Technology – Page 15

May 25, 2022

Trans-Atlantic Framework Would Ease EU-to-US Data Flows

?The United States and the European Commission (EC) have agreed in principle to a new protocol—the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework—that would make it easier for companies to transfer personal information, including employee details, from European Union (EU) nations to the U.S.

The new framework, announced in March, seeks to address privacy concerns that the EU’s Court of Justice cited in 2020 when it invalidated an earlier protocol, the Privacy Shield Framework. Legal experts expect privacy activists to challenge the new agreement, as they successfully did with the Privacy Shield and an earlier framework.

The Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework aims to put in place better privacy protections to limit U.S. intelligence activities involving EU residents’ personal data and would allow EU residents to seek redress through an independent Data Protection Review Court.

The EC cited several key principles comprising the new framework, noting that:

Data will be able to flow freely and safely between the EU and participating American companies.
New rules and binding safeguards would limit U.S. intelligence authorities’ access only to data that is “necessary and proportionate” to protect national security, and intelligence agencies will adopt procedures to ensure effective oversight of new privacy and civil liberties standards.
A new independent, two-tier redress system, including the Data Protection Review Court, would investigate European residents’ complaints about U.S. intelligence authorities’ access to their personal data.
Specific monitoring and review mechanisms will be put in place.

Streamlining Data Management

The Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework must go through various regulatory steps before it becomes effective and available to multinational companies.

The EU Court of Justice’s decision to invalidate the Privacy Shield Framework in 2020 “left a gap in safeguards available for exports of personal data to the USA, which the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework is seeking to fill,” said Katie Hewson, a partner specializing in United Kingdom (U.K.) and EU data protection and privacy law with Stephenson Harwood in London.

Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, safeguards must be in place to ensure that any personal data exported to other countries is protected to equivalent EU standards, Hewson noted.

Before it was invalidated, the Privacy Shield Framework “streamlined and facilitated U.S. data exports,” meaning that no additional documentation was needed to send personal data to participating U.S. companies, said Hewson. The Privacy Shield itself replaced an earlier safeguard, the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Framework, that the court invalidated in 2015.

The details announced suggest that the new framework will work in a similar way by facilitating personal data exports to U.S. organizations that self-certify their adherence to its principles through the U.S. Department of Commerce, according to Hewson.

The personal data could include employee names, contact information, performance evaluations, staff identification, and salary and benefits details that a global company might send to a U.S. office, she said. Post-Brexit, the U.K. isn’t part of the discussions and is conducting its own data-transfer privacy negotiations with the U.S., she noted.

When the EU court invalidated the Privacy Shield, more than 5,000 companies had self-certified as adherent to that framework, indicating they satisfied the “adequacy requirements” of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, according to Philip Gordon, an attorney with Littler in Denver.

Without the Privacy Shield, multinational companies have relied mostly on standard contractual clauses, or SCCs, for international data transfers, but these are more complicated, time-consuming and onerous to implement, according to legal experts, who consider the new framework a significant step for companies.

The SCC agreements require parties to assess the laws of destination countries to ensure intelligence agencies are not allowed access to data in a way that would interfere with a company’s ability to provide an EU-like level of protection for the imported data, Gordon explained.

Several Steps Before Official

“Unless and until the framework is approved and in effect, organizations cannot rely on it to safeguard their data exports to the USA. Therefore, for now, U.S. and EU organizations will need to continue to work together to put in place alternative safeguards and to carry out transfer impact assessments on their EU-U.S. data exports,” Hewson said.

Every U.S. multinational with an EU presence needs to transfer employee data “so they can manage their workforce globally, so the implications are huge,” Gordon said. The new framework would provide a “smoother, easier data transfer mechanism” for multinational employers; that’s why so many had signed up for the previous privacy shield, he said.

U.S. and EU negotiators have said informally they aim to put the framework into effect by year-end, Hewson noted. Gordon, however, expects it to take at least a year before companies will be able to take advantage of it.

Most companies seem excited about the proposed framework, although the excitement is tempered with concern, Witt said. “They’re hoping that it will make data transfers more streamlined and less time-consuming” without violating European citizens’ rights, she said.

Concerns include the possibility that a future U.S. president could reverse executive orders related to the agreement and that activists will challenge this framework, as well.

“The big question is whether it will be invalidated in a couple of years by the Court of Justice of the European Union,” said Witt, who suggested companies take a “belt and suspenders approach” by using both the SCCs and certifying to the new data framework.

Gordon expected authorities to be extremely careful before publishing a final framework to help protect the protocols from likely litigation.

“It would be disastrous to have the next iteration of the Privacy Shield invalidated,” he said.

Dinah Wisenberg Brin is a freelance reporter and writer based in Philadelphia.

May 18, 2022

Want Happier Recruiters? Tech Can Help

?The candidate experience is one of the most discussed recruitment measures in talent acquisition, and the employee experience has become a hallmark of talent management. But what about the recruiter experience?

Successful recruitment depends on a positive experience for recruiters, which includes solid collaboration with hiring managers and other stakeholders, optimized work processes, and investments in technology to elevate recruiters from “order takers” to talent advisors.

Finding and keeping recruiters is critical as organizations navigate one of the tightest labor markets in decades.

Reports have shown that companies have increased their recruiting budgets to meet these challenges, but the most critical role in talent acquisition (TA) success is too often overlooked, said Madeline Laurano, founder and chief analyst of Aptitude Research, a recruiting technology advisory firm based in Boston. “As organizations rush to transform talent acquisition, many have lost sight of their recruiters, the people doing the actual work. Companies will not be able to build strong recruiting teams if they do not understand and validate the recruiter experience.”

According to a recent study conducted by Aptitude Research, 58 percent of recruiters do not believe that leadership understands their role in the organization. As a result, recruiters are feeling overworked, burned out and unappreciated, Laurano said. One-third of recruiters surveyed are looking for new jobs.

The most damaging ramifications of a poor recruiter experience is the loss of qualified talent, said Elaine Orler, managing director, consulting, at Cielo Talent, a recruitment process outsourcing firm based in Brookfield, Wis. “The business sometimes forgets that their recruiters are marketing and sales agents. They are thought of as being in HR, but their target market is external. Recruiters who are not supported to recruit won’t recruit well,” she said.

The candidate experience will also suffer, Laurano said. “Recruiters are often the first point of contact with candidates, and if they are unhappy or don’t feel appreciated, that will be picked up by the candidate.”

If you listen to your recruiters, you’ll learn quickly where the bottlenecks are in the recruitment process, Orler added. “And recognize that recruiters are professionals that have the same accountability and value proposition to the organization as the sales function.”

Technology Is a Differentiator

One of the most important factors of the recruiter experience is facilitating efficient workflows so recruiters can focus on building relationships with candidates instead of being bogged down with administrative tasks or doing work that artificial intelligence tools can perform much more quickly.

“In a positive recruiter experience, technology is an enabler, a predictive tool that allows the recruiter to be more successful in decision-making,” Orler said. “In a negative experience, technology only serves as a transaction engine or is a set of disconnected systems that requires duplicative data entry.”

Technology should fuel efficiency and make lives simpler, said Josh Secrest, vice president of client advocacy and marketing at AI assistant software company Paradox and the former global talent leader at McDonald’s. “When it comes to recruiters specifically, technology should be taking work off their plates,” he said. “By automating tasks like screening, scheduling and responding to frequently asked questions, recruiting tech should free them up to give more value back to the business.”

Technology plays a significant role in a recruiter’s overall job satisfaction, experts agree.

Aptitude Research’s study found that 50 percent of recruiters would join another organization if it had better TA technology.

“With better tech that helps them do the mundane parts of their job,” Secrest said, “recruiters are more likely to stay and grow at the business. Recruiting technology plays a crucial part in why the best recruiters stay in their role and why they also might look elsewhere.”

The types of TA technology that drive the most value differs for various stakeholders, Laurano said. “HR and TA leaders are prioritizing candidate relationship management solutions this year, while recruiters identified sourcing, AI matching and digital interviewing tools as having the most value to their role,” she said. “Recruiters would benefit from technology across talent acquisition, from recruitment marketing to onboarding, but they really want sourcing technology. A big challenge recruiters face is identifying talent.”

Orler added that recruiters want tools that give them more intelligence to make better decisions. “They want talent intelligence platforms and decision-support technology like candidate scoring and ranking products,” she said. “They want screening tools to better filter through the noise. What they don’t want is to spend hours in the ATS [applicant tracking system] doing transactional process work. You can hire a coordinator to do that. Your best recruiters are out there building relationships and nurturing candidates.”

Adoption of automation tools has been growing, and whether it’s in job advertising, interview scheduling or candidate communications, automation “has been absolutely life-changing for recruiters,” Laurano said.

Secrest added that “an AI recruiting assistant can save recruiters up to 16 hours a week in screening and scheduling tasks, which gives them more time to create a high-touch, intentional candidate experience.”

Recruiters Not Included

Many organizations have decided to invest more in TA technology, yet they sometimes make life more difficult for recruiters by implementing solutions without first consulting them.

“As companies build more-robust TA tech stacks to support their recruitment efforts, they are looking at technology without always considering the user—the recruiter,” Laurano said. “The disconnect between the technology that companies implement and the technology that drives value stems from a flawed decision-making process. Only 32 percent of companies stated that recruiters are involved in TA technology decisions.”

Orler said the majority of technology delivered to recruiting teams is still predominantly transaction-based. “Technology is often designed on process definition,” she said. “What happens is that recruiters are not involved enough in process definition. Because of that, they are not able to help design the technology to support their role.”

Orler said this happens because recruiters are incredibly busy and leadership does not want to distract them from finding talent, and because IT staff believe they know technology better and can dictate the vendor selection process.

Integration Is Top Grievance

Integration has long been a point of frustration for many talent acquisition professionals, and 60 percent of recruiters surveyed by Aptitude Research cited poor integration as the greatest frustration with HR technology.

“Understand that integration is crucial to the recruiter experience,” Laurano said. “Integrating talent acquisition and HR systems has significant benefits in providing consistent data, enabling a better experience and eliminating manual processes. Systems that are not seamlessly integrated create more administrative work and delays for recruiting teams.”

Many companies lack the dedicated resources and underestimate the needs and expectations of IT to build integrations, Laurano said. “And IT [staff] are typically preoccupied with other priorities,” she added.

But while integration is still a point of frustration, capabilities to integrate have come a long way. More TA technology vendors are establishing partnerships with one another and supporting marketplaces full of plug-in solutions. “Even the big vendors are opening up to be able to integrate with the TA technology community,” she said.

March 13, 2019

Be Careful: Gamification at Work Can Go Very Wrong

?Gamification is becoming known as a valuable technique that can change behavior and incentivize higher productivity, but HR managers should know that gamifying the workplace only succeeds when the game is thoughtfully designed to create many winners.

Introducing the mechanics of game-playing—earning points for completing tasks, which leads to rewards—at work can drive competition, increase sales and sustain cultural change among employees. Keeping employees engaged and motivated in their work is one reason Carmella Kettner, director of global sales development at Cato Networks, introduced gamification to her team of eight sales development representatives 18 months ago.

Cato Networks provides enterprise networking and security services. The company’s sales reps make a minimum of 80 calls per day to explain Cato’s product and schedule demonstrations to potential clients. Points are given for making more than 400 calls per week or when calls lead to scheduling demonstrations and demonstrations convert to sales.

Since introducing gamification, Kettner said the number of calls, opportunities those calls generate, and new customers that have signed up for Cato’s products and services have increased by more than 35 percent.

But there is a downside to gamification. One noteworthy example of gamification gone awry occurred in 2008, when Disneyland Resort Hotels in Anaheim, Calif., implemented an electronic leaderboard with a traffic light theme that tracked the performance of laundry staff. The red light meant employees were behind in meeting management’s goals, yellow reflected that they were working at a slow pace, and green indicated that workers were hitting their targets. News articles were eventually published about workers who, struggling to keep up, skipped bathroom breaks. They also said pregnant women had trouble meeting the targets. Workers scornfully dubbed the game “the electronic whip.”

“The Disney example shows that if you don’t design the gamification solution to suit the workers you are trying to engage, it will backfire, and you run the risk of disengaging folks,” said Mike Brennan, president and chief service officer at Leapgen, a Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based digital transformation company and HR consultancy.

Brennan said 30 percent of his company’s clients have adopted gamification to boost worker performance and learning capabilities. He also said different workers have different attributes, motivators, pay models and jobs that should be taken into account.

He added that the behavior of an engineer in a lab who is responsible for developing safe products will have different incentives and behaviors than the salespeople promoting those products to prospective buyers.

“Gamification will succeed or fail based on who has input into the design of the game, which is the best determinant of how well it’s designed,” Brennan said. He recommended that people who are currently in the target population or who have worked similar roles be involved in the design process, since they are more likely to bring empathy to the table.

“A lot of this comes down to who are you designing the game for, what is the logic, what are the themes, what is the tone of the game and is it appropriate for the target population?” Brennan said. “The answers to those questions are going to be different depending on the scenario, the behaviors you are trying to drive and, most importantly, the people who are involved.”

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Give Everyone a Chance

Part of creating a comprehensive game is ensuring that the average worker can win. To do this, the game’s design requires the input of multiple professionals with behavioral, learning and business experience, said Gal Rimon, CEO and founder of New York City-based employee performance platform GamEffective.

“If there are 10,000 employees, and the leaderboard only shows the top 10 performing employees, the chances that the average worker would be in the top 10 is almost zero, and that demotivates the players,” Rimon said.

Kettner said one of the main reasons she chose GamEffective’s car game Forza for her team is the ability to change the game on a weekly basis, allowing her to introduce different goals and targets that increase the opportunity for each team member to win a prize.

“I need to have a reset every week so that everyone has a chance to excel,” she said.

According to Kettner, one week the game could be won by a team member with the highest improvement. The next week, an employee whose calls generated the most demonstrations at a client site could win, and the week after, the team member who learns the most about new marketing campaigns would take top marks.

“I’m creating all kinds of missions for the team, and those who get the most points get a $50 Amazon voucher,” she said.

Rimon added that a game that depends on points, badges and leaderboards isn’t enough to motivate workers. “You need to create a balanced experience that improves productivity, process and personal growth. If you ignore the personal growth of your employees, you will create stress, and there will be a backlash.”

The Right Degree of Difficulty

As HR managers become involved with gamification for the workforce, they should make sure that the missions being completed aren’t too easy or too hard, added Aaron Moncreiff, director of marketing at Bunchball, an Edina, Minn.-based gamification platform.

“You want to have certain difficulty levels to the mission, but a gamification program will fail if people are earning every badge that they could possibly earn in two weeks, because then what’s the point of continuing to do this?” Moncreiff said. “But on the flip side, a gamification program will fail if it takes you three weeks to earn each badge.”

He noted that the goal isn’t to create anxiety or to make workers feel like they are being shamed. At the same time, gamification isn’t going to make the worst employee in the company suddenly become the best. “The goal is to use gamification to make the worst employee, who is a D, a C, and then to make your C employees a B, and your B employees an A, and your A employees an A-plus,” Moncreiff said.

Nicole Lewis is a freelance journalist based in Miami. She covers business, technology and public policy.

March 12, 2019

How to Use Technology to Bolster Recruiting

Companies can choose from lots of recruiting technology. But with a limited budget, how can they get the best results in today’s scorching-hot hiring market and make sure top candidates don’t slip through the system?

February 19, 2019

New Onboarding Technology Cuts Down Manual Tasks

It’s no secret that good onboarding practices can reduce turnover and greatly improve new hires’ time to proficiency. What many HR leaders may not be aware of, however, is how next-generation onboarding technologies can eliminate much of the manual work in the process, reduce the chance of problems or delays, and leave more time for HR and line managers to train and socialize new employees.

January 30, 2019January 31, 2019