How to Simplify Your HR Tech Stack
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we sit down with Ciprian Arhire, Global Head of People Programmes and Analytics at Entain, to explore how HR leaders can balance AI, data, and human connection in the age of digital transformation.
Ciprian shares insights on simplifying HR tech stacks, building trust in AI adoption, and creating agile strategies that future-proof HR. He also shares why upskilling HR teams in data literacy and storytelling is critical for success.
🎓 In this episode, Ciprian discusses:
Why simplifying HR tech is critical for global businesses
How to balance automation and human empathy in HR
Why storytelling is a must-have skill in HR analytics
How to build trust while adopting AI and automation
Creating agile roadmaps to keep HR future-ready
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Ciprian Arhire 0:00
I think, for years now, and this is pre AI, we've been talking about robots and technology being part of the workplace, and maybe the role of the HR leader turning away from just looking after people and humans into the workplace and actually looking after everything and everyone that delivers value to the organization we still have like other technologies of like VR and AR and other bits being integrated into our workplaces and ways of working. And I think that the way we should cast out our vision is how all of these things that are advancing technology is coming into our workplace, yeah, and how are our roles evolving rather than being replaced? I
Chris Rainey 0:40
welcome
to the show. How are you? My friend,
Ciprian Arhire 0:57
I'm good. Thank you. Spring has finally arrived, has it?
Chris Rainey 1:03
Did you come with a jacket today? Yes, you don't have to say, Don't tell me you came out like that, because it is not that warm as well. Nice to see you in person again again. Saw you for the first time last week, and now you're stuck with me. But who knew? Do we live 10 minutes away from each other? Yeah, I didn't know that. So you basically been avoiding me this entire time. You knew, although, did you know where we were based
Ciprian Arhire 1:26
before? Yes, so you was avoided previous time.
Chris Rainey 1:31
It's fine. I forgive you. You're here now, before we jump in, tell everyone a little bit more about your background and sort of the journey to where we are now at and tain,
Ciprian Arhire 1:39
perfect. So I've how far can Can I get? So, grew up in Romania, and that's part of, sort of my career choices. Started moving more into technology. So I've started a degree in computer programming, and it during that degree, sort of started volunteering and working with different organizations, and just fell in love with HR. Decided to drop that degree
Chris Rainey 2:10
over that. How did you feel? Enough fall in love with HR. You was exposed to it in one of the companies,
Ciprian Arhire 2:15
yes, so we, I was working with a student organization that had, like, strong partnerships with the likes of Unilever or DHL or, okay, sort of different global organizations very much around how do we developed that the leadership of the future? So we were actually in Romania. We were the group exposed to quite advanced HR, talking about balanced scorecard and how we're applying that in the context of HR. And this was like 1990s early 2000s so about 25 years ago, of understanding sort of the roadmap for HR, quite early on. And I just like, love it and technology, but this sounds significantly more intriguing of making organizations better for
Chris Rainey 3:02
how did your parents take that decision?
Ciprian Arhire 3:05
But boy, they take most of my decisions, like, wait a minute, you want to go from independent and running my my own ship, and sort of shifted the direction into doing HR and started doing a bit a bit more of sort of talent management and different type of programs, yeah. Then went through the Global economical crisis that moved to me, surprisingly, into operations playing like the 2008 Yeah, because I found myself sort of interviewing for HR roles alongside ex HR directors and CHROs that lost their jobs. Oh, my God. And I was like, it's literally a talent manager role. I'm fighting with the CHRO for the same role. So I'm going to go into business operations, spend a bit of time in business operations. And then decided that I want to come to the UK to get a bit more the meat of HR and get a bit more evolution of the HR roadmap came in the UK 2012 lost track of time, and since then, been involved with CAPD and a lot of other communities of work, sort of getting to actually the bare bones of HR. And how do we drive that roadmap? Done a bit of consulting as part of my journey, as you do, just building that portfolio of these other type of skills and capabilities that I want to bring in in my personal portfolio as well. And now I am in sort of different organizations at the moment, at intain, looking after the HR transformation roadmap, the digital HR transformation strategy, and recently absorbed people analytics in into my remit as well just connecting the three together to make sure that we're designing and delivering some wonderful people experiences for 30 odd 1000 people. Amazing.
Chris Rainey 4:58
Yeah. So you kind of, kind of like, interestingly, come full circle back to the technical data.
Ciprian Arhire 5:08
Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily call myself like a programmer or No,
Chris Rainey 5:13
but I mean in terms of the you can now being able to combine both, whereas in early in your career, you had to, you felt like you had to choose one or the other. And obviously people analytics didn't even exist back then. I don't think you've even had HR analytics back then, you know, that long ago, right as well. So it's pretty cool that that's kind of full circle when you implement
Ciprian Arhire 5:34
I don't look that old, but when we were doing computer programming training and courses. You were literally writing c plus plot code on the whiteboard.
Chris Rainey 5:45
Oh, my God, that long ago now. You aging yourself. I've been doing for 2020, years. You've been you've got five years more on me as well. Tell everyone quickly a bit about and tain, because most people in UK, for example, they know all the brands, but they perhaps may not know, and tain so,
Ciprian Arhire 6:01
so antane is one of the leading groups dealing with betting, gambling and entertainment. So if you're from the UK, you'll probably recognize some of our brands, like coral, Ladbrokes or galabingo, or a lot of these. We do have significant population in our organization that is in retail shops. So as you would recognize, some of those brands, but part of, like, more than half of the people employed by and then deal with digital products as well. So a lot of games and apps and sort of digital footprint that we have across 42 different countries.
Chris Rainey 6:38
Yeah, super interesting. So you've obviously just absorb people analytics. I love the fact that you have those three areas, because, like you said, it gives a great advantage of understanding the entire employee experience. Typically that sets in in different silos in the company, which will become a challenge as well. Talk me through kind of what's really sort of top of mind for you right now,
Ciprian Arhire 7:00
and I think that entertain probably not very dissimilar for other organizations, has grown significantly through mergers and acquisitions. And a few years back, it was very much positioned as a holding organization, yeah, enabling these different brands and organizations with a lot of MDS and CEOs to run the business and generate profit. For the past few years, with the rebranding and the repositioning of the organization, we're converting more and more into a global enterprise. So that comes with people working across functions, bringing down some some of those silos, and trying to understand what is the one unique experience that we're providing for all entertainers across the organization, rather than, if you're working in Italy, you have a completely different experience than UK versus Ireland or other elements. So there's a drive one from the business and the business leadership of, how do we turn the organization into a one organization, rather than cousins and brothers holding hands. And then secondly, from the age of perspective, we have a very clear strategy of unifying our experience and enabling people to deliver value regardless where they are in in the world.
Chris Rainey 8:17
Yeah, I love that. So that's sort of the why, which is great in terms of the how, how is that driving your HR tech choices, in terms of how you look at solving those problems and creating that experience and and
Ciprian Arhire 8:34
we've started with that, the why, because that that's almost like the driver, yeah, everything that we want to deliver, and we're designing the experiences first before we look at how is technology enabling that? And we've made that decision quite intentional of technology is not driving us. Technology is an enabler for what we wanted to deliver in the organization. But we've done this exercise maybe about three years ago, when I joined the organization on looking at all of the tools, technologies, licenses that we'll be using across the group in in the HR function, so not necessarily just HR tech. So we've looked at whiteboards and collaboration tools and everything else on like a quick scan and a rapid prototype of understanding that we've identified about 180 technology in tools. That's a lot, and that's about 100 or 120 too many that that we should be using as an organization. And that was very much because we weren't the one organization. We were 38 different organizations,
Chris Rainey 9:38
and then they order on different systems, and everyone
Ciprian Arhire 9:41
came with their own separate HR system, their own separate we've had, like, multiple licenses of the same collaboration tools, because they came out as different populations. So we've looked at one. How do we harmonize and drive consistency across all of that? Whereby. Up 75% in on that journey. So we've picked up one what is our workplace technology? What is our HR and finance technology? And then what's going to be like? The enabler and the experience layer on top of that has three core technologies. We have you share
Chris Rainey 10:16
those after you end, because I know everyone listening to like, what are they? Why did you choose
Ciprian Arhire 10:21
them? In all of these are public, so I'm not sharing secrets of the organization, but we've chosen Oracle Service now, and Microsoft has been the core three technologies that will have consistently in the organization, and this is for our use internally, rather than our products being sold to and being used in the market. And across those three technologies will only make deviation from those principles, only if across those three functionalities, everything that we need from a business fails with significant percentage of mismatch. So I think a good example is based on the complexity of our business and having retail and non retail and different type of roles and expertise that we required. We found some limitations in Oracle recruitment cloud, so we went with smart recruiters that plugs in place with Oracle, as you're
Chris Rainey 11:20
only choosing others that will plug in. That's one of the other considerations. If you don't play nicely with those three then, yeah, then you're off the later point. Yeah,
Ciprian Arhire 11:29
basically, and we've done that analysis of how much time and effort and money we will have to spend if things don't integrate appropriately, if these systems can't communicate and understand the data and in the transfer of the information, and thirdly, where would be the type of functionality that we might be having a compromise to make sure that we're consistent around our decisions. So we're slowly decommissioning a lot of the other technologies. Why Oracle we've already had it in the business across four or five different countries, and it was heavily used in finance. So we've done a bit of assessment of we were at that time, probably 24,000 well now 30,000 just over in less than three years. And we said, with our ambition of growth and everything else, there's no other smaller technology that we will consider. So we were limited on almost like a pack of three, either SAP Oracle or work day. And we've looked at what are the type of things that are important to us as an organization, whether it's workflows, experience, UI or the type of database, and we've made a decision that Oracle is the right positioning for us, or from all of those reasons of integration into finance, data architecture and what we actually want from from the technology, it's
Chris Rainey 12:55
an interesting one because, like, it's an ongoing conversation as well. I feel like service now kind of just come out of the blue, not the blue, but I mean, every company, yeah. I mean, yeah, every company I speak to now, it's like service now, like, it's almost like a no brainer, and even the vast majority of situations are also turning on service now's agent as, sort of the agent of choice, as everyone sort of battles to be, yeah. How long? How long have you had that in place?
Ciprian Arhire 13:25
We've had service now in the organization for quite, quite a few years now. Okay, we've started with it being in it, as probably most listeners would would recognize that that's been the it ticketing platform. We've brought it in HR, probably in
Chris Rainey 13:42
2018 what's the use case and main use case? So
Ciprian Arhire 13:46
we've, we've looked at how does this become outside of just IT technology, and becomes an enterprise technology for support. We, for example, had conversations across the organization of GBS and sort of what should be the road map of the organization. We're nowhere there in making any any decisions, and we're still building that road map. But we said for employees opening up a platform that provides them with support, they don't care if it's it HR, finance or anything else, they had an issue, they've reached out to someone and is being resolved. And from our perspective, looking at, how do we bring down silos and we work together? So if you're part of onboarding, you will get facilities, IT, HR, finance, all of those teams involved. How do we do that in one technology? They
Chris Rainey 14:37
also all those systems are connecting into service now. So there's one consistent experience, and
Ciprian Arhire 14:41
all of them are supporting employees through service now. So as you have a consistent journey, and then you have allocation across different teams coming together to deliver seamless experience, rather than having the almost like the AI integrations, where oracle will send a notification into the finance system and. Product notification into your IT system and a separate notification just waiting for for those pools to come. Amazing. So it allows us to, like, think experiences integration and ways of working completely differently than than having separate technologies that just need to adjust the data that they transfer between themselves. And
Chris Rainey 15:19
it is is teams more from just a communication point of view, or are you deeper in in that relationship in
Ciprian Arhire 15:27
Microsoft? So we use a lot of Microsoft tools internally, from teams to project management to use
Chris Rainey 15:35
things like viva.
Ciprian Arhire 15:36
Yep, we use parts of viva. We use Glink now, that is right company Microsoft acquired, yeah, yep. And we're looking at what, what is the architecture and the support in there, and probably, as most can
Chris Rainey 15:50
link back with ServiceNow to get the sentiment analysis from people's questions in service. Now, sorry, really random question, if you were asking questions in service. Now, can you collect that data in Clint and not as seamlessly as No, not yet. Okay, do that? That would be really interesting. Sorry, I just came to mind. I was
Ciprian Arhire 16:11
like that. Now they've connected it into copilot and Okay, so you can get it there from and they started building a bit more functionality, which is potentially going to be quite, quite an exciting journey for family as a sub product of of Microsoft as well. Yeah, for understanding, sort of the advancement of sentiment analysis. And actually, how do you go from inside into action? So any type of prescriptive or sort of guidance for not just business leaders, but line managers of what they should be doing, and in
Chris Rainey 16:42
reality, then you'd also have real time data. How do you balance that with privacy? Though, instead of people's conversations, and obviously, they're using the team's ecosystem, and
Ciprian Arhire 16:55
there's a mix of legislation that is sort of tightening around consent, and explicit requirements, I think, Glint and the way we're using our technologies, we're always mindful of that. So we have a bit of like a working group that is tied into my transformation to make sure that I have cyber security, data privacy, our new AI and Task Force plugged in in that to understand so almost like how we're evolving. We still have finance, procurement and illegal as part of those to make sure that whatever we're going with, one, we're not going too fast, and we're almost like reducing some of the protections that we should have as an organization and for our employees. Secondly, the way we're looking at privacy and controls is we're always taking into consideration of not going too much into employee monitoring and making sure that we're explicit about how we're going to use that information, even if all of our cleaned whatever, you have to submit any responses, like clear statements of how we're going to collect it, how we're going to monitor it. Glint already provides us with some thresholds of anonymization and confidentiality. We went a bit higher than that because we said our appetite for risk as we're playing with these technologies is going to be a bit stricter. So I think the threshold for glint anonymize data is five for responses, we went seven, and we said, Actually, we're confident with that if in the future, we're going to feel going back to the recommendations we will. But we wanted to make sure that one, as we're gathering more data and we're making sense of the organization, there's no opportunity for us to get a bit too excited and how we're going to use that
Chris Rainey 18:46
information. Yeah, where are you looking at? We mentioned all of the Thank you. First of all, Shane, like, I think the audit is really interesting, as everyone's on that journey as well. How are you looking at which, because each of those platforms has their own agent, right? And everyone's trying to be sort of the master agent. How are you looking at that? Are you? Have you chosen like because you could launch the Oracle, agent, the service now, agent, the co pilot, for example.
Ciprian Arhire 19:12
And I think that that comes down to, we're doing a bit of refinement and on digital HR strategy and journey at the moment, so we're going to hopefully rely on start in the next two months to the business. But we've we've taken the decision of one the way we were. Choosing technologies needs to be unified and enterprise wise. So we're not necessarily picking technology that is only localized and and functionality, and that makes us have in improve, I was going to say, have clean data, but improve our accuracy and consistency of data globally to be able to amplify any of these type of agents. We went from some parts of our business feeling very much of. Startup vibes. So a year or a year and a half ago, people would actually enjoy queuing up outside of an HR office to talk to an HR person. We've made an informed decision that based on that change that we're driving in the organization, and we've already introduced like service now and and Oracle across some of these technologies where people already feel that there's technology between them and HR, that we're not going to go with any of the agents yet, so we want it and on like agent chat, which you actually came to a person rather than the AI, and we're doing a few tests to understand our readiness for using AI and chatbot between the three of them. So we're currently sort of testing and doing some pilots with Copilot to understand what that would look like we still have on our roadmap, and conversations separately with Oracle, what that would look like being integrated across platform. And there's some simple wins in there, of, would we allow the generative AI to help people structure and write their goals a bit better? Which is no brainer. Use
Chris Rainey 21:12
cases you can start with that are less there's not there's less risk.
Ciprian Arhire 21:15
And then there's some advanced ones that what we're looking at that you mentioned in ServiceNow that will do like close cross platform automation and triggers. So we, while we're not yet making a decision, and we're doing that quite intentionally, we're looking at what are the different type of case studies, and how far do we want to get through it? And I think that's sort of that's back to my initial element of the technologies and enabler. I
Chris Rainey 21:44
love the fact you boy all the way back, because you can get lost in that. But if you use that as a foundation of leading with that first, rather than the technology, you can it helps make it very clear decisions. Otherwise you could just get lost in the sea of technologies and integrations and everything else. And again,
Ciprian Arhire 22:00
a lot of organizations will position itself they want to retain some of the human side rather than human loop everything. Yeah, well, we're looking at it from from the perspective of where does it actually add significant value? So if people still consider like the human touch in specific moments of their experience is valuable, that is where we'll retain it, where humans do the best work, but anything else that will actually amplify and support people into making faster decisions, get the reports they want, get a dashboard, all of those different elements without having to wait for like three days. SLA, could we potentially look at expediting, improving and adding AI functionality, yeah,
Chris Rainey 22:42
so we missed one thing, people, analytics. Where does that sit within the ecosystem? What's technology, tools?
Ciprian Arhire 22:52
And so we're using Power BI at the moment with a lot of the advanced functionality part of Microsoft, and in the next few months, we'll be moving to Oracle, fusion data intelligence. Okay, that will allow us not just to almost like the way we're structuring our data, and are able to report on it. FDA will take it to the next level. Sorry, fusion data intelligence is there's
Chris Rainey 23:19
a lot and there's so many names as well, and they're always changing. And
Ciprian Arhire 23:23
so we're starting that journey now, when we're already started doing workshops and understanding almost like, what's the roadmap of reporting, analytics, insights, predictions that we would want to offer from from the team, we have gone through a bit of repositioning and restructuring of human and the function to begin with, but we're trying to move away from just reports and more into insights and analytics for business leaders as well. Yeah. FDA is quite nice because you have, like, data pools in there that you're pulling from multiple different systems, and you can automate how it makes sense of all of that data and how you can report regardless of you have smart recruiters as ATS and Oracle as an HCM and talent and compensation and service now, as transactions pull to all of that information to give you an understanding of what's happening in the HR function, and then how do you amplify that for for business leaders? Yeah, super
Chris Rainey 24:24
interesting. What you're pretty far down the line than most people that I'm chatting to? What advice would you give to people listening that are perhaps earlier on the journey and Now, taking this opportunity, like many people are, to reassess their HR tech stack. And
Ciprian Arhire 24:38
I think of a lot of time we get bamboozled, if I can use that network by almost like the opportunities out there and the hundreds and hundreds of technologies and hundreds of emails that you'll probably get from different vendors on the possibilities of technologies out. There. Just think of what is right for your organization. So if you want to be a bit more agile as a startup, then you probably benefit from from having more type of flexibility, from a technology that can shift overnight and you can drive new innovation. If you're trying to drive stability in your business strategy, or the type of technology that enable you to do that. So you can go like different models of best in class, or you can go enterprise technology that the way we've done it, where we still have the experience layer. So we're not necessarily limiting our understanding of just stuck into those technologies. And you can do like a hybrid of different models as part of that decision. The point is, do a bit of shopping and see as many products as you want, because a lot of them will even be inspiration for the future, rather than stuff that you need to buy. And the other thing of coming from, I was gonna say the dark side of being on the consulting side as well is always take some of these things with a grain of salt. So you've seen the AI tag attached to all possible tools and technologies decide to understand, like, how does it work? What does it deliver? Can you actually have some case studies from organization that have used that you will get in a lot of your experience of that sales pitch sounds significantly more polished than what the tool can actually deliver, and some of the limitations that you're going to face through that love that
Chris Rainey 26:32
do you, I know you've got a great network. Do you tap into your network a lot to just reach out to your colleagues that are already using the tools and technologies? Yeah,
Ciprian Arhire 26:41
and we've done that, like recently for for FDI, when we were in the process of understanding whether that's the right technology for us, from from Oracle, we've had some reference calls. We've nice spoken to, like, different people that were playing with it and trying to understand how value to them. And we've done that not just with Oracle FDA, but with all of the other technologies that we Yeah, too.
Chris Rainey 27:01
And you'll be surprised, for anyone listening like you'll be surprised how how receptive your peers are, because I get some people say, Oh, Chris, you know, I don't know anyone. Just reach out to people ask for and you'd be surprised how many peers like message on LinkedIn. Yeah, they will reply. They want, they would want to share their experience and have a conversation as well.
Ciprian Arhire 27:19
And a lot of vendors will come with their preferred No, exactly. That's about
Chris Rainey 27:23
to say, you don't always take just the preferred ones. Like, ask, you know, you can see on their websites, a lot of these vendors, of their companies, just reach out to those people on LinkedIn and ask for their advice.
Ciprian Arhire 27:32
And like, don't stick to like, traditional questions that you would want to ask these people that you're talking to. Think of, what are the battle scars that they've had that they want to share with you? Of in what like, we had questions of like, how clean was their data as they integrated it? Was it a limitation of the fact that they've grown through mergers and acquisitions and the data was not yet aligned? Did they use the actual tool to drive the data clean up and architecture, or did they just use it for reporting? So we had, like, very targeted questions around, what is our business case of how, how would we benefit from, from using this tool, rather than, does it work? What are the challenges and like, would you rate it from one to 10 or whatever you normally get into a reference call,
Chris Rainey 28:21
yeah. And a lot of that stuff you're not going to get from hearing from the vendor I told about scars, yeah.
Ciprian Arhire 28:26
And some of the tough questions we've asked was like, how was the vendor in supporting you in this journey? How fast did they respond? What were the challenges that you faced in interacting with the vendor? Because we were also interested enough of the support model as well. You
Chris Rainey 28:39
know what's gonna happen now everyone's gonna be calling
you. You gonna
be calling you. We miss one piece sorry. Like, the learning side. So from how you bringing learning into that? Like, do you have an LXP on LMS?
Ciprian Arhire 28:55
Yep, so we still have Oracle loan. Okay, in it, we're plugging in any other sort of learning providers, what halfway through, through that journey? I think last year we've done like a redesign and corrections in into our Oracle learn, and this year was sort of amplifying that
Chris Rainey 29:12
journey. Yeah, but I love the fact to your point, you're like, it has to be part of this ecosystem, because there's a temptation to go elsewhere, right? Was that similar around the choice around the people analytics piece, rather than going with like a like a Visier, for example, you're like, Well, we're leveraging what we already have,
Ciprian Arhire 29:28
and there's great tools out there. Yeah, there are amazing, yeah, we've looked at what is the right one for what we're trying to achieve. So business leaders being able to go into a one portal, press two buttons and get the information that they need without getting too sort of conversational and too AI focused, because one that there's a reluctance, especially from business leaders, on trusting AI, especially as every statement comes with this message has been generated by AI in my being. Correct, not necessarily helping with, sort of, especially when it comes to people data, not necessarily helping with the accuracy of that. So we've been looking at, how do we build some of the great foundations in there to be able to evolve our journey, but we've also been sort of intentional around, sort of, the additional elements that we're building in and we've what we haven't necessarily deployed, some of the advanced elements that we would want to bring into the organization, everything that word decisions that we're making now are for the 510, years roadmap. So we've had conversations about our talent and skills and how that will amplify the organization, and how, in the future we might, we would want to do strategic workforce planning that is informed by actual talent marketplace out there to give us an indication of where skills exist and how skills evolve from one specific skills into the other. And we've been looking at, if we want that in a few years time, what are some of the brilliant basic foundations that we're building, and we've had conversations about Oracle learn, for example, being able to understand from all of the plugins what is the architecture and taxonomy of skills and translate them between Oracle learn and the other technologies. So if we're calling it project management in Oracle learn, then if it's LinkedIn learning or anything else, they'll use their taxonomy, but it's gonna have clear translation between the two technologies. That's
Chris Rainey 31:27
really, yeah, that's super interesting. That's a big challenge for everyone right now,
Ciprian Arhire 31:31
especially as skills is evolving so fast. So it feels almost like, Yeah, as soon as you've mapped something, it's already evolved. It's already
Chris Rainey 31:38
out, yeah, by the time you've done that, it's like, already out of date. One of my questions actually was gonna ask you, like, is, is skills based hiring, you know, real transformation, or just another buzzword? I think
Ciprian Arhire 31:51
that depends on, depends on how you look at it, and if you think of the conversations and the trends you've seen in the market, even pre COVID, do we were having conversations about skills based pay, yes, and we were looking at how different skills actually how pay will be consolidated out of the different skills that you bring to the organization, and the utilization of those skills, a mindful of COVID and everything else, has sort of shifted That conversation a bit to the right, but still it's coming, and I think that what we've seen with AI and technology advancements is getting us closer to that of recognizing people's skills in the organization. My perspective is, yes, I think some organizations do it better than others, and some technologies do it better than others in understanding that, and not just how you source the skills and you bring them into the organization, but also how do you activate them and you actually put them to good use. So if you have like a talent marketplace, how intelligent are you using that to break down the skills and position them to the key projects that add significant value to the business, yeah, how are you connecting some of those initiatives into business value, rather than just gigs and passion projects? Sure,
Chris Rainey 33:09
yeah, one of the things I wanted to ask you is like, how can HR balance the power of analytics with employee trust? Covered it a little bit earlier, but yes,
Ciprian Arhire 33:18
and I think of, think, think back of what are you trying to get out of analytics? Like we would never breach people's trust just to get data on the back of it. And we've looked at almost like different mechanisms of, how do we do employee listening? And there's some amazing advanced tools out there and that do ecosystem listening so to pick up surveys and prompts and how do you comment on post on the internet, for example, or all of your comments and your likes and everything else in Vivian gage as a platform, brilliant tools. We said, that's a bit too intrusive for where we are at the moment with our organization, so that's not something that we would want to attack. Uh, plus, that gives us a lot of information that at the moment is not useful for us because we're building a lot of the basics that feels like something that we might need five eight years from from now, to understand almost like people's behavior. And if we identify almost like dips in engagement, or dips in sort of narrative, or almost like a conversational insight, how would we act on it, or predict, or predict
Chris Rainey 34:35
and burn out? Because you can see people's using overworking, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ciprian Arhire 34:41
And there's like, different elements of that. Of one is like voice sentiment analysis. Secondly is like work pattern, and then in type of different shifts of work and people being connected and engaged. We've seen enough stories from the market of like, over monitoring or or people using camera. In your laptop to see how if you're still next to your computer, or if you've been creating or moving your mouse, or anything
Chris Rainey 35:06
else still happening as well. It blows my mind that that's still a thing. And
Ciprian Arhire 35:10
I think that's that's the intentional rationale, and as HR leaders, we have a responsibility to make sure that we're still in the organization in the right direction when it comes to some of these things,
Chris Rainey 35:22
that's the quickest way to lose trust. And
Ciprian Arhire 35:24
it's like an easy, easy way to do what I mentioned earlier. You're getting a bit too excited, but by things, and you're almost like bridging into the side that will harm the organization on long journey. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 35:37
that's tough. Must be tough for you in a team, though, right? Because it's like it's tempted to attempting to be chased a new shiny object and but to stay grounded and say, Okay, this is interesting, but not right now
Ciprian Arhire 35:50
and, and we're sort of building that across the wider HR function as well as some of these things are so exciting to get to. But what are the right foundations that we need? Like, what are the steps that we need to build to get there things like, we do have a job architecture. It does need refresh for us to be able to trigger some other elements of how we are realign business partners and business units and salary benchmarking and informed incentives and and attach skills to that, but we're like, that's like eight, five projects, five, eight projects assigned to them was the fastest critical path that we can take in there without breaking the organization and driving change fatigue.
Chris Rainey 36:38
Yeah, and again, making sure you keep that employee experience front of mind always, I'm wondering, like, given the pace of transformation and change in this sort of the era of AI, how has this changed the skills and competencies that are required within your HR function in the team to drive this? Because it's a very different set of skills and competencies that. But, you know, and it's evolving very fast,
Ciprian Arhire 37:04
and it's a quite an interesting one, because I think it gets a lot of people anxious across that HR function. And if you think about us, we're probably about 300 and a bit people in the full HR function, in my team that just deals with the leading data transformation and shaping it. We have 28 at the moment. So so quite like a narrow team, just focus on, how do we shape and drive that the business. But when we get on significant projects, it does feel like a lot of the 300 population gets involved with either being on SME, being on project calls, supporting us in shaping and delivering that. So we've we've had to shift a lot into like stakeholder management and translating what is happening in people's heads, rather than just what they verbalize as well. So a lot of the consulting skills that have been useful getting them into our portfolio, and not just for myself, but for parts of my team, we've been looking at technology and technology advancements, and there's a bit of navigating the exciting new product versus brilliant foundations in technology, and how do we drive a lot of the security and controls and and making sure we're setting ourselves up for success rather than putting the organization at risk. Analytics is changing, and I think that the whole team gone through a bit of restructuring and realignment of skills to understand that in the past, we would have been very much focused around like delivering Reports and Lists to the organization. Now we're like, talking about storytelling with data, and we're talking about like, advanced analytics and driving predictions and prescriptions for the organization. So like, an interesting example would be, if we're looking at changing one of our offices in a different country, would we be able to use like people's travel distance to come into the office to identify, like, what's the hot spot of easy commute for them? Would we be able to use like heat maps to understand like preferences of people, what's around the office, and how did they gather that? So we started going a bit more into that space with with analytics, rather than sort of lists and sort of report and anything that we can automate, or we can allow people to self serve without putting any data at risk, yeah, have to say that without risk, what we're providing that level of access with, with the right controls.
Chris Rainey 39:36
It's so interesting because you would think that given the pace of change and AI, etc, that we would be speaking about a lot of technical skills, but it's the opposite. A lot of what you described are not as they as the technologies improves. It's the power. Skills become even more important. The first thing you said was storytelling
Ciprian Arhire 39:56
with data, right? And technical still, skills are still important. Today, of course, there will be even less relevant a few years from from now, because even the way we're interacting with AI and conversational AI, and that's not technical skills, no that the way we're talking about it. And you see a lot of technology shifting from like hard code, difficult programming, into no code and drop down, and actually you're talking to AI, and AI is writing the code for you, and
Chris Rainey 40:26
at that point, is them more understanding, more of a value of understanding the business and what we're solving for, as opposed to for how you do it, because that's going to become easier. Like no no one talks about prompt engineer anymore, because the AI has got so good you don't even need to write a prompt anymore, because it's advanced so much so all of a sudden you can, just now with the new new chat, GBT, you just ask a question, and it's so good that you don't have to write a really great pre defined prompt. Yeah, and be able to do that. And
Ciprian Arhire 40:56
it's that. The interesting part is, we're starting to feel more like we're like an innovation hub, and what testing and prototyping different tools before we deploy them to the organization, all within, like, a contained, safe environment. Yes, and like samples could be very much dedicated on technology under technology, but now we're saying with how do we use multiple technologies and multiple tools and like different business challenges that we wanted to do that? And I think a funny thing that I was talking to one of my managers in the analytics world was, how do we shift the narrative across that team of let's pose some questions and some challenges that they've never heard before that we are expecting that they will come from our business leaders in 234, years time, but into the AI No, into our team. Oh, okay, to understand, how is a team starting to navigate some of those?
Chris Rainey 41:54
Oh, okay, interesting, to get their feedback and sort of
Ciprian Arhire 41:58
test that. Because, yeah, if we're getting ourselves quite ready for that, is, how do we nudge the technology to support us to answer those questions?
Chris Rainey 42:08
What's um, there's kind of, I'm seeing, like, uh, within my network, and also, even on LinkedIn, there's, like, this sort of two views. One's like, a really positive, exciting future, and others, this sort of just dystopian future of AI is replacing us or etc, hopefully. What's your views on really,
Ciprian Arhire 42:26
if I can do my job and I can still get paid and travel the world, and what's
Chris Rainey 42:30
your views on this? I think
Ciprian Arhire 42:33
there's two elements in here. You do hear a lot of people of how much in control we are as HR leaders, to be able to shift the direction slightly disagree that we're we're in that much control. I think the advances, advancements in technologies and AI and everything else that that is coming down that path have already passed our ability to adopt them into organizations, so they'll always be ahead of organizations. So everyone is playing catch up. Rather than planning on some of these things, our ability to predict some of those things has been shrunk down significantly, and we're now what model eight or nine in chat GPT alone, since it was launched, so different prototyping and narrative. And now it does like deep research and reasoning, and you can build your own bots, and you can give them different tasks, and now they are moving into delivering tasks and notifications and research for you, rather than just conversational and generative so and that's what when
Chris Rainey 43:39
you move into the era of like, what some people calling large action models, rather than large language models. You already seeing. I updated my MacBook yesterday, by the way, and it showed me that chat GBT is now integrated with Siri and it's, and then I now I just chat with Siri and it's, and it's and it's chat GBT, and I asked it to write a template, and then I said, Send that to Shane. And it automatically connected to my Gmail, sent the sent the email to Shane, and I did that all without touching my computer. And I was like, oh my god, I just wrote the whole email. It knew Shane to contact in my Gmail, send it to him. So now it's starting to move towards actions. It connected to my calendar, I could book a hotel. I could book a flight without even anything.
Ciprian Arhire 44:24
Any is that element of what calling it like, orchestration and large module orchestration, and not just one GPT doing all of that, one GPT instructing multiple gpts To do that, I think, for years now, and this is pre AI, we've been talking about robots and technology being part of the workplace, and maybe the role of the HR leader turning away from just looking after people and humans into the workplace and actually looking after everything. And everyone that delivers value to the organization, almost like resource as a whole. I think even if you cast your mind back of 10 years ago, we were talking about like robots being in the workplace and HR looking after them and making sure that they're happy. And this
Chris Rainey 45:16
is almost the same now, but they're just digital. And
Ciprian Arhire 45:19
I think the mindset of what AI has done is it's allowing, it's like forcing us to have this circular view of just AI, rather than robots are still here, and they're doing a lot of wonderful, amazing things in automation of warehouses and running parts of our world. Now we have AI and generative and conversational AI and advancements that we've just spoken about, we still have like other technologies, of like VR and AR and other bits being integrated into our technology, into our workplaces and ways of working. We'll have like neuralink or other bits integrated in so it's already happened, yeah, we'll be start seeing, and you've seen like implants and sort of robotic arms and everything else attached to humans. So we're almost like cyborgs for the basically
Chris Rainey 46:08
a few years away from the matrix at this point. And
Ciprian Arhire 46:11
I think that the way we should cast out our vision is how all of these things that are advancing technology is coming into our workplace. Yeah. And how our roles evolving rather than being replaced. And I think that's that element of I was at the conference recently, and every HR leader presenting had this positive view of, we're in control, and we'll control exactly what AI does for us and and we'll keep the fun things and the enjoyable things, and we're going to move everything else into AI, everything that is repetitive or we don't enjoy, like washing dishes, or anything else that that will will be required. But I think it's, it's how clever are we using AI? So if you look at human intelligence, is how we're using AI to expand human intelligence. So I wouldn't say no in attaching 500 points to my IQ every single day to be able to do that, and all come into the type of work rather than just replacing it as a whole. Yeah, and it's like a lot of wonderful predictions out there. Just pick them up with with a grain of salt
Chris Rainey 47:13
every day. I saw one yesterday from McKinsey. It was like 80% of all HR tasks will be replaced by AI brilliant, right? That
Ciprian Arhire 47:21
does not mean that we've run out of jobs. It means that our jobs are evolving in different directions as well. Yeah, there's this report that probably like about five years old of future jobs. I think they've published some some new ones from from cognizant. Five years ago, we were already predicting that we'll have HR roles that will just deal with de biasing, AI and technology. So whatever we're predicting now is only in that narrative. I think it's like a mix of dystopian and positive. I think it's very much in the eyes of the beholder. So if you're thinking about AI will completely replace you, and you're not doing anything about it, and everything that you're doing is controlling AI rather than actually using it and enabling it to drive transformation in your organization, you're likely to end up in the dystopian element. But if you're thinking about AI of what are the opportunities, what are the risks? How do we mitigate some some of those risks, but we still fully enable the organization to to drive value you're shifting already into. What skills do I need tomorrow for my entire teams? What about the day after tomorrow? What about the day after that? And how are we constantly evolving? And can we keep up? Yeah,
Chris Rainey 48:39
and the reality is, like, some of the things that I've been speaking to HR leaders about for last 20 years, they could only dream of doing that. They can Yeah. Now with AI, you know, learning is a huge one around creating customizable learning pathways at scale that has context of the individual truly meeting where they're at, like, things like that. There's so many errors, like we've seen, obviously, loads of the recruitment, the candidate experience and recruitment use cases, yeah, that are coming through. They're now freeing up recruiters to do more value add tasks, right, and actually having conversations. There's so many, yeah, it's
Ciprian Arhire 49:15
an interesting unbalance in there, because we've been using automation, almost like low level AI and machine learning for years now. Yeah, it's been around, right in organizations. I've only seen now in the last few months, with a lot of organizations trying to stop candidates from using AI and writing CVS and, yeah, that's
Chris Rainey 49:36
a good point. They're using it too, yeah, whether you like it or not, and then,
Ciprian Arhire 49:39
like, it's, it's gone there. It's like, only fair. You've used it for years for candidates. Yeah, why wouldn't candidates use it for the organization? And it's that element of have our practices in organizations evolved enough to allow us to still select the right candidates with the right skills to bring them into. It's
Chris Rainey 50:00
gonna be tough, because, like I've seen, I know we've got wrap up soon, but I've seen, like so many use cases now, where you've got AI tools that will apply for 20 jobs for you, it will write a cover letter that's customized for every single one. So now companies in there, within their ATS have got one person applying for 20 jobs, and all of a sudden they've got what was supposed to be a solution that was solved, the problem is now, sorry, is now an extra, even more, more of a headache, because they've got 10x the CVS. Yeah. And
Ciprian Arhire 50:29
like the World Economic Forum conversation was, are we moving more and more into micro certifications and skills validation? Yes, that will replace CVS and
Chris Rainey 50:39
hundreds after hitting it's going to be, it's, yeah, it's this. There's a couple of new ACS is on the market now. Where are, basically, they're flipping it around, where, essentially you apply and you kind of create a profile, and then it suggests jobs for you, yeah. So just stop you from basically just spamming and applying to everything.
Ciprian Arhire 51:01
And there's other bits of like, you're creating a profile and you're almost like interviewing and having a conversation with AI that will then map your skills and ambitions beforehand. So there's like, other things that are coming out there that we just need to one understand. What is the challenge? What's
Chris Rainey 51:20
the best solution was gonna be fun? Was a fun time to be in a profession? Yeah,
Ciprian Arhire 51:24
I think that the solution of blocking people from from using it has never, ever in the history of humankind. That's
Chris Rainey 51:32
what I was thinking. I mean, like, because the ideals is, you create your profile, kind of like LinkedIn, you got your skills, you update it, and then you're suggested. But I feel like people want to be in control, right? Because you kind of feel like where you're at the mercy of the tool, and you're waiting for someone to tap on the shoulder, which anyone who's worked in an organization, who's been in that position, where you're in a specific role, and you're you can't move forward, because you're waiting for that tap on the shoulder. That's very frustrating. We don't want to create that, a digital version of that, so it's gonna be interesting. Listen, before you go, we covered so much during the conversation, and like you said, you're on the journey. By no means is this that there probably isn't an end destination. This is ongoing, ever revolving,
Ciprian Arhire 52:13
and we're keeping that agility. So we're building some brilliant basics. We're not making decisions for two, three years from now, but we're saying, wait in six months. Times I will come into your your office, go into ch rose office, and say, do we think we're ready for any of these things? Is it A, B or C? Are we doing this type of things like, what? How are we envisioning the future, and then how we're building enough flexibility in into our roadmap today, to give us the opportunity to
Chris Rainey 52:42
love that. So you have the sort of vision and the strategy for the you know, two, three to five years. But within that you you've made you create an agile framework, because you understand that the pace of change is very rare. You're gonna have to stick to that. Yeah, that,
Ciprian Arhire 52:57
and that's the element, because the five years is not locked. It's principles based, and it's position related. What type of organization do we want to be, and how do we envision that will will train us and that that allows us so what we're not like locking things to say we want GBS, and that's the right decision for us five years from now, therefore, how do we build everything we said, at some point in time, we will need to make a decision of what that would look like. That is not today. It's not going to be in the next three years, just looking at how we're evolving. But how do we give ourselves the opportunity that in the future we will end up into making a decision around it? Amazing.
Chris Rainey 53:40
The chip is always fun chatting with you almost like was gonna ask you for your parting piece of advice, but you've already shared so much great advice. What would be your parting piece of advice for people listening that are perhaps on a similar journey that you are right now? What advice would you give them? And then we'll say goodbye, I think
Ciprian Arhire 53:55
part of the advice that I'll leave people with is, if you we've, we've learned everything about sort of fearless organizations and and leading with with fear. We've learned the opposite of, how do you get curious about the world and you explore and you think about yourself, of putting, putting multiple different hearts as a nature leader to test prototype, understand, explore some of the things that we're dealing with are maybe outside of our understanding today. But how do you get closer to that as an exploration, the staying away from leading with fear is what's gonna actually make organizations bloom into what, what we should be, shaping them into having a good balance of technology, humans, interesting and meaningful work for everyone. I love that.
Chris Rainey 54:50
Listen, I appreciate you coming on the show, and if you're gonna get a lot of questions after after this one from our audience, but it was a pleasure.
Ciprian Arhire 54:58
Likewise, you.
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