I have served on the Boards or as a senior executive in companies that have created billions of dollars of value for their investors, so I am often asked where the next big opportunity lies. Apart from proptech, I see a significant opportunity in human resources technology. By the time you finish this article, I hope you will understand this “peopletech” trend and how to benefit from it.

Few employees are 100 per cent happy

There is clearly room for improvement in how companies hire, manage, and develop their employees. Very few people in the workforce have not at some point felt abused, misused, or simply overlooked. 

I’ll give you an example from my career. 

Not long after I graduated from business school, I was excited to land a role with a large financial institution in Germany. I was hired to be Head of Strategy for a business unit. 

But after signing and before starting, the organisation got confused, changed its mind, spent time debating my title, and in other ways wasted an entire month after I had officially begun before finally giving me a job to do. 

I earned no salary during that month. Worse, the uncertainty and the callousness with which I was treated made that experience one of the worst I have gone through in my professional career.

A huge opportunity

Perhaps technology cannot fully make up for human incompetence or indifference. Still, good HR technology can have a powerful effect on organisations that want to get the most from their teams.

Also Read: “We want to facilitate organisations’ Web3 transition from bits to atoms”: Brinc CEO Manav Gupta

To understand the scope of the opportunity that human resources technology businesses are addressing, let’s compare it to proptech, which we already know is huge.

Let me give you three data points:

• Consider that today an estimated 3.2 billion people are employed somewhere globally, and there are 2.3 billion properties. So, there are about 40-50 per cent more jobs than properties.
• Properties on average turn over every 10 to 20 years, depending on the country. Meanwhile, research from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that people change jobs every four years on average, a number that is consistent for many countries in the world. So jobs turn over 2.5 times to 5 times more frequently than properties.
• The value of both jobs and properties vary significantly by country. So, let’s look at the U.S. again. There, the average property is worth US$435k and the average job (over four years) is worth a smaller US$285k.

In sum, the opportunity for HR technology entrepreneurs is enormous. These statistics make it clear why the global human resource technology market is projected to grow to a total of US$36 billion by 2028, according to a report from Fortune Business Insights. That’s more than triple its 2018 size.

The best team usually wins

Perhaps most importantly of all, human resources technology is vital because, after all, it is dedicated to helping actual human beings achieve their potential. 

Individual human beings win Nobel prizes, sell products, brainstorm solutions, drive growth, care for their teammates, coach less experienced colleagues, and ensure your company‘s success.

In businesses, as in sports, the best team usually wins. 

I certainly would have loved to have best of breed HR tech during the five corporate takeovers I have gone through. Hundreds of millions of dollars can be at play, but mergers and acquisitions are often stalled or even thwarted due to missing paperwork. 

An always updated organisational chart is a key item on every checklist for due diligence data rooms. (Data rooms are the repositories of confidential information that potential takeover targets must prepare so their acquirers can do their pre-transaction research.)

Who works for whom and does what? That seems like an easy enough question. But I can tell you from experience that many companies cannot produce a live, detailed, and accurate org chart on demand.

Also Read: Why leaders matter for a strong organisational culture

I have seen first-hand how insufficient are the tools that traditionally have been available to most HR teams. And it is worse in smaller companies and startups. There, limited resources and fast growth can make human resources even more difficult.

All these realisations motivated my decision to invest in BrioHR.com. I believe this Malaysian based company has the potential to help companies and employees optimise their human resources across the amazing growth region of Southeast Asia and beyond. BrioHR’s solution also generates up-to-date org charts on demand.

In sum, there is a bright future ahead for players who provide end-to-end systems for empowering and managing people, systems, and platforms. There is a crying need for the facilitation of every stage of the employee-employer relationship, including recruiting, onboarding, employing, retaining, and developing team members. And companies like BrioHR are rising to the challenge.

–

Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community, or like the e27 Facebook page

Image credit: Canva Pro

The post Why HR tech will make Asia’s next unicorns appeared first on e27.