The Economic Survey 2022, recognised at least 14,000 new start-ups in India, which is up 20 times in five years. And earlier this year, Union Minister for Commerce and Industry – Piyush Goyal – reported that DPIIT recognised startups have created more than 7 lakh jobs in the country. Increasing workforce equals increasing complexity of workforce management. Gartner reports that by 2025, half of midmarket and large enterprises worldwide will have invested in cloud-deployed human capital management (HCM) suite for administrative HR and talent management. Along these lines, Mr. Rahul Kalidindi, Co-Founder & CEO, Akrivia HCM shares more insights on the same
- 1. Please describe the changing HR tech ecosystem today. How is the hybrid mode of work adding to it?
Over the past decade, the dynamics of human resources (HR) have been evolving and are no longer confined to the back office attending to piles after piles of paperwork. What started with just minor functions of leave and payroll management has now come a long way to managing end-to-end employee lifecycles. Today’s HR department leverages strategy, combined with effective use of tech tools, making the overall business operation easy and upgraded.
Take, cloud-based HRMS software for an instance. These platforms enable geo-agnostic, flexible and real-time HR functions from hire to retire for a hybrid workforce. Being usually a place with too many activities going on at the same time, HR departments, are increasingly digitizing their operations to reduce and simplify administrative tasks like onboarding, payroll, record keeping, etc. They have also unlocked the scope to incorporate more sensitive and humane issues functions like L&D programs that build a more employee-centric company culture.
- According to you, what would next-generation HR tech infrastructure look like in the coming days?
Any organization that still runs its system on legacy technologies will surely find it difficult to catch up with the new-world business requirements, especially in this fierce age of competition and dynamism. Additionally, with the fast-tracked digital adoption post-pandemic, we are witnessing almost every organization, from a start-up to a Fortune 500, strengthening their digital infrastructure across business arms, and the HR department doesn’t count out. According to Sierra-Cedar, 52% of large organizations plan to increase spending on HR tech in the next year as it enables an online ecosystem where all files and paperwork can be stored securely in the cloud with apps like Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox.
From our first-level customer demand, we can see that the next generation of HR tech infrastructure needs to be more comprehensive, scalable and intuitive. We think that the right cloud-based HR software that can take care of 360-degree employee management, from onboarding till off-boarding, will be fast-moving.
- Verified Market Research reported that the HCM market size is projected to reach USD 41.43 Billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 7.49% from 2022 to 2030. What do you think are the gaps that HCM software can help enterprises bridge?
All the current HR-tech discussion indicates that the shift across traditional approaches to modern technology is a boon to enterprises. HCM software is built with accessibility, affordability and scalability at the core, to cater to the people-management requirements of the entire spectrum of enterprises. The journey hereon will be to see how HCM software can use technology to converge all the scattered HR functions on a single pane. This will save enterprises time and money to manage individual vendors for individual functions. Enterprises will also realize how comprehensive HRMS platforms can help in expanding the scope of HR functions beyond transactional tasks like attendance, leave and payroll to strategic outcomes like employee engagement and experience. Another focus will be to use cutting-edge technologies like AI and ML to make more informed, predictive, and automated decisions. Automation can streamline HR workflows better, reducing turn-around by a significant margin. It also brings transparency to employees, removing conscious and unconscious biases.
- What is the new approach that Akrivia HCM brings to HRMS? How is the product planned to be sold? Any bundling strategy?
Akrivia HCM is the first enterprise Indian HRMS platform to offer the entire employee lifecycle suite in-house with multi-country localizations and our own IPaaS (Integrations platform as a service) with payroll for 15+ countries. It also offers a fully-managed LMS (Learning Management System). The platform offers over 20 plus cloud-native modules to take care of end-to-end employee lifecycle management utilities from recruitment to retirement.
Our product is built around the EPIC framework i.e Customer Enablement, Product Innovation and Customer Centricity, which differentiates it from the other enterprise players in the market. It aims to help HR leaders automate transactional tasks on the back of ML-powered analytics and insights; thereby eliminating slack, improving turnaround times and enhancing employee experience. At present, we have over 20 renowned beta customers that have a respective employee strength of over 2000. The customers hail from varied sectors like Manufacturing, IT, BFSI etc.
- Besides people analytics, how will you ensure data security of the people?
At Akrivia HCM, user privacy is our utmost priority. Our technical competencies and stringent organizational policies ensure that employees’ personal information is kept secure and protected from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, alteration or destruction, in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. For example, when any user enters sensitive information such as login credentials, we encrypt the transmission of that information using Transport Layer Security (TLS). We follow generally accepted standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it. Any data that is transmitted from the user’s browser is encrypted till it reaches our application. The data also stays encrypted on the database.
We encrypt data using state of art encryption techniques such as AES 256. As the data remains encrypted in transit as well as in rest, not even our employees will have access to the data. The key that is used for encrypting the data is auto generated and unique for each client. As such, we shall access the data only for the purposes of resolving any issues that are raised by the client.
When we share a user’s personal information with sub-processors or other third-party service providers, we base our selection on said parties having adequate safeguards in place that meet our data protection standards. We audit their compliance with such standards and incorporate contractual provisions ensuring compliance with such standards and applicable data privacy laws and regulations. We have a detailed guide on our website, on our privacy policy framework that clients can mix and choose from.
