The future of work will be hugely different from what it is now, with technology in HR demanding new skills from HR professionals. Remote work is catching on fast, and in addition to their existing responsibilities, HR professionals must:

• Improve their technology skills
• Purchase and implement new HR technology solutions
• Interact closely with IT personnel to optimally integrate new tools into existing systems infrastructure
• Leverage business intelligence (BI) tools to aggregate and report on disparate data sets

HR leadership must ensure that the HR team is suitably upskilled, with the right competencies for a technology-led world in the new normal. As the world heads further into 2021, here are the most important HR tech skills:

APIs

APIs, or application programming interfaces, underly a fast-catching-on service-driven interface for HR professionals. In essence, an API lists what is available and allows the extraction of the most relevant data point basis the time and nature of the requirement. APIs are an HR technology that extract information otherwise retrievable through an application or product only with great difficulty, if at all. For instance, an HR information system (HRIS) outputs employee attendance data only for a certain period, and it is impossible to conduct data analysis by extracting historical data for the specific period.

For HR to be able to properly use this HR tech, the following factors must be considered:

• Whether the system has an API, and availability of documentation for the same
• Method of using the API, particularly getting an API key from the vendor to authenticate with the service
• Trial of the API, either directly from the website or via an open-source tool like Postman
• Leveraging the API when the product does not provide the specific data needed to solve the problem

Business intelligence

With many different types of technology in HR, managing and tracking different data points becomes very complex. Business intelligence (BI) tools make HR reporting a simpler task by combining sets of data from different systems. These facilitate reporting with more detail and accuracy, by collating the data into different, comprehensive dashboards.

Leadership in HR can use BI tools for a variety of purposes. For instance, when studying how newly-hired employees are performing, the team would want to look through performance data. However, applicant tracking systems (ATS) store their data typically at a different location, making it difficult to extract recruitment data from the ATS and match it with performance data. When a BI system connects the ATS with performance data, it can create one common data set to be analyzed completely. The process can also be repeated as required.

Integration platforms

The workforce is highly dispersed with many firms, with its members working from remote locations. This makes it important, yet difficult, to know what employees want and need, how they are motivated, and the best way to improve their performance. To operate with a strong data mindset in the future of work, businesses will need to combine different types of HR data.

There are two ways to do this:

• Integrate ATS with HRIS through a hand-built pipeline of sorts: This may not be feasible, though, if multiple data systems must be connected.
• Use integration platforms as a service (iPaaS): As many of these solutions do not require coding, HR can easily focus on how to define and collate the data it needs. Boomi and Zapier are two well-known examples.

Solving the integration conundrum in HR tech requires answering the following:

• Possibility of natively integrating two products
• Availability of iPaaS support for native integration
• Availability of standard HTTP services for retrieving and sending particular information to desired APIs

What is important to understand is that APIs give a base, BI tools drive the discovery of data insights, and integration platforms connect different information for better HR analysis.