep going.”

Business and technology consulting firm West Monroe found that organizations that targeted “micro” AI interventions were better able to deliver faster results and limit risk, and it’s a trend among top performers, according to the firm.

The analysis comes as companies and organizations work to navigate the choppy waters of the ongoing 

. Businesses are directing millions of dollars toward new AI products and systems, but the technology offers unproven ROI and is itself evolving rapidly.

According to the analysis, which appeared in the firm’s 

 report released in July, “organizations winning today are shifting away from ‘big bang’ implementations and are instead prioritizing initiatives that yield faster results.”

This appears to be a departure from innovation that prioritizes big ideas and big risk…and a big budget. But technology is evolving, and 

 and new AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT) can reduce implementation of transformation projects from months to days. Additionally, with the right infrastructure, teams can deploy new AI interventions independently of other projects.

West Monroe found: “success stories are smaller, and come from companies that build foundational capabilities and apply them to specific business challenges.” The winning strategy, according to the firm, is to keep up the momentum going through small, manageable projects that build towards larger goals and priorities.

There’s work HR and people leaders can do now to help support their business and prepare the workforce.

The report outlined a number of strategies that could impact the HR team.

Foster a culture of experimentation and learning

Develop processes for sharing information and learnings across the business

Focus on adaptable skills across the workforce, like “problem-solving capabilities, adaptability, and continuous learning.”

robot head shaped stairwell with person climbing the steps

When it comes to AI, think (checks notes) small?

Research finds small, targeted AI interventions can yield faster, more nimble results.

Girish Ganesan, CPO at S&P Global, took the reins of the financial information and analytics giant’s HR function last fall amid a C-suite shake up following the appointment of CEO Martina Cheung 

. Ganesan told HR Brew he’s spent the nearly year-long journey focused on three main priorities: supporting the executive team’s efforts under a new CEO, readying the workforce as the company and world evolves, and maximizing the people teams to best deliver for the company and its employees.

He said a big chunk of his work involved deploying a new employee value proposition for its workforce: people forward. Ganesan said the organization needed to evolve its people philosophy to reflect changes inside the organization and outside more broadly.

 The new framework guides all company messaging and communication and is “embedded across the employee life cycle,” according to Ganesan.

“It’s an evolution from our people-first philosophy, which has existed at S&P Global for many years,” he said. “It’s a mindset that guides how we invest in our people, largely underpinned in continuous growth and development.”

The shift to people forward reflected not only a strategy shift from new executive leaders, but also acknowledged ongoing AI-disruption and new economic and geopolitical realities.

S&P Global focuses on employee career development, trust and transparency amid a changing workplace and world, and a renewed focus on employee well-being with emphasis on the entire person.

“We want our people to grow and come along the journey as the organization evolves, so it emphasizes momentum, propelling our workforce towards keeping up with the pace with market changes, emerging technologies and shifting work-life needs,” he said.

Ganesan said people forward is an evolution of the company’s previous “people first” philosophy, designed to equip the workforce for continuous innovation and adaptation.

Empowering employee growth and career development requires a focus on employee agency over their own career development and equipping employees with the training and tools to succeed in a new economy. It’s no secret an AI-enabled economy is where 

“We’re not just adopting AI. We want to prepare our people to thrive alongside it,” he said.

S&P offers in-house generative AI tooling to every employee. Every employee, 42,000 of them, is required to complete a training program on the tools. The organization is doubling down with additional role-specific training for specific groups of employees and managers.

S&P focuses its education both on essential tech and essential skills training, largely focused on human skills or leadership skills, which will be more urgently needed as AI becomes more enveloped in the day-to-day of business, he said.

“You both need to be technically astute to be able to leverage AI, but you also need to have those power skills to be able to supplement where AI is going to leave a gap,” he said.

As businesses transition amid the ongoing AI transformation, and S&P Global moves ahead with its AI plans, company execs are working to include employee listening and needs. AI transformation questions are included in employee surveying, and AI technology showcased to employees also “generates a lot of commentary and questions.”

“We want to make sure that we’re building a community in which everyone feels connected and valued,” he said, “It was fundamentally important to us that…our people feel that their voices are being heard and that we are on this journey together.” 

Ganesan also said that employee wellness and well being is paramount to S&P’s new strategy. The company boasts of its wellness days, five days a year when its offices are closed and employees are asked to focus on their lives and families. It also focuses on hybrid work, an essential resource for supporting employees’ ability to work the way that works best for them.

“AI is truly turning into a life skill very quickly, beyond a professional skill,” Ganesan said. “It’s seeping into our lives. It’s in society everywhere. I wake up to an AI feed every day, and that’s how life’s going to be, but combining that with human connectivity, empathy, respect for human race, also respect for human intelligence, that’s going to bring about judgment…even more profound as we move forward.”

business people walking on a windy path towards progress

S&P Global’s employee strategy builds on human talent by investing in their skills and development in AI and beyond

“People forward” invests in developing the next generation of workers equipped for working in an AI-powered future.

AI skills aren’t the only urgently needed skills to ready the workforce for the AI transformation. Skilling across workplace technology—not just AI—will be critical to successful AI-enablement projects, new research from Coursera and AWS finds.

The survey of technology leaders across top global firms finds that 88% agree planned AI investments will not succeed without increasing investments in skills development.

“Despite all this technological transformation and automation and speed that you know these leaders…still believe that humans are irreplaceable,” said Coursera’s CPO Marcelo Modica.

But the findings are a bit more complex. While AI upskilling is obviously important to success, technology leaders say cloud, data, and cybersecurity upskilling are also essentially needed, especially in the next three years, or AI initiatives spearheaded by organizations may underdeliver or even fail, 

A workforce with strong cloud skills remains a top priority because cloud infrastructure plays a fundamental role in every digital initiative inside the organization, including AI projects. Data skills are needed as data quality and good governance are required to successfully deploy AI solutions, and cybersecurity responsibilities will grow with expanded cloud and AI infrastructure.

“Those technical skills in themselves are changing very rapidly,” Modica told HR Brew.

 Modica told HR Brew that readying the workforce for this AI transformation calls for a new strategy for employee learning.

Learning in the AI-enabled future will require more “practical skill development, working on real projects, practicing skill assessments,” he said, and importantly “risk-free experimentation.” A culture of experimentation, innovation, and failure, “the louder the better,” will best prepare employees for participating in the future of work.

 has been thought of as something you do separately from 

Employees stop working to participate in a training program, but according to Modica, this new culture always requires learning.

“Now more than ever, these things have to be very tightly webbed together on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “From an HR perspective, this idea of continuous learning is going to be really important…As these new technologies roll out, constantly thinking about that training in a day-to-day workflow as opposed to separate.”

image of a hand pushing a learning button with a stylist pen in a digital space

Cloud, data, and cybersecurity upskilling needed amid ongoing AI transformation

AI upskilling requires foundational technology skills, and maybe a new approach to employee learning.

HCM and enterprise software giant SAP plans to acquire the hiring platform SmartRecruiters.

Execs told reporters on a media call that the move would bolster SAP’s all-in-one suite with additional capabilities. The company announced the acquisition on Aug. 1.

“Bringing in talent isn’t just an HR priority, it’s a business priority,” SAP SuccessFactors Chief Product Officer Dan Beck said on the call. “SmartRecruiters has a robust portfolio with advanced capabilities [that] allows us to move more quickly to serve our customers.”

He pointed to SmartRecruiters’s AI expertise in candidate sourcing and screening, its rich sources of recruiting data that can help SAP further people intelligence for strategic workforce planning, and its robust end-to-end workflows that can help SAP deliver a better candidate experience, as well as a better experience for talent pros.

“Recruiters and hiring managers have really grown to love the brand and the product,” SmartRecruiters CEO Rebecca Carr said. “They’re using it every day in the flow of work, and it’s become not just a module or a bolt on, but really a system that is designed for hiring across all stakeholders in the hiring process.”

Beck said he expects the platform’s AI capabilities and data will help SAP better and more quickly serve its customers amid this moment of rapid technological transformation.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The move is still subject to regulatory approval, which Beck told reporters he expected in the last quarter of this year. The acquisition won’t change up the recruitment workflow for SAP or SmartRecruiters customers just yet. SmartRecruiters will remain an “agnostic vendor” for the “foreseeable future,” according to Carr.

“Whether you’re a SmartRecruiter customer or an SAP customer or both, we’re going to be able to create good value for you, and hopefully not a lot of complexity,” she said.

SAP to acquire SmartRecruiters to bolster its HCM suite and recruitment data

SAP execs say it reflects the increasing business value of successful talent management.

Mikaela Cohen

The majority (64%) of US adults plan to avoid using AI for “as long as possible,” according to a 

. AI experts think 79% of US adults already use AI “constantly or several times a day,” the 

 found in April, but only 27% of respondents said they use AI to that extent.

There could be an educational or “misunderstanding gap,” said Todd Blaskowitz, senior client partner on the AI strategy and transformation team at consulting firm Korn Ferry.

“You’re probably using an AI or a generative AI solution, day in and day out, that you may not even be aware of,” Blaskowitz told HR Brew. “[It’s] a misunderstanding gap with individuals around these tools, and how they are starting to present themselves in your daily lives, and how you accomplish a daily task, or even your work within your job.”

Many people don’t realize they’re already using AI, said Lydia Saad, director of US social research at Gallup. For instance, she said, Netflix uses AI to recommend users content based on their viewing history. And Google uses it to aggregate information for search results.

“There’s a lot of people who don’t know what all the different variations of AI are,” Saad told HR Brew. This could cause resistance.

Saad highlighted another piece of Gallup data, which found the more people use AI tools, the more likely they are to see it as a tech advancement, rather than a threat. Some 71% of US adults who use genAI daily see it as innovative, compared to 35% of those who’ve never used it.

“As people get more familiar with using it, they’ll get more comfortable with understanding how they can use it without it doing harm to them or their livelihood,” she said.

Before introducing AI tools in the workplace, Blaskowitz recommended providing education, as well as clarity and transparency around how it fits in their company’s strategy.

“If people just hear, ‘Oh, we’re doing all this AI stuff at work. Oh, we just got Copilot or ChatGPT, but if they don’t have clarity on how that fits into the overall, bigger picture, that’s going to cause resistance in the organization,” he said. “If you don’t hear that narrative or understand it, you’re going to create your own.”

Then, people leaders, Blaskowitz said, can start encouraging employees to embrace an AI mindset.

“Help your people rethink their work, rethink the outcomes that they’re trying to do with a mindset of, ‘How might AI improve this?’” he said. “How might AI enhance the overall experience, the overall quality, my overall productivity?”

In offering encouragement, however, Blaskowitz said he advises leaders not to ignore workers’ fears. “[Be] a human, showing empathy, and addressing the fears that people bring into the workplace,” he said.

Employees are avoiding AI—HR can help them embrace it

“As people get more familiar with using it, they’ll get more comfortable with understanding how they can use it without it doing harm to them or their livelihood,” Lydia Saad, director of US social research at Gallup, told HR Brew.