My "Social HR" predictions for 2014

Twitter Meta Moo! too far? (Photo credit: Josh Russell)

Well I don't normally do such posts :) And as my professor from college advised "Predicting, specially about the future is hazardous" :)

But I thought, at the most, what can happen by Dec 2014? At worst I will have egg on my face, at best you'll not remember I posted this :D

So here goes:

• Employee Referrals will go social - more and more employers who hire in large numbers will tap their employees' social networks and leverage social tech like leaderboards and public recognition to drive referrals. On a related note I would love to see one or more of the larger Applicant Tracking Systems bake in social referrals within the tool.
• Gamification will impact Assessments, Onboarding and Learning - Gamification is the process of making tasks social, that require people to move from level to level with social recognition elements also built in will be deployed in organizations from Assessments, to Onboarding to Learning
• Large organizations will deploy their own version of MOOCs - Massive Open Online Courses are impacting how people learn (at school with firms like Khan Academy) to higher education (Coursera). In 2014 I think large organizations would leverage "internal MOOCs" to train new staff or some large organizational initiatives.
• Recognition will try to go social - Have mentioned this earlier in the context of referrals - but here I am talking about the individual and team recognition by peers on a social platform - spreading to the enterprise - however standalone recognition platforms will need to get integrated into intranets or Enterprise Social Networks for this to be happening better
• Employer Branding will move from social engagement to social advertising - As Facebook and Twitter both get pressured by the markets to monetize, more and more companies will be used Facebook ads and Twitter promoted tweets to reach different talent segments
• Content specialists will be used by HR - whether internal hires or by agencies, these would be the people who will showcase the culture and SMEs externally and role modelling behaviours internally triggering conversations and measuring impact.

What do you think?

Updated: Here's what I think will *NOT* happen in HR techonology (social or otherwise):

• Big Data - Let's admit it, in 99.99% of companies HR doesn't have the "small data" - so getting to big data and predictive analytics in 2014 is unlikely for HR folks.
• Wearable computing - Yes I've seen the video of how Google Glass can help in onboarding new employees, but that won't happen in 2014.
• Crowdsourcing - Some companies (which you can count on your fingertips) are turning to employees to crowdsource things from product to ideas on working policies, but 99% of companies will not do it (or fail if they do it - because the overall ecosystem is not in place)