William Tincup, HR and innovation expert and president and editor-at-large of RecruitingDaily, describes how technology and the “human” in HR can coexist.
William Tincup
President and Editor-at-Large, RecruitingDaily
You’ve seen thousands of HR tech pitches over the years. What do you think HR leaders are tired of hearing from vendors and what do they want to hear in 2025?
I think the thing that tires them out is the “how,” because vendors want to talk about how the technology works. They want to get into the zeros and ones, and they don’t focus enough time on workflow change management.
At the end of the day, HR doesn’t care about “how,” it cares about the output that it creates. They care about workflow. They wish that vendors would talk more about their business goals and more about the outputs of the technology rather than how the technology was built.
We talk a lot about evidence-based HR, but in your experience, what kind of data moves the needle in conversations between HR and the suite?
Being able to find a piece of data, wherever it is, through storytelling. [For example] what’s our average stay when we hire somebody? “On average, employees at this position stay five months.” That’s based on data. There’s no, “Here’s what we’re learning from that […] a year ago, that was three months.”
As a CEO, if I just hear “five months,” that’s a fail. But there’s a good story here: It’s almost doubled in less than a year, and here are the driving reasons and what we’re going to do to try to get it to nine months. So, it’s that storytelling piece that’s missing.
What’s one uncomfortable truth HR leaders need to face if they want to keep their best people?
Identifying high performers, high potentials, and your most important talent and putting personalized plans of retention around each individual.
With so much noise in the space, what do you think separates truly impactful HR tech from the rest? And how can buyers get better at spotting the difference?
Buyers can get better looking at live software. Don’t look at demos. Don’t look at PowerPoint. You want to see software that’s actually been built not the road map. I don’t want to talk to the people who are going to just tell me great things about you. I want to talk to people who said “no.” And why I want to talk to them is [because of] what made the decision no? There’s a transparency in it.
What advice would you give to a chief people officer trying to balance innovation like AI or skills platforms with practical wins their CEO can feel?
Start something. The hardest thing in this is that there’s so much coming at them so fast, and it creates “analysis paralysis.” You just freeze up. That’s happening in HR. The best advice you can give someone who’s freezing up is to just move. Just put one step in front of another, create that inertia. Try a pilot with a company. If it doesn’t work, try something else. Sometimes an innovation isn’t really an innovation until two years later.
