Master's Thesis

Master in Human Resources Management
MASTER’S THESIS
“Why HR won’t be doomed by technology,
and how they will work hand in hand
in our near future”
______________________________
Ciro Francesco Urselli
100345062

Abstract
_________________________________________________________________
The existence of Human Resources as an independent department is at risk.
HR professionals will inescapably be replaced by artificial intelligence and software, leaving no space
for HR as we know it.
At least that’s what some executives and researchers (Averbook 2014; Charney 2013; Mundi 2012) are
foretelling.
Surely, software is already deeply affecting how HR works. But instead of prognosticating the death of
the Human Resources department, an increasing amount of researchers are trying to weigh how and
to what extent the emerging trends and technologies will affect HR processes, managerial skills and
organizational structures.
This work is an attempt to assess what is going to change and why, and to offer insights for HR
practitioners on how to respond to these changes.
Through an analysis of the key business trends that will presumably reshape the business world in our
near future, this work lays out implications and considerations for HR professionals, highlighting new
missions, mandates, required KSAs and prominent processes that the managers of tomorrow are going
to face.

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Index
_________________________________________________________________
1. Introduction…………………….……………………………………………………………………………….………………………..…….………2
1.1. Preamble………………….……………………………………………..……………………………….…..………..2
1.2. Research questions……………………………………….............................................................3
1.3. Structure and objectives of the work..…………………………………………………………….……….4
2. Assumptions……..…………………………………………………………………..………..……………………………………..……………….5
2.1. Is HRM actually at risk?...............................................................................................5
2.2. The HR department of today…………………………………………………………………………………..7
3. Main trends in society and economics…………………………..……………….......................................................10
3.1. Analysis of the main social and economic trends………………………….……….…………….….10
3.1.1. Globalization and society……………………………………………………………………..…….12
3.1.2. Workforce diversity and society………….………………………………………………..…….13
3.1.3. Technology and society……………………………………………………………………..……….14
3.2. How are these trends going to affect organizations?.................................................15
3.2.1. Globalization, Workforce diversity, Technology and organizations………..…….15
3.2.2. The company of the future….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….17
3.3. How are these trends going to affect the HR department?........................................18
3.3.1. Globalization, Workforce diversity and Human Resources….….…………….…….18
3.3.1.1. Extended Workforce………………………………………………………..……….19
3.3.1.2. Global talent pool.........................................................................20
3.3.1.3. Customization…………………………………………………………………………..23
3.3.1.4. Culture……………………………………………………………………………………..24
3.3.1.5. Skills shortfall……………………………………………………………………………26
3.3.2. Technology and Human Resources..…….……………………………..……..……..……….28
3.3.2.1. Big Data & Analytics………………………………………………………..……….29
3.3.2.2. Social Networks….........................................................................33
3.3.2.3. Artificial Intelligence..…………………………………………………………….…35
4. Assessing HR managers’ skills and mission of today and of tomorrow……..................………………….…37
4.1. HR managers today………………………………………………………………………………….…............37
4.2. HR managers tomorrow………………………………………………………………………..……………….40
4.3. Bottom Line………………….............................................................................................41
5. Professionals’ point of view……………………………...…………………….…………………………………………………..…..….42
6. Methodology………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….50
6.1. ’Grounded Theory’.………………………………………………………………………………………………….50
6.2. Stages of development…………………………………………………………………………………………….51
6.3. Timetable…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………51
Bibliography……………………..………………………………………………..……………….………,,….…...……………..….….……….-

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1. Introduction
_________________________________________________________________
1.1 Preamble
Business world is an extremely changing and capricious environment, in which are involved very
complex and different variables that keep endlessly altering the rules of the game. Inside a system like
this, a continuous and unpredictable series of innovation upset the role and the perception of the
different actors involved at any level, at any time.
In the current economic climate, companies might easily be appealed to focus their efforts only on
short-terms, fast-changing events, but they couldn’t forget to consider where these events are leading
in the long-term, that is how trends are going to affect global business in the near future. The ability
to be ready and reactive in such a challenging world could be one of the best reason to create and/or
maintain a stable competitive advantage.
In the following pages, the author tries to identify which are the main trends that are going to affect
one business division above all – the Human Resources one – and then, grounding the conclusion on
credited researches, to provide a reliable prediction of how this division will adapt to this complex and
huge metamorphosis.
Human resource management (HRM) traditionally has two main forms of existence, one in the form
of academic discourse and activity, and the other in the form of practice in organizations that employ
people (Storey 2007). The first form finds expression in conferences, journals, books, courses in
business schools and so on, while the latter deals with employment relationships. When HRM emerged
on the scene during the late ‘80s, researchers and executives predicted a really short future for this
discipline, often inferring it as a passing mode, not seen able to survive. But in few time a lot of hints
emerged that HRM had already found a strong land to grow up on. Almost at the same time, both the
academic form (thanks mostly to the contribution of Ulrich and Pfeffer), and the organizational form
(thanks to Huselid, which provided statistical measurements for HR outcomes and performances) rose
up in popularity and consensus, widening importance and scope of the function among corporations.
Despite this side-by-side growth, however, there is still a huge gap between the academic findings and
the practical applications of them. This study is an attempt to analyze and rationalize cases and
practices of today, in a way that makes these two spheres converge as much as possible toward the
same point in the future, in order to collaborate in the most prolific way to the society welfare.

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1.2 Research questions
The primary debate about Human Resources Management was led mostly in deficiency of any data
about the operational use of specific practices. In the last years, with the big contribution of the IT
revolution, a lot of macro and micro information emerged both from large-scale surveys and detailed
cases. This kind of data gives as an accurate overview on the extent of diffusion of specific practices,
as well as on the impact and the outcomes of the aforementioned.
The Harvard school, in the early ‘90s suggested that ‘many pressures are demanding a broader, more
comprehensive and more strategic perspective with regard to the organization’s Human Resources’.
These pressures have created a need for: ‘A longer-term perspective in managing people and
consideration of people as potential assets rather than merely a variable cost’ (Beer et al. 1984). They
identified for the first time in a clear framework two representative features of HRM: - the alignment
among competitive strategy and employees’ policies is managers’ business, so they have to be entitled
more with this responsibility and - employees should be actively involved in planning and
implementing the policies they will be directed by.
As taught in universities nowadays, HRM of today essentially moves from the Harvard Framework,
integrating more participation from both executive and line managers in the various layers of HR
processes, and considering the importance of personnel involvement at a higher degree.
But is the department moving fast enough to embrace the massive changes that technology,
globalization and work-force variations are going to bring?
Starting from these analytical preface, two very wide and imbricated questions need to be addressed:
 How and to what extent main trends are going to affect organizing models, tasks and
boundaries of the HR department?
 How are HR professional roles changing and what will be the new set of knowledge, skills and
abilities required to comply with new mission?
The focus of the first question rely mainly on the shift HRM is taking toward a progressively more
strategic role, and on how technology and globalization are going to modify importance and
procedures of the most important HR processes: which ones will extinguish and which will gain
strategic importance?
The focus of the second question is to identify how managerial roles will modify within HR boundaries,
predicting which skills will be needed the most in order to make the department an initiator and a
warden of competitive advantage.

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1.3 Structure and objectives of the work
This study starts from the assumption that artificial intelligences, software, calculators or any kind of
breaking-trough technology couldn’t entirely replace the role of today’s HR specialists, or at least not
in our near future. Business and companies are massively changing in structures and processes, but
the new major trends as technology and globalization could be seen as favorable circumstances for
Human Resources professionals to gain strategic importance and decisional power in the competitive
labor-market of the next decade.
The literature review could be divided in two main parts:
- Beside an opening analysis of the Human Resources department of today, its perceived vs real
capabilities, mission and tasks, the effort will be focused on the identification of the global economic
trends and how they could possibly be or not a threat for generalists and specialists.
Then, the study proceeds deepening in assessing the way and the extent these trends are going to
affect business in general, ending with an examination of the presumed effects within the boundaries
of HR department itself.
- The second part tries to assess required knowledge, skills and abilities of HR managers of today, and
comparing them to the KSAs required by the managers of the future.
As a result, precious hints for practitioners will emerge from the analysis.
‘HR needs to raise its game by aligning its skills and capabilities with the organization’s overall
business goals. As HR pursues its own makeover, its strategic role must also change to meet the
intense pressures of today’s business environment. Imagine an organization where business leaders
look to HR for advice as they develop business strategies to drive growth, where HR is considered
the developer of talent and leadership across the business, and where business leaders respect and
admire the HR professionals as co-leaders of the business. This can all happen, but only with an
extreme makeover of HR.’ (Mazor, Schmahl, and Stephan 2015)

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2. Assumptions
_________________________________________________________________
2.1 Is HRM actually at risk?
Important executives all around the world are enquiring relevance and efficiency of HRM in modern
companies, questioning if a division like the Human Resources department of today will be useful in
order to facilitate the attainment of strategic goals, or simply it will became an unnecessary cost.
Craig Mundi (2012) suggests that there’s actually a big gap among what HR professionals actually do,
and how many leaders really perceives their activity. This means that, in the most of the companies,
executives feels like HR processes often creates ‘frictions’ instead of facilitating the ‘flow’ required to
promote better overall performances. The pressures to align HRM processes to the strategy of the
company are greater than ever; thus, in the majority of the cases, business units are still relegated and
stuck into a compliance role which tasks will be most likely replaced by preset processes.
“HR as we see it today is going to die. A lot of what we can do will be automated in the future. The
emphasis will shift from jobs to tasks. Some people might be doing work for five or six different
companies. This will cause real disruption to HR departments and the way they work." states Jason
Averbook (2014) in one of his newest publication. But what does he really means? There’s really no
more place at the table for HR department in the next decades?
Not exactly.
“The good news is it will be re-born as something more important if we work together towards real
change." he follows.
The ‘real change’ Averbook is talking about implies a massive makeover of the entire department,
shifting from a transactional role to a more interactive and integrated one. Today there are already
myriad of recruiting platforms, benefits ‘self-service’ systems and talent management programs that
could provide to the compliance tasks that historically have always been HR specialists core activities,
in a cheaper and more efficient way. Recruiting software has become more innovative and cost-
effective, big data has become a core component of talent management, and 2015 marks the first year
in which millennials represent the majority of the workforce (at least in the US), a generation
that makes career decisions differently than previous ones. (Feeney 2015)
In this sense, we can state that HR is at a crossroad. As the core activities such as recruiting and
retaining talents became more competitive due to the enlargement of the labor market, not anymore

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a regional one, but a global market, the emphasis given to these processes could move HR specialists
closer to the executive management teams.
Thus, both generalists and specialists in this field has been by far too slow to embrace the changes.
From a recent study made from Deloitte (Mazor 2015), emerges that ‘only 30 percent of business
leaders believes that HR has a reputation for sound business decisions; only 28 percent feel that HR is
highly efficient; only 22 percent believe that HR is adapting to the changing needs of their workforce;
and only 20 percent feel that HR can adequately plan for the company’s future talent needs.’ Other
alarming data emerged when asked to executives to rate the HR organization’s performances
(Figure 1) or to assess the way the organization comply with HR’s capabilities (Figure 2). To put it
frankly, it seems that HR is not keeping up with the changing environment. Even if a trend of small
improvement is shown in the last years, it wouldn’t be enough to permit the survival of HR
professionals as they are doing today. Probably we are really close to a tipping point that could spell
either the end of HRM or its evolution. ‘The study also found that 80% of survey respondents believe
that their company’s HR skills are a significant issue, a gap that will need to be accounted for quickly in
order to meet the demands of this new era in HR’.
‘Reinventing HR: An extreme makeover’ Mazor et al. (2015) – pg.62
‘Reinventing HR: An extreme makeover’ Mazor et al. (2015) – pg.61

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2.2 The HR department of today
The main characteristics of the HRM concept as they emerged from the literature of the pioneers and
later commentators (Armstrong 2006) are that it is:
 Diverse;
As models and practices among different organization are surely dissimilar, often only
corresponding to the classic definition of HRM in few aspects. In this respect, a distinction can be
made between the ‘hard’ version of HRM, which emphasizes the importance of the people as an
asset through which companies achieve their competitive advantage, and the ‘soft’ version, that
focuses on communications, motivation and leadership.
 Commitment-oriented;
As argued by Guest (1987), HRM should aim to foster and achieve ‘behavioral commitment to
pursue agreed goals, and attitudinal commitment reflected in a strong identification with the
enterprise’ and, as a consequence, promote a willingness in people to act in the interests of the
company’s pursuit of excellence.
 Based on the belief of ‘human capital’;
The notion that people are not simply a variable cost, but they should instead be regarded as an
asset, was firstly formulated by Beer in the 1984. Since then, the recognition to the human capital
as a source of competitive advantage and its contribution to company’s success became a standard.
 Individualistic rather than collectivistic;
In the sense that it emphasizes the importance of creating and maintaining relationships between
the organization and the individuals instead that operating through group and representative
systems.
 A management-driven activity;
‘HRM can be described as a central, senior management-driven strategic activity that is developed,
owned and delivered by management as a whole to promote the interests of the organization that
they serve.’
 Strategic with an emphasis on integration;
The strategic integration of HRM flows from executives’ vision which needs the full engagement
of employees to realize it, and this represent a very important HRM policy goal, which reflects the
ability of the company to successfully integrate HRM issues in its strategic plan.

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In particular, the character of this correlation between HRM and organizational strategy represented
the center of considerable attention over a long time, since the early studies of Schuler in the ‘80s.
One of the prominent approaches in these thirty years has been the effort to create models which
connect HRM with wider aspects of the organization, such as the ability to create competitive
advantage or its kind of competitive strategy. Lots of these models focus on the implementation
component of strategic management but, if considered singularly, they tend to underestimate the
importance of HRM and the value added through the synergies among its practices. For this reasons,
many managers have difficulties in making explicit how much HRM processes and practices account
for better business performance.
A great contribution in this respect was given by a very interesting ten-years longitudinal study
conducted by the University of Sheffield and the London School of Economics that ‘shares some of the
characteristics of recent US research in that it focuses on measuring the relationship over time between
people management and other managerial inputs, and business performance outputs’. (Patterson et
al. 2003)
The results provide a clear portrait of the connection between various organizational practices and the
overall firm performance. Regarding HRM practices, Patterson selected those ones which were
resulting as the most relevant from previous literature and personal interviews with senior managers
and – according to the principle that it makes more sense to assess systems of HRM practices instead
than considering them individually – he grouped them together revealing two underlying dimensions:
- Selection, induction, training and use of appraisals represented one factor which they termed
‘acquisition and development of employee skills’.
- Skill flexibility, job responsibility, job variety and use of formal teams were also interrelated
and they termed this factor ‘job design’.
In order to explain the ‘percentage of variation in change in company performance accounted for by
HRM factors’, they used the composite measures of these two groups instead of the individual
measures of the single practices, and made a regression analysis that relate these dimensions to the
overall profitability and productivity of the firm. After doing that, they picked other four main areas of
organizational practices which are conventionally been considered to impact a firm performance:
- Business strategy
- Emphasis on quality
- Use of advanced technology
- Research and development

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With an analogous regression analysis, variation in performance were determined according to each
managerial practice, resulting in an astonishing outcome (Figure 3):
One of the reasons for which HRM practices predicts that much of variation among different
companies performance is for sure that almost every company in a specific market is very committed
in ensuring at least benchmark level of quality, technology and investments in R&D. That is to say that
in these areas companies are similarly competitive or not competitive at all. Conversely, when it comes
to HRM practices, we can find a significant variation due to the different magnitudes of the efforts
companies put in it: more than 2
3⁄ of interviewed firms reported having no formal HRM strategy; only
6% reported having a highly planned training strategy; assessment centers and formal career paths
were hardly engaged.
According to Patterson: “If managers wish to influence the performance of their companies, the results
show that the most important area to emphasize is the management of people. This is ironic, given
that our research has also demonstrated that emphasis on HRM practices is one of the most neglected
areas of managerial practice within organizations. The implications we believe are clear”.
In the following chapters, HRM will be contextualized in nowadays environment, main focuses and
trends will be assessed, and a framework for understanding and predict its evolution will emerge.
‘Impact of People Management Practices on Business Performance’ Patterson et al. (2003) – pg.19

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3. Main trends in society and economics
_________________________________________________________________
As mentioned before, the central part of this study is focused on addressing two wide and overlapping
questions, with the purpose to provide an interpretative scheme of what is going to change in HR
function during the next decade.
In order to reach this objective, this first part of the analysis will start from the identification of those
global trends that are essentially transforming our society. Based on accredited literature, the work
will try to assess how these main social and economic trends are going to affect society and then
organizations in general, before to examine what will be the consequences inside the HRM boundaries.
Importance and renovation of specific HR processes and practices will be then investigated, and a
research-based ‘prediction’ about the future of this business department will emerge.
3.1 Analysis of the main social and economic trends
Change has historically been a constant both in the social and in the economic world. Thus in last years
it has struck us with an extraordinary speed and strength. Compared to the Industrial Revolution of
the late 18th
century, researches estimated that ‘this change is happening 10 times faster and at 300
times the scale, or roughly 3,000 times the impact’ (Dobbs, Manyika, and Woetzel 2015). More than
ever, our success — as a company, an individual or a society — is determined by the ability we exploit
to adapt to these forces.
Thus, in a McKinsey Global Institute annual survey in which was asked 1416 executives about the most
important forces reshaping our society, emerged that ‘there is little change in how respondents view
the importance of global trends compared with previous years— either for business in general or for
their own companies' profits’ (Dye and Stephenson 2010). Evidently, financial crisis and economic
recession have not upset these tendencies. As it emerge from the survey, concerning the ten most
important trends identified by the interviewed themselves, there is a quite optimistic attitude that
connects major shifts in global forces to increased profits (Figure 4). It means that most of the
executives feel ready to embrace to ride the wave of this volatile environment, but as history taught
us, only a very minority of them will manage to exploit competitive advantages in this sense.

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In most of the cases there’s only a partial knowledge of both causes and consequences of these
massive phenomena that keep altering our reality, as the amount of variables involved behind each of
them is very extensive.
Since the aim of this work is to provide HR managers of the future with a broad knowledge about what
to expect and how to be ready to react, here it will be offered a scheme for practitioners to interpret
what is going on and why, through the identification of those main trends that will probably affect
organizing models, tasks and boundaries of the HR department.
In order to make a systematic and logical investigation, the various forces that are reshaping our world
will be simply grouped in three ‘macro-trends’, that will be individually discomposed for the final
purpose.
These macro-trends are:
- Globalization
- Workforce diversity
- Technology
Macro-trends were selected on the basis of their omnipresence in today’s literature. Thus, other major
trends that were relevant to global business issues (such as environmental issues or financial issues)
were excluded from the analysis because they’re thought not that much critical for HRM evolution.
‘Five Forces Reshaping the Global Economy: McKinsey Global Survey Results’ Dye R. (2010)

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Nevertheless, significant relevance in this study will be given to technology, since it is considered to be
the main threat to the Human Resources department. Thus, great importance will be given both to
Globalization and Workforce diversity since they’re surely mutually influencing society, business and
technology itself.
3.1.1 Globalization and society
Globalization has become a very familiar word in the XXI century, the denotation of which has been
vastly discussed by previous research. Anyway, the concept, the cause and the consequences of it will
be briefly outlined for our purpose.
Globalization means that the entirety of the world is progressively behaving as if it was a single, unique
market, with mutually supporting production, reacting to the same needs and consuming similar
goods. Some of the indicator of increasing globalization could be the Gross World Product (grown from
around 18 billion in 1980 to more than 77 billion in 2014) or the amount of Foreign Direct Investment
(World Economics 2013). Besides, it is easy to identify lot of other features that, even if less
measurable, give us an idea of the magnitude of this phenomenon: standardization of goods around
the world, standardization of technologies, standardization of laws, standardization of rights, etc.
It is clear that the different
cultures and behavior in our
world are converging toward a
common point that flatten and
homogenize society.
As a consequence, international
trading was massively amplified
during the past decades, as
shown in the McKinsey chart
aside. It means that an
increasing proportion of goods
and services are traded across
borders instead than been sold
at home. Producers deals with a world of consumers, not anymore with a segment of it.
But what are the causes of this globalization? According to Williamson (2008): “The source lies […] in
the development of technology. The costs of transport, of travel, and above all the costs of
‘No ordinary disruption: The four global forces breaking all the trends’ Dye R., Manyika J. (2015)

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communicating information have fallen dramatically in the postwar period, almost entirely because of
the progress of technology. It is clearly the availability of cheap, rapid and reliable communications
that permits such phenomena, just as this is the key to the integration of the international capital
market”.
Williamson statement gives a suggestion on how these macro-trends we are discussing are, as a matter
of fact, strictly correlated.
3.1.2 Workforce diversity and society
‘Diversity can be defined as acknowledging, understanding, accepting, and valuing differences among
people with respect to age, class, race, ethnicity, gender, disabilities, etc.’ (Esty 1995)
A diverse workforce is the direct expression of a changing and diversely represented society and
marketplace. Increasing globalization (one more time macro-trends are correlated) leads to more
interaction between people with
different ages, needs and
cultures, since physical borders
disappear and people no longer
live in their narrow environment.
Demographic changes, skills
mismatch and ethnic and gender
equality foster the need for
organization to adapt their
workforce in order to better
understand and represent the
actual world they operate in.
As the global life expectancy and
the average age of the world population increases, organizations will also need to change their
approach toward a proactive one, which ensure them to have a diverse and balanced employees’
profile. For the first time ever there will be more than five different generations operating together in
the same environment, with different cultures and attitudes, but with the same goal: this needs to be
managed in a new, smart and careful way in order to exploit those advantages that diversity could
bring.

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3.1.3 Technology and society
More than fifty years operating under Moore’s law made innovation became a disruptive force for our
society. Today we live in a highly-connected, fast-changing environment in which revolutionary
technologies keeps altering the rule of the game year after year. For the first time in the human history,
all the world is instantly approachable, letting communication, knowledge, and information flowing
from one side of the planet to the other in the blink of an eye.
Most important, the rate of adoption of new technologies has increased massively during the last
decades, as shown in the chart below:
‘The difference today is the sheer
ubiquity of technology in our
lives and the speed of change. It
took more than 50 years after
the telephone was invented until
half of American homes had one.
It took radio 38 years to attract
50 million listeners. But
Facebook attracted 50 million
users in its first year and that
number multiplied 100 times
over the next five years. […]
In 2009, two years after the iPhone’s launch, developers had created around 150,000 applications. By
2014, that number had hi 1.2 million, and users had downloaded more than 75 billion total apps, more
than ten for every person on the planet. As fast as innovation has multiplied and spread in recent years,
it is poised to change and grow at an exponential speed beyond the power of human intuition to
anticipate.’ (Dobbs et al. 2015)
The revolution of data is the factor that, combined with increasing processing power and connectivity,
intensify the impact of digitalization and the rhythm of innovation in today society.
The fact that these forces are mutually-amplifying forces, strengthen the power and diffusion of new
technologies among humanity and foster globalization in an evident way.

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3.2 How are these trends going to affect organizations?
After that a general analysis about the effects of the three macro-trends on society has been done, the
study deepen into a more specific relations: the one among the same trends and the organizational
world.
In order to reflect the changes that these disruptive forces bring in our society, companies need to
adapt their organizational models, practices and aims to create a new form of competitive advantage
or to preserve the one they already might have.
3.2.1 Globalization, Workforce diversity, Technology and organizations
As shown in Figure 4 (p.14) the growth in the number of consumers in emerging market and the shift
in global economic activity are seen by executives from all around the world as two of the most
important factors to be considered by their companies for the next decade. Executives knows how
developing economies are increasingly became not only a prominent new market, but also main
providers of talents and innovation. Moreover, increasing in elderly population and the consequent
graying workforce are making it more difficult for developed economies to maintain a stable growth
for the future. Only 13% of
executives expect the gains of
companies in developed
countries to be significant in
the next five to ten years, while
62% of them presume gains to
be moderate (Dye 2010). This
shift in the locus of economic
activity leads to a massive
organizational transformation:
just in the early 2000, 475 of
the 500 largest international
companies according to
Fortune were headquartered
in developed countries; by 2025, researchers state that almost half of those largest companies will be
headquartered in today’s emerging markets (Dobbs et al. 2015).
‘Online and upcoming: The Internet’s impact on aspiring countries’ Nottebohm, Manyika (2012)

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‘Trends Reshaping the Future of HR’ Accenture (2014)
The same research utter that nearly half of the GWP growth between 2010 and 2025 will come from
these emerging countries.
The immediate consequence of this shift is that the entire world will be a provider of customers and
workers in a gradually more equivalent way: the scenario changes toward one in which the borders of
the global talent map disappear. This means that instead of organizing and operating market by
market, an increasing amount of companies will face the need to reorganize their production in a more
agile and fluid way, which allows its products and services to stream worldwide to those places where
the highest benefit can be generated at the most efficient conditions. Even if extremely challenging,
operating in this volatile environment could lead to huge rewards: managers ‘can improve their ability
to manage risks, reduce operating costs, achieve market growth, flexibly respond to changing market
conditions, and acquire highly skilled talent in a way they’ve never been able to before.
To achieve these benefits, businesses will need to transform themselves. They will need to realign their
workforce and leadership with their new global footprint, ensuring that leaders and managers have a
global mindset, can operate across cultures, and come from a variety of backgrounds that are reflective
of the organization’s multi-cultural customer and employee base.’ (Gartside et al. 2014)
As companies struggle to become more responsive and customer-focused, their organizational models
are changing their configurations from the traditional, functional ones in the direction of some more
interconnected, adaptable teams. In point of fact, organizations could no longer survive with purely
outsourcing the home country model everywhere else (International Approach), or setting up separate
operations in different countries (Multinational Approach); instead, a more Global Approach (Figure
5) to internationalization is required, in order to bring respect for and acknowledgment of the different
realities and cultures our world is composed by.
Figure 5:

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3.2.2 The company of the future
Globalization, workforce diversity, technology and countless other forces were growing in scale,
gathering pace and starting to massively affect our society and environment already in the end of the
20th
century. Today, they are upsetting almost every time-honored pattern in practically every aspect
of our world. In every direction, they are causing other trends to break at every moment. Moreover,
the fact that all of them are operating at the same time magnifies the disruptive effect on the economic
world. Even though we’ve never had such an amount of data at our fingertips, forecasts seems to be
progressively less reliable and accurate.
According to Dobbs and Manyika (2015): “If we look at the world through a rearview mirror and make
decisions on the basis of the intuition built on our experience, we could well be wrong. [...] While it is
full of opportunities, this era is deeply unsettling. And there is a great deal of work to be done. We
need to realize that much of what we think we know about how the world works is wrong; to get a
handle on the disruptive forces transforming the global economy; to identify the long-standing trends
that are breaking; to develop the courage and foresight to clear the intellectual decks and prepare to
respond. These lessons apply as much to policy makers as to business executives, and the process of
resetting your internal navigation system can’t begin soon enough.”
Leaders know that they must evolve the structure of their organizations in a more agile and responsive
one, or pay the consequences of these short-term disruptions. This evolution should take place
throughout the entire organization, and transpire across all of its functions in order to be effective.
Think about the magnitude of such a transformation: today’s organization commonly strive for
efficiency, risk reduction and internal consistency mostly by strictly monitoring all of the activities in
an oligarchic decision-making model; standardization and scripting are the principal tools to predict
needs and design responsive systems; effective communication among different functions is rare.
In the future, companies might need to operate in a drastically different manner. Demand might be
hardly forecasted, shifting operations toward an “as-needed” basis in order to respond to it in real
time. When a change arise, they should be able to attract the right talent, at the right place, at the
right time. Employees on every level of the organizational hierarchy could be empowered with
increasingly more decision-making power.
Formidable technologies are emerging, which will presumably make such a world possible.

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3.3 How are these trends going to affect the HR department?
Now that the basis about the relationship among the main global forces and the business has been
grounded, let’s take the work into our specific domain: what will happen to the Human Resources
department with the development of Globalization, Workforce diversity and Technology?
In order to answer to this question, the investigation will proceed with a main distinction about the
combined effect of Globalization and Workforce diversity on Human Capital trends, organizational
culture, skills shortfalls, various talent management practices and consequents new HR organizational
models.
Then, a similar analysis will be conducted in order to identify what will be the new technologic business
tools and then weigh the impact of them upon the main HRM practices and processes, assessing which
one will remain almost unaffected, which one will evolve and in what direction they will do it, and
which one will probably face extinction.
3.3.1 Globalization, Workforce diversity and Human Resources
Human Resources departments are renovating as the contemporary business meets frequent and
intricate challenges, and exploit chances. As stated in the previous chapter, the makeover that Human
Resources need nowadays is a direct consequence of the quick changes within organizations due to
factors such as globalization and workforce diversity. In the global contest within a more horizontal
and connected world, decision making inside a company has become progressively more complex and
tortuous. The new globalized world has enlarged the talent pool for both outstanding and low-skilled
workers. Talents are increasingly becoming one of the main sources for sustaining a competitive
advantage and deeply influence central organizational outcomes such as profitability, customer
satisfaction and overall performances. Companies with the capacity to foreknow and sustainably cope
with their personnel needs, particularly for high skilled employees, will gain the desired results even
in the most volatile of the environments.
According to Bhushan Kapoor (2012), Professor and Chair at the Cal State University, USA: ‘The global
supply of talent is short of its long-term demand, and the gap is a challenge for employers everywhere.
The shortage between the demand and supply of talent is likely to continue to increase, notably for
highly-skilled workers and for the next generation of middle and senior leaders. Most emerging nations
with large populations, including Brazil, Russia, India, and China, may not be able to sustain a net
surplus workforce with the right skills for much longer. Now, more than ever, organizations need to

19
place greater emphasis on attracting human capital rather than financial capital. Because capital is
broadly available from investors and lenders, and innovations can be duplicated relatively easily and
quickly, effective human resource management is the best way to differentiate one company from
another.’
The investigation of this work will now aim to asses to what extent the more important aspects
resulting from increasing globalization and workforce diversity will affect HR departments, which
scenario we should expect and how to promptly readapt the department according to the findings.
3.3.1.1 Extended Workforce
For an increasing amount of companies today, the total workforce is composed by an assortment of
permanent and provisional employees, often including those known as ‘extended workforce’.
Extended workers are those professionals who lend companies their expertise and skills in an
expanded network of consultants, business partners, freelancers and so on.
Economists utter that the extended workforce will carry on expanding as part of a long-term trend.
The Government Accountability Office, using US Labor Department data, found out that, while in 1989
contingent workers represented only 6 percent of the labor force in the US, in early 2011 they already
constituted 31 percent of the total workforce for the same country (Mantell 2011). This kind of
employees help organization to enhance their current set of workers with a highly dynamic and mobile
one, as a response to the volatile environment of today. As a matter of facts, companies are starting
to outsource not only administrative processes but even strategically critical ones. Even top
management and directors are often being replaced by provisional CEOs, CHROs, CMOs and a broad
range of extremely high-skilled profiles in order to solve specific snags.
Once more, technology is facilitating the increasing adoption of extended workers all around the world
through advancements that permit to people to work remotely or to search for almost infinite
opportunities. Furthermore, cloud talent sourcing and social networking are easing the adoption of
these kind of contractors.
This transformation is enabling organizations to exploit four of the main desirable competitive abilities:
 Agility (time-to-market, training costs, staff scaling, flexible mix of skills, …)
 Access to outstanding talent (wider range, highly-performing, highly-specialized, …)
 Continuously matching talent to task
 Promote innovation

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In a survey carried out by Manpower (2009), that interviewed 41000 executives around the globe,
already in 2009 the 34% of interviewed considered extended workforce as a strategically critical
component of their strategy.
But what is the opportunities that this trend offers to the Human Resources function in particular?
‘Quickly bringing together globally dispersed, blended workforces to achieve an organization’s goals
will require no less than a (Human Resources) management revolution. And that revolution is only just
beginning. HR practitioners who can capitalize on and harness the power of the new extended
workforce will position their companies to gain unique advantages and outperform the competition.’
(Gartside et al. 2013)
As custodians of the organizational talent program, HR will need to adapt its structures, mission and
practices in order to reflect this new reality: the classical ‘buy’ vs ‘build’ dilemma should integrate an
increasingly more significant ‘borrow’ alternative. Evidently, use of analytics could represent a critical
point in exploiting the opportunities of the global talent landscape, and to better fit each talent with
each work. A good starting-point could be the redefinition of traditional HR’s ‘customers’ with a more
enlarged and enriched perspective that should include not only permanent employees but also
extended workforce. This means to extend traditional HR practices also to contingent workers, such
as performance management and feedbacks, incentives programs, training and learning and career
development.
3.3.1.2 Global talent pool
As aforesaid, with companies carrying on internationalizing their operations comes more struggles to
find talents at a local level. Companies will progressively be constituted by an international and diverse
workforce. HR must play a crucial role in aiding their business to manage this trend. This means it need
to left behind standardization and universalism that represented the status quo of today’s HRM
practices, and move toward a more customized and glocal attitude.
In this sense, standardization and repeatability of the procedures enabled companies to easily move
into new markets with a sort of plug-and-play approach. However, this strategy doesn’t empower
organizations with the ability to leverage on the different synergies that diversity and complexity could
bring. The big challenge is to balance the need for efficient global and standardized procedures, and
the need to be efficacious and reactive at each local level. In order to achieve this goal, HR should
innovate in five key talent management practices (Gartside et al. 2014):

21
 Use of analytics (to become expert advisors on the global talent map)
 Global talent acquisition
 Global talent mobility
 Global leadership development
 Global virtual teams
Regarding the need to properly allocate its Human Capital across the world, HR could take advantage
of professional analytics software and scenario simulations to determine the best fits. Through a
massive analysis of the social, cultural and legal variables of the interested countries, HR could help
executives in deciding where to ‘train’ talent, where to ‘buy’, where to ‘move’ or where to ‘borrow’ it.
It is important to consider that acquiring strategic employees from an unfamiliar culture is probably
going to be challenging. For this reason, lot of companies actually rely on local employment agencies
when they have to hire in a foreign country. However, new IT communication systems, social
networking and international platforms are opening up to the opportunity for employers and
candidates to better collect and access to an unprecedented amount of high-quality data, making
global talent acquisition more reliable and less expensive. An imperative factor to be considered in this
respect is the rising
importance of talent growing
in emerging economies. As
showed in Figure 6,
developing countries are
already the biggest provider of
talent in Science, Technology,
Engineering and Mathematics,
and they are claiming a higher
percentage year by year. The
magnitude of this workforce
transformation must be
accurately evaluated since the
relevance of the topic and the
competitive difference that
global acquisition policies could make. It is necessary to be acknowledged of how these economies are
growing and to what extent this growth will affect both economic and social world in order to take
proper countermeasures.
Figure 6: Share of STEM talent: Emerging and developed economies
‘No Shortage of Talent: How the Global Market is Producing the STEM Skills Needed for Growth’
Craig et al. (2011)

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An additional central aspect of the global talent map losing its borders is global talent mobility. In this
respect, opportunities are as massively extensive as the challenges. Compensation policies, legislation,
mindset and lot of other variables are still geographically scattered. However companies are improving
existent IT, processes and platforms to facilitate international mobility for all of their employees. The
idea is to move from a traditional push-demand model to a pull-demand one: develop a global mindset
among employees and give them easily approachable opportunities to expatriate. One way to do it is
to foster employees’ global experience since they are young, and not only reserving expatriation for
veterans. “I think the traditional mindset of geographical location will change radically as the young
generation now expects to see the world. Increasingly, you’re going to see a workforce that’s eager to
take on some of the costs and expense for global opportunities themselves. In the past, we’ve always
thought about expats as being at the top of the house. In the future, however, global assignments will
transcend all levels—not only because it’s a business requirement but because it’s a talent requirement
in order for us to attract and retain the best talent” (Gartside et al. 2014).
Even the leadership development will be forced to radically adapt to globalization. A successful leader
will need a global frame of mind to be successful in every context. Once more, HR will play a decisive
role in aiding their actual leaders to develop this kind of frame: through letting them manage a multi-
cultural workforce, or coordinating teams across very different areas, providing them international
experiences and testing them to succeed in different local dynamics. According to Stephen Cohen
(2010), the main characteristics of an effective global leader are the one summed up in the table below:
‘Effective global leadership requires a global mindset’ Cohen S. L. (2010)

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Actually, according to a survey, less than 20% of international companies adopt global assignments to
develop a global mindset among their leaders (Allen, Gosling, and Powell 2013), so it seems there’s
really a lot of space for improvements.
Last but not least, HR have to learn how to manage multi-cultural virtual teams. As companies strive
to globalize their operations worldwide, cultural differences and teaming will play an increasingly key
role in creating and sustaining a competitive advantage. Sharing attributes and values, developing
common ways to communicate and collaborate, training on how to overcome bias and fostering global
sensitivity and open-mindedness are some of the tasks to be achieved to manage this trend.
3.3.1.3 Customization
‘One-size-fits-all’ practices, derived by the current HRM universalistic approach, could no longer be the
state of the art for talent management practices in the future. IT information systems, internet
communication and analytics of big data have opened up the road to a very new trend that could make
the current model becoming obsolete soon: customization.
We’re all benefitting from customization in virtually every aspect of our life as a consumers, from
product differentiation and
personalization to increasingly more
individually targeted ads. In the same
way employees are not only expecting,
but even starting to demand more
customization in their workplace
(Figure 7). Simultaneously, as argued
before, demographic upheavals have
brought a more diverse workforce in
respect of age, gender and ethnicity.
This lead to the need for organizations
to leave behind the search for the ‘best
practice’ and to focus on handling its
Human Capital as a workforce of one.
‘Managing your people as a workforce of one’ Smith and Cantrell (2015)
Figure 7: Benefits of customizing

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According to a research done by Smith and Cantrell (2015), customization of HR practices could lead
to huge paybacks: ‘when employees get rewarded in ways they personally value, they will likely feel
more motivated to excel at their job. When they can learn through approaches that suit their own
learning styles, they build skills. When they’re able to work in ways that meet their personal and job
needs (for instance, they’re given space to concentrate or tools to collaborate), they become more
productive. Customization can also help companies attract and hire top talent by tailoring recruiting
practices toward specific individuals. Moreover, it can increase engagement and job satisfaction, thus
reducing attrition and lowering turnover costs’.
In addition, this shift could reveal itself as a big opportunity for the HR department to gain significant
strategic importance: similarly to what happened to the marketing function with the adoption of
customization, HR could fit more incisively in the top layers of strategic planning. The idea is to develop
a structured framework that permits flexibility and user-friendliness. A strategy to achieve this bold
goal could start from the segmentation of a company’s workforce, exactly in the way a marketing
specialist segment its customers’ target. Analytics gave us a big contribution in this respect. Once that
the various segments are defined, a set of modular choices could be proposed to employees in order
to meet their individual work expectations. Organizations that will achieve to create such a prosper
environment will build new basis through which they can attain unprecedented levels of performance,
propelled by talented, committed and motivated people.
3.3.1.4 Culture
Not so many factors contribute in such a relevant way to corporate success as culture does. Resulting
from a Deloitte survey, a staggering amount of business executives, nearly nine in ten, consider culture
as a very important factor to achieve competitive advantage, and the importance given to this theme
is increasing year after year (Kaplan, Dollar, and Melian 2016).
But what is culture about? The same authors of the aforementioned survey define it in this way:
‘Culture describes “the way things work around here”. Specifically, it includes the values, beliefs,
behaviors, artifacts, and reward systems that influence people’s behavior on a day-to-day basis. It is
driven by top leadership and becomes deeply embedded in the company through a myriad of processes,
reward systems, and behaviors. Culture includes all the behaviors that may or may not improve
business performance. Today, culture is a CEO-level issue and something that can be measured and
improved to drive strategy.’

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The relevance of being acknowledged about culture emerges especially when things don’t go in the
expected way. Merging two companies with different culture, for example, could be extremely
harming for both if this issue isn’t managed properly. As businesses strive in developing their culture,
HR’s job is to actively shape it. When managed well, culture ties people together and drives
performances. Once culture is described, it outlines who will be hired, who deserves promotions and
fosters desired behaviors across organizations.
In this new globalized, highly-connected world, managing different culture becomes a must do for
every international company. Corporate culture could be both explicitly designed and described or
implicitly based on leaders’ personalities. In both cases employees will learn culture trough training
and by observation. Companies that ignore the importance of this issue will almost certainly face
problems in the future in attracting, retaining and developing the best talents. As a matter of fact,
different cultures
that failed to be
integrated properly
are the cause of the
failure of the 70
percent of M&A
(KPMG 2011).
From a purely
theoretical point of
view, it is really
complex to find out
and quantify key cultural variables. The first major contribution was given by Hofstede in 1980: he
described culture as the combination of five key dimensions in which national cultures diverges.
Through his framework, we are now able to ‘measure’ the cultural distance among different countries
(an example is given in the chart above) and adopt the consequent strategy. More than ever, today’s
companies face the challenges and the opportunities of managing such a global, diverse workforce.
One of the main HR challenges will be to balance societal and organizational cultures and, at the same
time, fostering diversity. There are some cultural factors, such as organization’s management styles
or performance management systems that can be adapted to better fit the local culture, while some
others, such as human right policies or mission and values, cannot be negotiated. HR needs to assess
which attributes are better to be adapted, and which ones are better to be preserved in order to keep
organizational integrity. In order to do this, behaviors needs to be ‘measured’ through a set of

26
empirical tools and confronted with the desired culture. If measurement reveals that the actual culture
doesn’t match the desired one, a set of action must be taken to better communicate and better shape
values into the workplace.
3.3.1.5 Skills shortfall
Even if there are myriad of people currently unemployed in virtually every market around the world,
lot of companies are struggling to find the skills they need. As reported by one of the latest research,
as much as 35% of organizations worldwide are having difficulty in filling strategic positions, and 73%
of them, lament lack of experience, abilities or knowledge as the main impediment to employing
needed talent (ManpowerGroup 2013). This means that talent shortages are not necessarily linked
with a specific jobless
rate. For example, the
most recent data cite
that unemployment
rate in Japan is around
3.2%, while Ireland
rate is at 9.7%
(Eurostat 2016): in
spite of this, the
overall percentage of
organization reporting
having difficulties in
filling their jobs is
completely different
in those countries
compared to what
unemployment let us
presuppose, as shown
in Figure 8.
Even more alarming is the fact that this trend is only expected to intensify in the next ten years: due
to the baby-boomers retirement, and the weakening birthrate in developed economies, a ferocious
competition over talent will probably take place. Additionally, economists predict that around 80% of
Figure 8: ‘2013 Talent Shortage Survey Results’ ManpowerGroup 2013

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all the jobs over the next ten years will need an intermediate or high level of skills (CEDEFOP 2010),
exactly the ones that companies are missing the most.
According to some Accenture’s experts: ‘To compete in this brave new world, HR organizations will
need to shift from reactive, supply-side fulfillment of skills to proactive, demand-side fulfillment. Think
about it: “just-in-time” processes helped manufacturing companies reduce costs and improve flexibility
by getting materials delivered immediately before they’re needed for production. Likewise, HR
organizations will need to develop a “just-in-time” workforce—one that enables them to instantly find
and deploy skills when and where they’re required in the business.’ (Lavelle, Tambe, and Cantrell 2015)
A strategy that could help to achieve such a fulfillment would start with a deep analysis of the talent
landscape, through the use – for example – of data modeling and analytics, and advising business
leaders on how to obtain the needed skills (geographic pool, extended workforce, training, redesigning
jobs, …), balancing benefits and costs.
In addition, selection and recruiting specialists should proactively search for the needed talent and find
a model to best identify and attract outstanding talent. In this respect, some interesting data suggests
us a possible new trend: 53% of workers report employers document their skills, and 60% of them are
willing to share personal information with other potential employers (Smith et al. 2012). This mean
that social and job platform could really improve their reliability and give an unprecedented amount
of relevant information to recruiters.
Fostering global mobility will be needed as well, as a driving force for making talents flowing easily
where they are more needed.
All in all, skill development should be a continuous process through which employees could update
their skills and remain competitive and motivated. In these respect, P2P online learning could be a way
more efficient method than the slower-moving traditional training. Actually, only 21% of employees
states they gain new skills from their company’s formal training program (Smith et al. 2012).
These new approach needed for a demand-driven model to fulfill skills will massively redefine the HR
function. New roles need to be created (e.g. talent data analyst) and extended workforce skills must
be managed in a new relevant manner. Training could be totally revolutionized, as the skills required
to provide it.
Overall, the HR department will likely transform in a more business integrated function which
proactively searches, attracts and develops skills and talents, and builds a ‘just-in-time’ workforce able
to succeed in the most turbulent of the environments.

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3.3.2 Technology and Human Resources
We’ve just seen how shifts in extended workforce, global talent pool, customization, culture and skills
shortfalls are going to significantly affect the HR function in the next decade. These attributes of
increased globalization and workforce diversity have been treated both as a challenge and an
opportunity for HR department to improve its impact across the whole organization and to better align
its mandate to the strategic goals of the company. Nevertheless, all of them are strictly linked with the
third macro-trend discussed before, technology, which permitted such a global connectivity and
emerging opportunities for the whole world population.
Before to go deeper with the analysis, here it is an interesting and brief report made by Ian Person, a
renowned full-time futurologist, about some of the main technologic trends that are already taking
place in our society:
‘Miniaturization will continue. With video visor displays, and gesture, voice recognition and finger-tip
tracking for interfacing, mobile phones can be reduced to the size of jewelry. Smart dust will monitor
environment and traffic levels, and provide data for augmented reality. Sensor networks will enable
many machine-generated information services.
Certainly, smart meters will drive changes in the energy industry, as micro power generation springs
up and starts to compete head-on with centralized power stations.
Miniaturization will reduce environmental footprints for information technology. By 2020, active
contact lenses will be available and could replace all the displays we currently need with less than a
gram of glass. This will increase markets for visual services, but reduce markets for large displays.
The clean energy industry will link to electric transport and create a cleaner economy, with health
benefits too, but this won't happen overnight. Although significant progress will occur by 2020, most
changes will happen later.
Nevertheless, an industry that exists today to provide parts and services for traditional engines will be
replaced by one for electrical systems.
Artificial intelligence will improve productivity year-on-year. Simple administrative tasks have already
been captured by our computers. By 2020, even professional knowledge and skills will be routinely
matched by AI, with the semantic web enabling a range of automated administration. There will be less
need to outsource call centers when AI can deal with queries locally and more cheaply.’
(Pearson 2013)

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This work intentionally splits technology from the other two macro-trends because of the potentially
disruptive effect that it could have on our department. As mentioned in the introduction, a significant
number of researchers and executives spell that technologic innovations will replace main HRM tasks
and jobs, leaving no place at the table for the department itself. This means that, contrarily to
globalization and workforce diversity, technology could both represent an opportunity or a deathly
threat for HR practitioners. For sure it will be the source of huge challenges. For this reason, this study
will detect the main technologic tools and trends that are going to be used to better manage people,
assess their impact on the most important HRM practices and processes and identify some responsive
strategies for HR managers to embrace these opportunities and not to be overcome by them.
3.3.2.1 Big Data & Analytics
In the information economy of our century data are gaining an increasing importance. Virtually every
activity we do has started being datafied. Using the words of John Bersin (2013), founder of Bersin by
Deloitte: ‘Think about it this way: Facebook has “datafied” our friend network. Google has “datafied”
our search and information retrieval. LinkedIn has “datafied” our professional connections. Twitter is
“datafying” news and real time information. Waze is “datafying” our driving. GE is “datafying” all its
engines, power plants, and machines’. Each of these companies is storing, analyzing and monetizing
these information, which we define as Big Data, in a progressively more accurate way. This trend had
is first revolutionary impact on the marketing function, almost 25 years ago, opening the gate to
market segmentation, customer scoring and improving demand forecasting. In the same way, Big Data
are beginning to massively affect the way people inside the company are managed. Most companies’
largest expense is their employees’ payroll, but very few executives truly understand what drives
performance among their employees. Organizations are collecting personal information about internal
and external workforce since the last three decades: demographic and educational information, job
history and performance records, etc. But very few have started using these data in a scientifically valid
way in order to make decisions.
At least until this year.
Pushed by competitive pressure and greater availability of integrated systems, companies are
massively building people analytics teams and developing increasingly more data-driven solutions for
their businesses. In a survey made by Deloitte (Figure 9), it results that on average 77 percent of the

30
companies believe that people analytics represents today a very important issue (Collins et al. 2016).
Processing and connecting Petabytes of data is already in our technological knowledge, and is
beginning to help managers to improve the overall business wealth. Regarding HR, people analytics is
affecting main processes and tasks in an unequaled way. Let’s think for example to selection processes
and their Big Data, the Talent Analytic: information regarding professional career, compensations
history, KSAs, engagement, formation and so on are data that, if properly interpreted and linked, lead
to the selection of the right people for the right job, and identify potentially “toxic” profiles. Once that
the resource has been chosen, companies needs to retain it: in this sense, there are already studies
about the motivational driver of each individual employee, in order to keep his/her emotional strength
and foster attitudes and engagement, that is, processing data can help to predict motivational and
performance trends.
These technologies give us a hint about how People Analytics could represent a great opportunity for
HRM to perform in a new, very efficient way. One of the main advantages for HR professionals could
be that they have now the chance to show the value and the Return On Investment that this shift
toward analytics could bring, which will result in a higher willing to invest more in analytics themselves.
Obviously, this leads back to justified and larger investments in Human Resources as well.
Figure 9: Percentage of respondents rating people analytics as an “important” or “very important” trend
‘Global Human Capital Trends 2016’ Deloitte (2016)

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But where companies can begin?
Maybe, partnering with marketing could be a good start since this function has already multi-year
experience on monitoring, leveraging and managing external data. This experience could represent a
solid ground on which develop models and systems that do the same with company’s internal data.
Then, remaining focused on business priorities, there’s the need to build, as aforementioned, a People
Analytics team that will be in charge of collecting, storing, analyzing and connecting data. This require
a completely new set of skills and abilities, which are not that common in today’s HR departments.
Business consulting and external partnership could play a critical role in leveraging analytics skills.
Datafication of HR is strongly challenging most of the main processes of the department itself, creating
new roles and automatizing some others. Activities such as selection, recruiting, performance
management, staffing, compensation and every administrative related practice, will be probably
replaced by automated programs and software; nonetheless, lots of new job profiles and relative skills
will be required to manage these data and to fit the best model for each context. This means that
probably programming and managerial skills will take the place of today’s administrative ones. There
are already in place job profiles such as the HR data manager, lots of HR data tools and the training
system is increasingly including statistics, visualization and concept of data analysis.
Google was one of the pioneer in People Analytics management, investing lot of economic and non-
economic resources in managing data. HR decisions at Google are entirely taken by their powerful
‘People Analytics Team’, which has, as two of their most important values and goals these quotes
(Sullivan 2013):
- “All people decisions at Google are based on data and analytics.”
- The goal is to… “bring the same level of rigor to people-decisions that we do to engineering
decisions.”
John Sullivan, teacher at the San Francisco State University, author and HR thought leader, evidenced
some of the most important Google’s HR practices that were strictly linked with People Analytics and
data:
“1. Leadership characteristics and the role of managers – Its “project oxygen” research analyzed reams of
internal data and determined that great managers are essential for top performance and retention. It
further identified the eight characteristics of great leaders. The data proved that rather than superior
technical knowledge, periodic one-on-one coaching which included expressing interest in the employee
and frequent personalized feedback ranked as the No. 1 key to being a successful leader. Managers are
rated twice a year by their employees on their performance on the eight factors.
2. The PiLab — Google’s PiLab is a unique subgroup that no other firm has. It conducts applied experiments
within Google to determine the most effective approaches for managing people and maintaining a

32
productive environment (including the type of reward that makes employees the happiest). The lab even
improved employee health by reducing the calorie intake of its employees at their eating facilities by
relying on scientific data and experiments (by simply reducing the size of the plates).
3. A retention algorithm — Google developed a mathematical algorithm to proactively and successfully
predict which employees are most likely to become a retention problem. This approach allows
management to act before it’s too late and it further allows retention solutions to be personalized.
4. Predictive modeling – People management is forward looking at Google. As a result, it develops
predictive models and use “what if” analysis to continually improve their forecasts of upcoming people
management problems and opportunities. It also uses analytics to produce more effective workforce
planning, which is essential in a rapidly growing and changing firm.
5. Improving diversity – Unlike most firms, analytics are used at Google to solve diversity problems. As a
result, the people analytics team conducted analysis to identify the root causes of weak diversity recruiting,
retention, and promotions (especially among women engineers). The results that it produced in hiring,
retention, and promotion were dramatic and measurable.
6. An effective hiring algorithm – One of the few firms to approach recruiting scientifically, Google
developed an algorithm for predicting which candidates had the highest probability of succeeding after
they are hired. Its research also determined that little value was added beyond four interviews,
dramatically shortening time to hire. Google is also unique in its strategic approach to hiring because its
hiring decisions are made by a group in order to prevent individual hiring managers from hiring people for
their own short-term needs. Under “Project Janus,” it developed an algorithm for each large job family
that analyzed rejected resumes to identify any top candidates who they might have missed. They found
that they had only a 1.5% miss rate, and as a result they hired some of the revisited candidates.
7. Calculating the value of top performers – Google executives have calculated the performance
differential between an exceptional technologist and an average one (as much as 300 times higher).
Proving the value of top performers convinces executives to provide the resources necessary to hire, retain,
and develop extraordinary talent. Google’s best-kept secret is that people operations professionals make
the best “business case” of any firm in any industry, which is the primary reason why they receive such
extraordinary executive support.
8. Workplace design drives collaboration – Google has an extraordinary focus on increasing collaboration
between employees from different functions. It has found that increased innovation comes from a
combination of three factors: discovery (i.e. learning), collaboration, and fun. It consciously designs its
workplaces to maximize learning, fun, and collaboration (it even tracks the time spent by employees in the
café lines to maximize collaboration). Managing “fun” may seem superfluous to some, but the data
indicates that it is a major factor in attraction, retention, and collaboration.
9. Increasing discovery and learning – Rather than focusing on traditional classroom learning, the
emphasis is on hands-on learning (the vast majority of people learn through on the job learning). Google
has increased discovery and learning through project rotations, learning from failures, and even through
inviting people like Al Gore and Lady Gaga to speak to their employees. Clearly self-directed continuous
learning and the ability to adapt are key employee competencies at Google.
10. It doesn’t dictate; it convinces with data – The final key to Google’s people analytics team’s success
occurs not during the analysis phase, but instead when it present its final proposals to executives and
managers. Rather than demanding or forcing managers to accept its approach, it instead acts as internal
consultants and influences people to change based on the powerful data and the action
recommendations that they present. Because its audiences are highly analytical (as most executives are),
it uses data to change preset opinions and to influence.” (Sullivan 2013)

33
3.3.2.2 Social Networks
Social networking has become a daily-based activity for 2.3 billion of users all around the world, and
the growth rate has been around +10% in the last year (Kemp 2016). It’s hard to think that almost ten
years ago, no person or businesses had a Facebook profile, a Twitter, or an Instagram account. It’s even
harder to predict how much more – and how – this forces will change our world in the next decade.
Companies are already moving beyond a passive ‘adoption’ of the main social networks, toward more
integrated systems that include social functions across everyday business practices, from sales and
product development, to marketing and HR. An outstanding example of well-integrated social strategy
could be found in IBM: across the whole corporation, everyone – from the executives to each
employee – has his/her own IBM’s social network page, and get provided with easy access to hundreds
of internal information sources, communities, instant messaging, wikis, etc. This system allows them
to develop more and diverse product, easily find and keep in contact with customers and suppliers,
train a generation of high-skilled leaders and build a genuine feeling of belonging and community spirit
(IBM 2016). One of the main elements needed for such a shift, and a driver for the success of every
social strategy is a corporate culture that fosters sharing and collaboration. This attitude is a necessary
condition for the implementation of every social networking platform, since without it, social networks
of every kind couldn’t exploit their primary functions. In an interview with Sandy Carter, made by
Forbes, the IBM’s General Manager utters that: ‘For organizations with a traditional, hierarchal
structure, this is a big shift in thinking that will affect how, when, where, and what employees
communicate. It can be a bit scary for executives to overcome this initial hurdle, but once done, the
results will speak for themselves. […]Either way, it starts with leading by example, communicating that
it’s a priority, and following through. The transformation into a social business doesn’t happen in a
month, six months, or even a year. It’s a constant evolution and must be ingrained into an
organization’s core values - rather than a temporary priority that shifts out of focus next quarter.’ (The
Muse 2013)
On the other side, social networks are already disrupting the selection and recruitment function, from
both the employer’s and the employee’s point of view. There are two main reasons for which social is
eroding the traditional values of recruiting:
- Companies have access to a network of industries and talent, with a global quick reach;
- Talents can easily evaluate, compare and find the best offer for themselves.
The first point leads to a strong decrease of the adoption of external recruiting agencies. Since 2011,
more than half of all U.S. companies is decreasing their expenses in recruiting agencies, being provided
with an enriched, cheaper and instant network through a diverse set of social platforms (Bersin &

34
Associates 2011). LinkedIn, the most renowned professional social network, in about 15 years since its
creation, now counts more than 450 million of users, and more than 93% of companies using it for
hiring (Chaykowski 2016).
‘And this growth is just beginning.
The company offers a wide range of
recruiting solutions now includes:
 LinkedIn Recruiter (the company’s
recruiting platform) gives companies
access to the entire database of 150
million professionals to find and seek
passive candidates,
 LinkedIn Job Postings, lets you post
jobs and buy highly targeted ads
(LinkedIn ads are very intelligent and
they promote themselves to LinkedIn
users in a very powerful way), and
our research shows that they can be much more effective than ads placed on Facebook for professional
positions,
 LinkedIn Employment Branding services now let you build out a career website within the LinkedIn
network, to attract candidates, promote jobs to the right people,
 LinkedIn Talent Pipeline manages your stream of incoming candidates, giving you capabilities similar
to a candidate marketing and applicant tracking system.
And there is more to come’, according to Bersin (2012). Moreover, most innovative companies are
developing their own platforms and algorithms that, combined with the sourcing power of social
networks, help them to identify and predict which kind of people best fits with their needs.
So, similarly to what forecasted for People Analytics, even social networks will disrupt some of today’s
traditional HR practices, probably making nowadays’ job positions and selection and recruiting skills
obsoletes in a few years. This means that new roles and skills needed will be created in order to manage
the hiring function in a more integrated and social way, build a stronger employer brand or better
matching KSAs and tasks. In a world in which talent management is becoming more significant than
ever, the socially and digitally powered HR managers will be in a stronger position in order to play a
key role in enabling the company to create a competitive advantage.
‘Job Seekers: Social Media is Even More Important than You Thought’ The Muse (2013)

35
3.3.2.3 Artificial Intelligence
Probably, a very significant variable hasn’t been highlighted appropriately in the last chapters:
computer and machines are getting better and faster, searching and processing an unprecedented
amount of data in less time as possible. And this is only the beginning.
A lot of interest has been stimulated by surprising new progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI), a field
renowned for its failure to fulfill its promises. At least until 2012. During the recent years, AIs
technology completely exploded, due to smarter
applications and most of all to the adoption of
Deep Learning technologies, which allows
computers to learn and improve through
processing lots of examples rather than being
human-programmed. Investments on AI
companies in 2015 have been ten times higher
than investments in 2010, as shown in Figure 10.
This means that we already have data
programming machines in a progressively better
and smarter way. Where some see danger, others
see opportunity. Artificial Intelligence actually
works for pattern recognition and resource
matching. This means that, to some extent, the
answer to every question strictly depends on the clusters of examples and/or resources that the
developer provides to the machine for learning. The more the system gets utilized, the more it became
‘expert’ in solving cluster of problems, and it will start searching for its brand new patterns on itself.
The impact of such a force on everyday life will be disruptive. AIs are already the key component to
power search engines, identify spam mails, recognize voices or images, detect frauds or hidden issues,
or suggest you a personalized list of services and products. So business and social life is already
transforming according to it.
Figure 10: ‘The return of the machinery question’ Standage, T. (2016)
‘The Roles and Uses of Artificial Intelligence in Resource Discovery’ Thurber, J (2014)

36
But what could be the consequence for the HR department?
One logical assumption to be considered is that, as much as these machines could become smarter
until becoming virtually perfect, there will always exist the need for human beings to coordinate and
direct them through a strategy and toward updating goals. If machines should cross this ‘limit’, and
become able to autonomously take always the best decision to manage an organization, all the actual
business world and labor market would be completely disrupted.
Hence, human beings will be just enabled with new capabilities and systems that allows them to take
better decisions and get rid of the massive amount of administrative mistakes. In the specific case of
the HR function, AIs could be useful for a lot of tasks, such as tracking employees’ engagement, support
his/her development and match his/her skills, create an employees’ referral network, policy tracking,
talent discovery or background checks. It’s predictable that with the actual rate of development, soon
algorithms will be able to identify the patterns of a desirable managerial behavior and, scanning
through employee’s mails, calendar and personal skills and attitudes, provide him with precious hints
at the right time. Insofar as these can only seem ‘sci-fi’ speculation at the time, companies seriously
investing on AI systems and technologies like the Deep Learning have just rocketed the development
on this field to a whole new level. As aforementioned, all this could represent both a very good
opportunity, as uttered by Jerry Thurber, Co-Founder and CEO at Innotrieve…
“Artificial intelligence offers some new and very interesting advantages to the practice of HR and
specifically to the process of resource discovery. Just to name a few:
• Goes beyond key words to find non-standard descriptions and less obvious job-fit;
• Fast and accurate and takes only seconds to cull through millions of profiles;
• Perfect for the new world of social recruiting by leveraging the social footprint;
• Gets Smarter by learning what’s important to you.” (Thurber 2014)
…or spell the end of work and corporations as we know it, as humorously stated by John Seely Brown.
Xerox Corporation:
“The corporation of the future will be made up of one employee and a dog. The employee is there to
monitor the machines. And the dog is there to make sure s/he doesn’t touch anything”. (Brown 1997)

37
4. Assessing HR managers’ competencies
and mission of today and of tomorrow
_____________________________________________
The last analytic chapter of this study is focused on the identification and investigation of todays’ HR
managers’ competencies and missions, with the aim to predict how these are going to modify
according to the abovementioned global trends.
4.1 Competencies and mandates of an HR manager today
A competency is the blend of knowledge, skills and all the abilities one needs to effectively perform a
job duty. There are general and technical competencies, and both are necessary for each occupation.
When it comes to HR, different researchers and executives tried to categorize required KSAs for
managerial positions in personnel management. The HR University, the US Federal Government’s
training resource center for Human Resources professionals, identified the main general and technical
HR competencies as it follows, in order to give specific training to senior HR specialists:
Technical Competencies:
Classification
Compensation
Employee Benefits
HR Development
HR Information Systems
Staffing
Performance Management
Employee Relations
Labor Relations
Policy
Executive Services
General Competencies:
Attention to Detail
Decision Making
Flexibility
Negotiating
Information Management
Integrity
Interpersonal Skills
Jurisprudence
Oral Communication
Organizational Awareness
Planning and Evaluating
Problem Solving
Project Management
Self-Management
Teamwork
Workforce Planning
‘Human Resources Management Competency Model’ HR University (2015)

38
In late 2000, Schuler, Jackson and Storey listed an untraditional set of general and technical
competencies which fulfillment would have led to successful managers. These include:
‘Business Competencies:
 Industry knowledge
 Competitor understanding
 Financial understanding
 Global perspective/knowledge
 Strategic analysis
 Multiple stakeholder sensitivity
Leadership Competencies:
 Strategic visioning:
 Managing cultural diversity
 Creator of learning culture
 Planning and decision making skills
 Value shaper Change and Knowledge
Management Competencies:
 Network building:
 HR Alignment
 Managing learning and knowledge transfer
 Consulting / Influencing
 Group / Process Facilitation
 Organization Development / Effectiveness
Professional / Technical Competencies:
 Staffing
 Performance Management
 Remuneration / Reward Systems
 Employee Relations
 Succession Planning
 Union Relations
 Diversity Management’ (Schuler, Jackson, and Storey 2000)

39
Apart from this ‘academic’ vision of HR’s competencies, others researchers tried to find out models or
maps which line out the diverse roles that HR function could represents in different companies. For
example, Reilly (2000) developed a map to link
contribution given, time orientation and the
three main roles that HR departments fill in
today’s organization, as shown in the figure
aside.
In other words, Reilly identified that the
“strategist/integrator” role is the one which is
more probably to make a long-term,
strategically significant contribution, while the
traditional roles of “administrator/controller”
and “advise/consultant” gives a more short-medium term tactical contribution.
Starting from Reilly assumptions of a strategist role, Ulrich and Brockbank developed in 2005 a
reformulation of the 1997’s model which was focused on this fresh vision of HR management. The
model listed the following roles as the ones to be filled by the Human Resources manager inside the
boundaries of its organization, resumed by Michael Armstrong:
‘● Strategic partner – consists of multiple dimensions: business expert, change agent, strategic HR
planner, knowledge manager and consultant, combining them to align HR systems to help accomplish
the organization’s vision and mission, helping managers to get things done, and disseminating learning
across the organization.
● Employee advocate – focuses on the needs of today’s employees through listening, understanding
and empathizing.
● Human capital developer – in the role of managing and developing human capital (individuals and
teams), focuses on preparing employees to be successful in the future.
● Functional expert – concerned with the HR practices that are central to HR value, acting with insight
on the basis of the body of knowledge they possess. Necessary to distinguish between the foundation
HR practices – recruitment, learning and development, rewards, etc. – and the emerging HR practices
such as communications, work process and organization design, and executive leadership
development.
● Leader – leading the HR function, collaborating with other functions and providing leadership to
them, setting and enhancing the standards for strategic thinking and ensuring corporate governance.’
(Armstrong 2006)
‘HR Shared Services and the Realignment of HR’ Reilly (2000)

40
4.2 Competencies and mandates of an HR manager tomorrow
During February, this year, WANTED Analytics released the ’20 Most In-Demand HR Skills’, an
investigation about the most required abilities both regarding technical and personal skills (2016).
From their study, came out that almost purely-administrative competencies such as legal compliance,
familiarity with traditional staffing practices, selection and recruiting platforms, or benefits and
incentives models, are still among the most in-demand skills, even if lowering in importance.
As emerged above in this work, the majority of these administrative tasks, as most of the compliance,
will be made obsolete from emerging new technologies and systems, and a new massively globalized
talent pool which needs to be managed in an agile way. Reinforcing the thesis of the strategic
integrated - ‘business partner’ approach to the HR of the
future, managers must focus their efforts toward
business priorities instead of dedicating too much time to
policies and practices often impractical. There will be a
need for a higher ability in identifying both challenges and
opportunities, such as understanding the business needs
on an updating basis. As discussed regarding the
workforce diversity and the globalized pool, talent
management and succession planning will represent
more than ever a key role in creating or sustaining a
competitive advantage. Moreover, training systems will
be disrupted, focusing toward a customized, individual
development system which will enable leaders to
accelerate organizational effectiveness and competitiveness. Employer branding has multiplied its
impact through internet and social networks, and the same social media are disrupting selection and
recruitment practices as we know it.
HR professionals will need to build genuine relationship of trust and transparence with business
leaders, and take decisions and positions about how to make the organization more successful. They
must be integrators and innovator at the same time, and technology promoter. Big picture thinking
would be really useful to increase efficacy in strategical contexts. The importance of People Analytics
has already been discussed, so as those practices that lead to be proficient in this field.
‘The Role and Future of HR: The CEO’s Perspective’ Balthazard (2011)

41
On the basis of what emerged from Chapter 3, some of the skills that will make a difference for the HR
professionals of the future could be:
 Strategic thinking
 People Analytics
 Scenario-modeling
 Mentoring
 Negotiation
 Marketing skills
 Social Networking
 Financial hints
 Organizational design
 Decision-making
 International experience
 Programming
A manager that excel in most, or all of these skills has the real opportunity to make HR function became
a crucial component of organizational performance even in the most capricious and highly-competitive
environment.
4.3 Bottom Line
HR department is going to face a massive makeover in the next decade.
Today’s professional will have to reinvent themselves to fit in such a transforming environment.
Organizations must be led in a very agile way, and this will pass from HRM hands.
There’s the need for the executive to really be acknowledged and involved in HRM issues, so as to
strategically align this function to the organizational goals.
Hiring and developing HR leaders with such a mindset allows HR department to have the maximum
impact within the company boundaries, and within their career in the future.

42
5. Professionals’ point of view
_________________________________________________________________
As a corollary of this work, there are listed a set of four interviews regarding the main topic discussed,
and related to our research questions. The target of the interview is intentionally chosen according to
the principle of comprising the most diverse and inclusive opinions: an academic contribute, two HR
professionals and a non-HR line-manager point of view. The scenarios emerging from these different
fields’ specialists, confirm a good part of the thesis developed and sustained in this study.
Participants were sourced through a personal network of contact in the HR academic and professional
environments, on the basis of a renowned interest and experience in the field, corroborated (relatively
to Mr. Ruta and the Marketing Manager) by various publications.
Willingness to participate to this project was assessed via e-mail, and in the same way answers were
collected. Questions and results are here listed:
- QUESTION 1 -
What do you think will be the future of nowadays’ HR department? Will it survive and adapt, or will it face extinction?
- QUESTION 2 -
Which HR processes and HRM practices will be probably replaced by automated systems and which ones will not?
- QUESTION 3 -
Who will deliver the function in the future? HR specialists or Top Management? Could generalists still have a place at
the table?
- QUESTION 4 -
What will be skills and abilities required by the HR Manager of the future?

43
Interviewed: Interviewee decided to stay anonymous
Profession: HR Country Manager Spain – Organizational Advisory company
- ANSWER 1 –
In my view, the HR function has been historically very simple.
In the old days, before XX century, people wanted jobs, jobs were simple (mainly manual jobs) and
companies were able to supply those jobs. When jobs offered and jobs wanted were unbalanced, then
salaries changed dramatically. Those days just required daily recruiters.
In the XX century most governments developed labor laws with the raise of unions. Complex
agreements between employers and employees were signed in order to ensure stability on top of
everything.
HR departments were born and developed in those days (before the 70’s). They were mainly
gatekeepers of the labor laws and the union agreements. The majority of HR professionals were
lawyers, just ensuring compliance.
When business organizations became more and more complex (during the 80’s), with more intellectual
jobs than manual jobs, and with a high percentage of qualified people, the HR departments that were
in charge of labor laws and agreements started to develop the so called “HR techniques”, in order to
understand and manage more complex jobs. Job analysis, competencies, performance, salary
management, potential evaluation and so on and on, were the new frontier of HR departments.
HR faces now a completely different scenario. Machines massively perform manual jobs, remaining
jobs are extremely specialized, people (not only youngsters) value life balance, commitment is crucial
and big organizations are not appealing anymore. At the same time, the society is becoming extremely
heterogeneous, there are many kinds of families and people circumstances may vary several times in
a lifetime. In this new scenario, HR techniques and labor laws become obsolete. So HR Departments
do.
For me, the most important threat faced by HR Departments in the future is that HR will no longer be
a “technical” issue, but a business issue. As a result, HR will need strategies. Accounting for instance
will remain technical, you will always need accountants to know your financial situation, and
organizations do not design accounting strategies, but HR will need fit for business purposes strategies,
which is not the case today. For instance, when we talk about recruitment, most organizations are
looking for young graduates, with 2 to 5 years experience, speaking 2 or 3 languages, and with very

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