I generally don’t enjoy conferences and have historically dodged expo halls and eager sales reps with Matrix-like agility. But this year has been different. I’ve spent the past decade knee-deep in all things talent and people operations—owning internal processes and advising startups on the talent and people tech stack. Each year, there’s been the promise of automation, with the same old talk track about giving the people team time back to do more strategic work… but by and large, the promises have been empty. Only now can we see the light at the end of the tech tunnel.

At Thumbtack, I owned the talent and people tech stack for our ~800-person organization. It was a complete patchwork quilt of tools since there was no single platform that could do it all. I spent an egregious number of hours navigating APIs and two-way connections. Ultimately, these tools and processes were limited by the technological constraints that existed. The only automation we had was repetitive, rule-based, and—most importantly—unreliable. Tools would follow rules and mappings, but break as soon as something looked or felt different. And these steps are mission-critical… we’re talking about people’s paychecks! We didn’t trust the machines more than we trusted humans, and as a result, we spent way too much time operating as half-human, half-machine.

Walking through Transform this year in Vegas, I found myself drawn to the expo. I spent every free moment I had meeting vendors and learning about how their technology was actually going to give people and talent leaders time back—finally, after all these years. We don’t yet know who will emerge as the winner, but unlike previous years when companies were touting nominal progress and innovation, I feel like we’re at the precipice of a total talent technology shake-up.

Tech to Keep an Eye Out for: The people tech market has always been saturated. While a few leaders are poised to take the No. 1 spot, there’s a lot of emerging technology solving real and important challenges.

• Sourcing – Juicebox: In a crowded space, they’re a bright light. Especially great for early-stage companies who can’t afford LinkedIn Recruiter seats, Juicebox is the first people search engine built on natural language. No fancy Boolean strings. No manually entering every possible iteration of a school’s name. No triple-checking that you selected “San Francisco, CA” and “Bay Area.” The best part? It’s affordable! It’s a no-brainer when it comes to supercharging your search or learning how to source for the first time.

• Interviewing – Metaview: In early 2019, Siadhal reached out to me to see if I was interested in learning more about his new, no-name recruiting technology. He walked me through his tool: an AI note-taker that would record, transcribe and track all interviews. He promised more engaged interviewers, less frantic typing and more thorough evaluation of candidates. I thought he was completely out of touch with reality. I honestly couldn’t imagine a recruiter—let alone a candidate—feeling comfortable being recorded. This was pre-COVID, when on-site, in-person interviews were a huge part of the experience. How wrong I was. At BCV, we’ve used Metaview for the past two years, and the Talent team unanimously says it’s the one tool they couldn’t live without. It delivers on its promise. Our Talent team can be genuinely present and engaged with candidates without the fear of capturing everything perfectly. People also say great things about Brighthire—a Metaview competitor—though I haven’t used them myself.

• Headcount Management – TeamOhana: When I was at Thumbtack, I created a Google Sheet called our “headcount tracker”—the single source of truth for open, filled and upcoming roles across the entire company. Every hire and every term was tracked in this file, and legitimately no one else had edit access. I was a complete single point of failure—but also, back to my earlier point, no one trusted the machines. Only the humans. This file was the source of truth for Finance, Exec and Recruiting. I easily spent 10 hours a week keeping it updated. Don’t even get me started on year-end planning… Enter TeamOhana: take my insane headcount tracker that no one was allowed to touch and completely automate it. It integrates with your ATS, HRIS, and hiring plan to create a live dashboard. Time to hire? Check. Recruiting capacity? Check. Headcount forecasting? Check. It even manages pending starts, approved hires and future terminations. While I would miss my beloved, ever-pinned, ever-open doc, I cannot imagine how many hours I would have gotten back in my life if I’d had a tool like this when I originally built my tracker in 2018.

• Benefits – Thatch: I have yet to meet someone who is enthusiastic about their corporate healthcare offering. Systems are archaic, difficult to navigate, expensive and one-size-fits-all. Thatch flips that model on its head —making it easier for both employers and employees. Thatch uses an ICHRA (Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement). Instead of giving you a company health plan, your employer gives you money each month to buy your own health insurance so employees can completely customize their healthcare plans. Employers just set a budget, and employees pick what they need for themselves and their families. Huge bonus: Thatch handles all benefit questions and inquiries—freeing up the people team from being the middle-person, and saving them from the thousands of plan-related questions that flood ticketing queues every year.

Total gamechangers… once they happen:

As I think about where people tech is evolving, there are two areas I’m most excited about. The first, the holy grail of people analytics, quality of hire. Definitive confirmation that the hiring and recruiting team scoped, recruited, closed and onboarded the right person.

In a patchwork tech environment, this has been nearly impossible to do well. I used to send out individual notes to new hires and managers with a list of set questions to get feedback on fit, expectations and satisfaction after the first 90 days. Imagine doing that manually for a company of 800? Just impossible.

Now, imagine being able to pull together:

• What the JD was
• Someone’s background
• How fast they’re hitting initial goal
• Their progression over time
• Bonus bracket
• Sentiment and feedback
• Interviewer feedback and how that correlated with eventual performance

Imagine weaving that all together seamlessly. Our systems have become so much more sophisticated, and tools that were previously point-solutions are becoming integrated platforms. I haven’t seen a single platform that does this yet—but I suspect we will soon.

The second is agentic people operations. In a world of endless Zendesk tickets and manual updates to clunky systems, this is the clearest path to alleviating the manual and administrative work from a people operations function. In no way does this replace the need to have humans in the loop, but it means that rote, repetitive tasks are transformed into zero-touch workflows. Wisq is currently leading the charge here, but in my opinion, it’s too soon to tell who is the winner. If I were a global HRIS, I’d sure be putting a lot of time, energy and resources into building this into my product.

Note: BCV is not an investor in any of these platforms. We are customers of some, but are not paid or receive anything for public endorsement.

What to do now:

I can’t help feeling like this is the most exciting chapter in People and Talent Operations. Incumbent systems we all love to hate aren’t going to be able to match the pace of disruption, and a whole new landscape of technology will (hopefully) take over. My biggest piece of advice for those working on talent and people teams is to stay relevant. This is not a new thought since more and more companies are headed in this direction. If you don’t know how to use AI, even if you’re the Chief People Officer, your job is toast. Test out new tools, talk to your peers and challenge your existing tech stack to innovate.