With the fourth industrial revolution, the contemporary global economy has entered the digital era. In such period of digitalization and intelligence, new technologies such as mobile communications, Internet of things, cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence have made the relationship between human resources and organizations and relationship between real and virtual economy getting more and more interconnected. More virtual organizations began to emerge, and the working model of online collaboration became the norm. The organizational structure tended to be flatter and more decentralized. Under such circumstance, traditional corporate human resource management mode is hard to adapt and cope with, which requires the changes and innovation of human resource management system.
In the digital economy, organizations are operating in a dynamic and customer-orientation environment with uncertain, flexible and continuously changing work. With convenient mobile devices, talents can work in the cloud instead of a fixed and real workplace at any time to satisfy their customers’ needs. The increasing number of new technologies are applied into practical work, which requires talents can equip more skills with themselves and keep learning in practice. In order to manage collective human resources better, the HR department has changed in four aspects: hiring, using, training and retaining.
Firstly, in terms of hiring talents in the digital economy, social networks are regarded as a vital channel to discover new talents and enlarge professional networks for HR professionals. Surprisingly, 31% of hires come from social networks (Perez, 2015). Moreover, compared to traditional time-costly screening and face-to-face interviews taken by HR professionals, with the help of big data analysis, AI and convenient mobile devices, resumes are screened by advanced systems automatically. And interviews are more flexible and time-saving with online apps. Furthermore, some companies even use AI to interview talents online, and HR professionals are arranged to interview several excellent candidates and decide the final option.
Secondly, referring to the arrangement of talents after recruitment in the digital economy, the emerging share economy and flexible work facilitate the emergence of freelance jobs and contractual employment. In this way, their pay is based on each task they take, and they have freer work time arrangement. HR professionals can contact them through online social apps and Skype to interact with them regularly and supervise them. For instance, in the Uber, once the contractual drivers are on-boarded, the HR professionals interact with them through the App based and virtual interfaces rather than meeting them in person (Juneja, 2015).
Thirdly, while training human resources in the digital economy, the relationship between people and organizations has become a mutually beneficial symbiosis mode. Human resources are not dependent on the organization, but actively respond to and realize customers’ needs to achieve individual development and organizational development. The organization offer opportunities for talents to promote their self-study ability.
Finally, in order to retain talents for the organization in the digital economy, continuous mutual benefits mechanism and transparent benefit-sharing mechanism are more attractive than traditional salary incentives, career management or organizational culture under dramatic adjustments of the relationship between human resources and organizations. Long-term mutually beneficial cooperation between talents and organizations is required for HR professionals’ maintaining.
In the digital economy, on the one hand, advanced technology support reduces the workload of HR professionals. On the other hand, the emergence of the virtual economy and new work choice redefine relationships between HR and organizations which require HR professionals to adapt and adjust to cope with changing internal and external environment.
In the future, HR professionals are facing challenges to cope with pension and insurance or those freelance talents. A new social contract between organizations and cooperative talents is required to maintain a long-time mutually beneficial connection. Moreover, Chytiri (2019) argued that HR professionals are supposed to implement new HR strategies to promote loyalty and engagement, cope with diversity and retain digital talents. He believed HR professionals were necessary to acquire primary skills to access, analyze, assess and share information. He also illustrated that using digital technology to store and evaluate talents’ personal information needed to be considered critically from the perspective of ethics. However, Fenech, Baguant and Ivanov (2019) advised HR professionals to take full use of stored human resource data to formulate and implement strategies. Notably, digitalization has become an unstoppable trend. HR professionals are supposed to adapt changes resulted from the emerging digital economy and adjust their strategy gradually.
References:
Chytiri, A. P. (2019). Human Resource professionals’ Role in the Digital Era. SPOUDAI Journal of Economics and Business, Vol.69 (2019), Issue 1-2, pp. 62-72
Fenech, R., Baguant, P., & Ivanov, D. (2019). The changing role of human resource management in an era of digital transformation. Journal of Management Information and Decision Sciences, 22(2), 166-175.
Juneja, P. (2015). Human Resource Management in the Times of Emerging Digital Economy. Management Study Guide. Retrieved on 13th February 2020 from: https://www.managementstudyguide.com/human-resource-management-in-times-of-emerging-digital-economy.htm
Pérez, C. P. (2015). 6 HR Trends in the new digital economy. Retrieved on 13th February 2020 from: https://www.glocalthinking.com/en/6-hr-trends-in-the-new-digital-economy
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