3 Key Themes Dominate Gartner’s Hype Cycle for HR Technology

The Gartner Hype Cycle™ for HR Technology provides a curated list of technologies and innovations that we consider important to leaders responsible for transforming HR. This year’s edition highlights technologies that can help your organization achieve greater HR agility and flexibility in an environment of constant change.

• Cloud human capital management (HCM) suites have historically offered consolidated HR functionalities within a single, integrated solution. Now, a composable HR application framework (CHAF) can enable quick deployment of new employee experiences through packaged business capabilities (PBCs). Although CHAFs are still nascent, application leaders should begin shaping their HR technology strategies around this concept.

• Global employer of record (EoR) solutions are emerging technologies that help organizations hire and manage workers in a new location, without having to set up a legal entity in each country. This is essential to quickly expand in new markets. Global EoR, which sits in the Innovation Trigger phase of the Hype Cycle, can also provide more flexibility for remote workers.

• Workforce planning provides a shared view of the workforce-related changes needed to meet long- and short-term strategic or operational goals. However, differing perspectives and lack of quality data are just a few obstacles leaders are facing in this area, landing workforce planning in the Trough of Disillusionment.

• The past few years have brought increased demand for coaching and mentoring. But scaling is a challenge. Although only a few vendors have achieved scale, coaching and mentoring applications have the potential to expand quickly and transform the way entire workforces engage and develop.
  

• Verticals like retail, healthcare, manufacturing and logistics have many more frontline than desk-based workers. Despite this, tech initiatives often focus solely on desk-based workers. Frontline worker employee experience technology (EXtech) allows organizations to improve the experience of this underserved section.
  

• Sitting on the Slope of Enlightenment, talent analytics is fast approaching mainstream adoption for its ability to track the performance of HR processes and programs, and apply lessons to improve in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), employee experience (EX) and ultimately, business performance.

• Generative AI (GenAI) may be able to drive greater efficiency and effectiveness in the HR function, where it will primarily serve as a tool for text generation (job descriptions, recruiting, learning, content creation for onboarding and “humanlike” HR chatbots). However, GenAI outputs are hardly error-free, creating a strong need for data governance, quality control and good employee judgment.
  

• AI in talent acquisition helps drive efficiency, grow business impact and deliver a digital user experience by automating recruitment, personalizing the candidate experience and using data to prioritize top candidates. Yet as regulation of AI in recruiting continues to develop globally and these solutions move toward the Slope of Enlightenment, they are also encountering pushback.
  

• Increasing speed to productivity is an ongoing mandate. Employee onboarding solutions, which are nearing the Plateau of Productivity, do this and help improve EX — a key factor in establishing the sense of care, trust and belonging that supports employee retention. Many organizations are upgrading their onboarding processes to address first-year retention challenges in particular.