Workday Rising 2024: Key trends & innovations to watch

As the saying goes, “a rising tide lifts all ships,” and with the Workday Rising 2024 conference just around the corner, it’s time for the talent community to come together and take talent acquisition to new heights.

A few key themes will undoubtedly dominate the event this year. 

1. Economic uncertainty and inflation: The ongoing global economic uncertainty, driven by inflationary pressures and fluctuating market conditions, is leading companies to adopt more cautious hiring practices. Organizations are focusing on cost control, which often results in streamlining their tech stack, an emphasis on hiring early-career talent, or hiring for immediate needs rather than long-term strategic goals​.
2. Global competition for skills: The competition for skilled talent remains intense, particularly in specialized fields like technology and AI. This competition is driven by the rapid digital transformation across industries, which has created a high demand for workers with specific technical skills. This issue is compounded by an aging population. As a result, companies are having to get creative with where and how they identify new talent.
3. Investment in technology and automation: Economic pressures are driving companies to invest more in technology and automation as a way to reduce hiring costs and as a way to identify new talent. This includes the use of AI in recruitment processes to streamline hiring and reduce the time and cost associated with talent acquisition. However, this also shifts the demand towards candidates with specific skills in technology management, AI, and automation, increasing competition for these roles​.

Since the Workday community last met at Rising 2023, a raft of approaches and technologies is emerging to help talent leaders not only tackle the big challenges of the moment, but turn them into opportunities.

Streamlining your TA tech stack

Talent leaders should begin by evaluating their current tech stack to ensure it aligns with broader business objectives. This means identifying which tools genuinely contribute to achieving KPIs like time-to-hire, quality of hire, and employee retention. The Virtual Job Tryout® from HireVue is a highly-predictive multi-method assessment shown to increase performance by 53%, retention by 117%, and improve diversity by 173%.

One of the key challenges in managing a tech stack is ensuring that different tools can communicate effectively. Talent leaders should prioritize tools that offer strong interoperability, allowing for seamless data flow between systems. The HireVue for Workday integration is a powerful two-way integration, providing one automated system of record so recruiters no longer need to work out of multiple systems or manually update candidate statuses and data. HireVue is the leading Workday Certified Talent Experience Platform with over 200 integrations delivering streamlined hiring. Discover more about HireVue on the Workday Marketplace.

First impressions matter. Today’s candidates expect the same on-demand, mobile-first experience they’ve come to enjoy as consumers. An easy to navigate job search process that lets an employer brand shine can make all the difference in determining which company will succeed at hiring today’s top talent.

Web and text-based chat, powered by conversational AI, enables candidates to start their job search late at night on a careers page, or while texting in the supermarket queue. Within minutes (no matter the time of day), candidates can quickly find the right role by answering a few simple work preference questions—then get on-demand answers to the questions they care most about when looking for their new employer.

Hire for Potential and find new talent

In a competitive labor market, moving away from credentials and experience and focusing on skills and potential will allow talent leaders to open up the aperture and broaden their talent pool. Using AI-driven technology that’s designed to assess the skills and competencies has also shown to better predict success in a role.

Incorporating technical and soft assessments into your hiring process that evaluate skills and competencies is the key to finding talent that can not only succeed today but also help your business navigate the challenges of tomorrow—and in an age where talent shortages are felt in every industry, retention is top of mind for hiring teams.

With an assessment for every role at every level, HireVue’ market-leading library of assessment content looks beyond just resume qualifications—better identifying what every candidate is truly capable of.

The Find My Fit pre-apply assessment from HireVue presents candidates with all the roles that they fit—not just the ones they search for. Find My Fit helps easily identify what roles best match candidate potential. After a brief assessment of interests, personality, and background, Find My Fit compares the answers to your organization’s open opportunities, recommending the roles that are the best fit for the candidate. Recommending roles based on the candidate’s interests and soft skills drives candidates to those roles that might be a better fit—and can help you fill more open roles and expand the diversity of your talent pool.

Integrate AI thoughtfully 

Hiring should be fair—and backed by science. The typical hiring process often shuts out the best candidates—but Human Potential Intelligence is rooted in science to create a fairer hiring landscape. While hiring AI may be new, the rigor behind it isn’t. Our innovative models are built on decades of science and over 70 million interviews—and look to the future of what’s possible for your workplace.

While AI tools can greatly enhance efficiency in tasks like candidate screening and scheduling, it's crucial to implement them in a way that is both ethical and effective. Used correctly, AI is a powerful tool to enable talent leaders to make better and fairer hiring decisions. HireVue created the industry’s first AI Explainability Statement and supports third-party audits of our technology. 

Algorithms should be highly controlled and tested by humans to prevent them from evolving in a problematic way. We deploy AI that is both static and deterministic, meaning algorithms are not being re-trained on the fly, and they give the same output every time given the same input (unlike ChatGPT)—this should be the standard in hiring. With our AI systems, the algorithm is trained and tested in the “lab” and then locked before deployment. The system can only “learn” new things if someone chooses to update it.

Discover more about HireVue on the Workday Marketplace or book a meeting with us at booth #A18 at Workday Rising on September 16th - 17th 2024 in Las Vegas.