Technology is great, but let's not forget the human factor

In our HR Systems and Technology class we have learned about a lot of cool amazing systems for every aspect of HR. I'm so excited that these technologies exist, and I hope that I get a chance to use them all in the future to make wherever I work a better place =)

But a thought has occurred to me from reading my classmate's posts. We can't let technology replace human interaction, and the human touch.

As many problems as technology solves, we can't view these solutions as a set-it-and-forget-it type of deal. Rather, they should be implemented with the idea that they'll free up HR time for MORE human interaction and strategic initiatives.

For example, at a recent company happy hour, I happened to be sitting with a coworker that I don't get to talk to very often. I put her on a lot of interviews for engineering candidates and she shared with me some of her feelings and ideas about our interviewing process. I brought these up to my manager, and we met with this engineer and discussed them more in depth and I was blown away. The ideas were AMAZINGLY WONDERFUL!

Even with the world's best ATS (which we don't have, but even if we did), or the most perfect HRIS and performance management systems, we wouldn't have learned an interviewer and employees feelings on our recruiting processes unless we talked to them.

And while HR system companies often put out content blogs about best practices or try to make suggestions to customers about how to best utilize their product, how many of us will really take it to heart?

Whereas if you have a person standing in front of you, explaining something to you very passionately with first hand experience, which one will give you the best insight and strong motivation to make necessary changes to existing systems and processes?

Let's make sure that the great technology available to us doesn't make us lazy, but instead helps us to improve!

Compensation Leveling

In this week's class we looked at PayScale and learned about pulling reports from this site to see what certain positions are making in certain locations. The thing about this site, our teacher mentioned, was that all data (titles and the corresponding compensation) were self-reported. So we were cautioned to take it with a grain of salt and know that some people may have inflated their titles.

At work, someone had suggested to HR that we use PayScale, but it was shot down due to the self-reported aspect of it. Old school compensation people tend to distrust anything self-reported. Instead, we use Radford. Companies have to report in all of their job titles, leveling them to existing job titles in a database, and report their compensation so that they can get data.

At work I attended a compensation presentation that told us that titles are linked to compensation. A lot of time people think they can give people a new title to make them happy, regardless of what their duties and pay are. But out in the world, apparently, what your title is will definitely correspond to the compensation you should be receiving.

I'm curious to hear about what classmates' experience with compensation leveling is!