Indian HR is ready for the Tech Revolution - thoughts from #TechHR14

Around 10 days ago I attended India's first ever Tech HR conference organized by People Matters in Gurgaon. I was privileged to be invited to speak at the unconference track in the event and host a Google Hangout with analysts Alan Lepofsky and Holger Mueller. It was also an opportunity to listen to industry leaders like Abhijit Bhaduri, Frank Ricciardi, Debjani Ghosh, Anand Pillai and Sameer Patel. I was also looking to catch up with innovative learning professionals and friends Kavi Arasu and Sunder Ramachandran.

Here's my takeaway:

• HR Technology is simplifying. The large players are moving to the cloud from on-premise and HR's dependence on the IT function is reducing. Most of this tech even between solutions by different vendors is becoming easy to integrate.
• HR leaders are increasingly seeing technology not with the earlier view of "eliminating inefficiencies" but understand that tech will transform HR and the workplace.
• There was a lot of talk about big data and analytics - but I missed the sessions. However I believe that soon we will see a lot of different kinds of people working in HR, like data scientists. 
• Employees will expect technology to be easy to use, intuitive and not go through a learning curve to use it, and for it to work across devices.
• There are quite a few HR Tech startups in the Talent Acquisition and Employee Engagement space. Some that caught my eye were Jombay, Talent Auction. Now it is incumbent on HR leaders to try out such innovative Indian startups.

Do check out the PDF report put together by the People Matters team about the event. Also read Sameer Patel's perspective on difference between the HR conversation in India with the US. A post by Rakshita on my session.