In facing into this challenge, the Coles HR team was able to draw upon the shared Coles Group values of customer obsession, passion and pace, responsibility, health and happiness. As Tammy Ryder, General Manager, People and Culture at Coles, put it, 鈥淭he wellbeing of our team and customer is always at the heart of what we do.鈥�

Coles knows how to do things in a big way. It鈥檚 a large-scale operation, with 120,000 team members, processing more than 21 million customer transactions each week, and providing its customers with products from thousands of farmers and suppliers. The Group has more than 2,400 outlets across its portfolio of Australian supermarkets, liquor and convenience stores.

鈥淒uring the COVID crisis of 2020, Coles team members moved mountains to ensure a constant supply of goods during the pandemic, ensuring we could supply essential goods to our customers in a time of uncertainty鈥� said Ryder.

Despite the truly unprecedented times, Coles was able to recruit for jobs and mobilise team members in a quick and agile manner.

鈥淲e started to see shopping behavior at the same levels we see during Christmas peak, as people started panic buying,鈥� said Ryder. 鈥淥ur supply chain was in overdrive, implementing innovative health and safety controls at lightning speed. We realised we needed a lot more team members, right away. And almost oversight, we went from a steady flow of recruitment activity into unprecedented, large-scale COVID-19 recruitment response mode.鈥�

Ryder鈥檚 team made an initial ask for an additional 5,000 team members across the country to help with replenishing shelves, servicing customers and additional cleaning. To make this happen, the Coles team redesigned their recruitment and onboarding processes. They called it FastTrack, which removed manual store-based process steps by centralising recruitment activity.

For example, to enable speed and safety, as well as to expedite the hiring process, Coles immediately switched to implementing video interviews. The company also connected with businesses such as airlines, that were pausing operations due to the pandemic. Being able to communicate directly with these external workforces enabled Coles to scale team members quickly. After just six weeks, they鈥檇 been able to recruit 12,000 additional team members into the business.

Coles has also brought this level of passion and innovation to making progress towards diversity and inclusion (D&I) in the workplace. Coles sees difference as a good thing. Because they know that the differences of their team member鈥檚 background, experiences and perspectives can set them apart. But also bring them together.

Their differences help them spark ideas, create connections and discover commonality. Just as they have done for over a century, they鈥檙e focused more so than ever before on making Coles somewhere everyone feels like they belong.

From the very outset, this vision has transcended the kind of box-checking trap that can affect such initiatives.

鈥淲e recognise that the value of attracting and retaining diverse teams enhances our decision making and ability to innovate,鈥� said Ryder. 鈥淒iversity teams and an inclusive culture are critical to the success of our overall business strategy.鈥�

To progress gender equity, Coles has set gender targets to reach 40% women in leadership roles at an organisational level, as well as to improve male and female representation in each function to 30% of each gender. Setting targets at management levels ensure the company brings valuable diversity of thought into its leadership teams. They have also delivered inclusive leadership and unconscious bias training for senior leaders as part of their diversity and inclusion strategy, known as 鈥淏etter Together.鈥�

鈥淚n regard to Indigenous employment at Coles, the focus is on providing more opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, suppliers, customers and communities to engage with our business,鈥� said Ryder. 鈥淭he aim is to increase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander team member representation to 5% of our workforce and 3% of trade and management roles by providing great careers at Coles.鈥�

Coles also recently finished a major HR transformation with 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors within 18 months. The HR team then made the bold choice to deploy all modules at once, versus taking an incremental approach. It was not a simple nor straight-forward decision, but as Ryder explained, it made sense because retail is such a fast-paced business.

鈥淧assion and Pace are two of our core values, so after going through 18 months of design and development of what we call myhub at Coles, we made the decision to go for it and cut over altogether,鈥� said Ryder. 鈥淎 鈥榖ig bang,鈥� if you will. Our HR team believed it was the right approach for the business in the current climate.鈥�

The technology itself was suitable for rapid adoption. The user experience is akin to an iPhone. And there鈥檚 no manual. Employees can simply start using it. Coles did carry out team training for which 90% of their people opted in. And it worked. Coles team members liked the new systems, which are intuitive and mobile enabled.

As with any big tech launch, there were some expected bumps and bugs at first. However. They resolved all the issues with a lot of support and collaboration between the Coles IT and HR teams, enabling them to exit hyper care within six weeks of launch.

The company had over 100,000 team members log in during the first week, updating details, engaging with the new interface, and checking pay slips. The new system gives Coles a great foundation to leverage now as it customises further builds to the system for its needs.

Moving to HR cloud solutions was not the only digital transformation Coles Group experienced in this short time frame. It was just one of several major projects that aimed to change the way the whole company uses digital technology to run the business. A big part of this is an overall move to becoming a 鈥溌槎乖� House.鈥�

To this end, Coles has implemented Ariba for procurement, 麻豆原创 S/4HANA for Finance and Fieldglass for contingent workers. By aligning its 麻豆原创 systems, the company can integrate seamlessly to deliver a great user experience and drive positive, progressive business outcomes.

Now that Coles has the 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors system deployed, their P&C Digital Roadmap comprises a five-year vision that truly reimagines the role of P&C at Coles and how the department can elevate its partnership with the business to enable its corporate strategy.

This Roadmap is aligned to the Coles 鈥淲inning Together鈥� people strategy. They have projects in flight that are focused on recruitment at the store level. The goals are to evolve the candidate experience, reduce the time to hire, automate and digitalise the experience.

The plan includes multichannel communications, along with job matching based on AI. For high volume processes, the HR team is looking at robotic process automation (RPA) and automation of high volume/ low value core HR transactions. Ryder鈥檚 group envisions using AI for query management and line manager support. They have projects focused on knowledge and content management, too. Analytics is a big play for HR at Coles. The goal is to use people insights from its 120,000 team member workforce to improve its services and performance to support the business.

Looking ahead, Coles HR is building on an excellent foundation that enables the department to chart its own course and really leverage technology. 鈥淭he future is what we make it and I鈥檓 excited by what we鈥檙e working towards,鈥� said Ryder.

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So how can an organisation support the “no touch” future of interacting with their employees and future employees? Fortunately, we live in a truly amazing digital age and there are several solutions and techniques that can offer not only a no touch solution, but some interesting advantages as well. HR teams need to be as as any other part of an organisation, so its important to consider alternatives to the ‘normal’ way of doing things to support the continuity of business.

I’ll address a few key areas, but keep in mind that these technologies can be used in many diverse circumstances and chances are your organisation may have adopted some of these already, but perhaps only in areas outside of HR.

Let’s start with the process of hiring. Though many organisations do not have hiring new employees anywhere near the top of their priorities, other organisations cannot hire quickly enough. But how do you interact with a candidate or an employee job seeker virtually?

Video interviewing is becoming among many organisations these days because of the ability to interview a person without inviting them into a facility, in close proximity to other employees. Products like HireVue and Sonru are good examples but there are many. The way video interviews generally work is to allow a candidate to record themselves answering questions. So unlike a Zoom, or a Microsoft Teams conference, the interview may not be held live, and instead be completely automated.

The candidate receives an email message with a link to begin the process. After a short testing phase to make sure the candidate’s camera, internet speed and sound are working, the candidate is given the opportunity to practice answering some questions first. Finally they will record their interview. Some solutions will provide a timer both to read and understand the question, and also to answer the question.

One nice aspect of this process for the candidate is that they get to rehearse, and they don’t have the pressure of someone watching them. For the recruiters, there are all kinds of metrics, and that can be derived from the videos not only from how the questions were answered, but also from more subtle cues like facial expressions, where their eyes are looking, and more.

Digital Signatures
At some stage, your employees or prospective employees will be asked to sign a document. Whether it is their employment contract, or company policy – handing them a piece of paper that they – ewww – touch, is not acceptable. So enter the technology of .

There are many technologies available, some able to stand up in court better than others but in every case the person doing the signing is doing so in an entirely digital way. One standout is DocuSign of course who offers the concept of a ‘digital signature’ that incorporates sophisticated technologies to prove that a person really did sign a document. Signatures can be a graphical representation of an employee’s actual signature, or facsimile or just some letters standing for their initials.

The signature itself is not the important part, it’s all the underlying data to support its validity that will hold water with your company’s legal team.

In conclusion, though these are some excellent and widely used techniques, there are still many organisations that have not made the move to a “no touch” or even a “low touch” environment when it comes to interacting with their prospective and existing employees.

Aside from these employer side solutions, HR needs to be a key player in other areas of employee life also, like supporting and techniques that also support social distancing. Hopefully these examples will light the fire of action with you and your HR team so you can be bold and adopt technologies like these to support your employees and job seekers. When it comes to sound “no touch” solutions, you cant touch these.

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While some of these predictions are closer to coming true than others, if we turn our attention to the world of recruiting, we鈥檒l find several much more practical and immediately attainable goals as we enter the new decade. They may be less thrilling than teleportation, but these compelling innovations are nonetheless poised to make a major impact on聽:

1. AI-Based Candidate Matching

Recession planning is in full swing. With many anticipating a聽, talent acquisition team are preparing for a radically different candidate market.

While we鈥檝e long been battling talent shortages, a recession could bring talent surpluses instead. But this will not immediately solve all the challenges聽around recruiting and retaining the best talent. Instead, recruiting teams will look to AI-based candidate matching solutions.

There won鈥檛 be more recruiters in a downturn, but you can anticipate applications for open positions to increase to as much as 20 times their current level. Effective AI solutions will be key to making the talent pool more manageable by helping recruiters short-list candidates while identifying聽those with the right skills, like adaptability and agility.

2. Taking a Candidate-First Approach

If an element of the recruiting process, an experience, or a piece of information being collected is not to the benefit of the candidate, it will be eliminated. Of course, legal requirements do not apply.

However, recruiting teams should work with their legal departments to understand what is truly required and what can be done away with to deliver a better candidate experience. For example,聽聽as many as 60 percent of candidates will abandon a job application if they feel it is too long or complex. To avoid drop-offs and incomplete applications, recruiters will have to cut the extraneous data collection and let candidates get right to the point.

3. Incorporating More Feedback Into the Recruiting Experience

Recruiting teams will begin to implement comprehensive feedback and experience management solutions. Feedback should be collected during three moments, at minimum: post-application, post-interview, and post-hire. And feedback should be requested from all candidates, even those who did not get an interview request or offer. By analysing this feedback, recruiting teams will be able to identify more opportunities to dramatically improve their recruiting processes.

4. Eliminating the Gender Pay Gap

Plenty of tools are now available to identify and solve gender inequity in corporate pay structures. In 2020, the best companies will eliminate the gender pay gap entirely 鈥� or they will at least have a聽concrete plan to eliminate it within the near future. For example, organizations can implement salary offer checks and balances or compensation-ratio intelligence in the internal transfer and promotion process.

Diversity can not only聽聽but also lead to better retention, stronger business performance, increased employee engagement, and enhanced customer satisfaction. Fair pay structures are crucial for the meaningful success of any workforce diversity initiative.

5. Recognising聽the Material Benefits of Diversity Programs

As many organizations have implemented significant diversity initiatives over the last five years, companies are now beginning to experience firsthand how a more diverse workforce can accelerate innovation, increase productivity and revenue, and strengthen corporate brands and cultures. While closing pay gaps is one key step toward more diversity, that鈥檚 not all it takes.

In 2020, companies will double down and implement more strategies to encourage and support workforce diversity. Expect to see more anonymous recruiting initiatives, such as blind screening and assessments. AI can be a big help in this process, but even聽. Going forward, talent acquisition teams should prioritise learning about vendors鈥� efforts to prevent AI bias before choosing any AI solution.

Additionally, as part of their diversity hiring initiatives, recruiters will take more steps to better accommodate interviewing and hiring people with disabilities. Organisations are starting to recognise that this large pool of highly skilled talent has often been overlooked, and those companies that tap into it stand to gain an edge over their competitors.

6. Real-Time Flexibility in Hire Type

In the year ahead, companies will start to shift away from predetermined contractor, contingent, and direct-hire roles. Instead, they will find the most appropriately skilled person for the role and hire them.

Organisations are recognising that some of the best candidates on the market aren鈥檛 looking for traditional full-time roles. They may have families to care for, or they may simply desire more variety in their work and schedule. Regardless of the reason, candidates are seeking nontraditional work arrangements, and companies will need to become more flexible in order to compete for the best talent. As a result, a recruiter鈥檚 focus will shift to the most appropriately skilled person, not just the right hire-type fit.

鈥�

In summary, 2020 will be an exciting year in the recruiting space. Organisations are beginning to see the economic value of diversity programs and the impact of emerging technologies like AI and experience data.

Continue innovating and developing the best possible recruitment experiences for your candidates. Regardless of the state of the economy, the most valuable investment for your company鈥檚 ability to stay competitive, nimble, and innovative remains the same: your people.

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