Tech news

As states swap degrees for skills, AI, agents and automation for HR turns policy into measurable hiring outcomes Phenom , the leader in applied AI built to redesign work operations for hiring faster, developing better and retaining longer, and Opportunity@Work, a national nonprofit focused on expanding economic opportunity for workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs), announced a strategic partnership to help public sector organizations make skills-based hiring a lasting part of their workforce strategies. “Government agencies have some of the best proof that skills-first hiring works… This partnership gives states a practical way to connect that proof to the technology they already use to hire,” said Byron Auguste, CEO and co-founder of Opportunity@Work. States across the country are eliminating degree requirements and adopting skills-first hiring to meet their evolving talent needs and to broaden pathways into public service. While public sector hiring may be les...

The AI-native platform now offers personalized financial guidance that draws on an employee’s specific benefits, pay, and debt, delivered through its conversational AI, Cait. Candidly , the AI-native financial guidance and technology platform, announced a new employee-facing offering: benefits-aware financial guidance that provides the workforce with holistic financial guidance grounded in their own finances and the benefits they are already offered. The solution expands Candidly’s employer-sponsored benefits suite, which to date has centered on student debt and college planning, and now spans an employee’s broader financial life. Employers invest heavily in benefits, but many go underutilized due to low awareness and the need for personalized, holistic guidance to fully understand and take advantage of the full suite of benefits their employer is offering. Making the most of these benefits is rarely a matter of maximizing one piece in isolation — retirement contribu...

The pattern for transforming a workforce often starts familiarly. An organization identifies a gap in capability, rolls out a training program, introduces a new policy or technology, and measures participation. But completing a program does not automatically mean that employees have changed the way they work. A training course can teach a new process, a leadership program can introduce new management practices, and a digital transformation initiative can deploy new tools, but sustained transformation depends on what employees actually do after those interventions. When organizations treat workforce transformation as a one-time initiative, they often find it difficult to sustain the momentum after the formal program has ended. Thus, the gap between training, policy implementation and sustained employee behavior is becoming an important HR technology challenge. Employees may know what they are supposed to do but can still revert to familiar workflows, habits, tools or collaboration pat...

Businessolver research reveals a C-suite divided over whether AI should make the workforce more capable or leaner, while CIOs and CTOs are 25 points more likely than CFOs to worry that technology will outpace internal systems and workforce skills. Executives investing in AI for cost savings via headcount reduction are nearly half as likely to invest in the AI upskilling and workforce readiness needed to enable the AI efficiency they seek, according to new Businessolver research. Among the 27% of C-suite executives who name cost savings through headcount reduction as a top AI investment goal, just 18% also prioritize AI upskilling, compared with 35% of CXOs who do not prioritize AI for headcount reduction. The same leaders trail on predictive analytics (21% vs. 44%), time savings and productivity, and reducing employees’ administrative work — the investments that make a workforce more capable. “AI does not create value on its own. People create value when they’re ena...