Sherriza Nor Rashidi has over 20 years work experience in various aspects of Human Resources Management in services, manufacturing, banking & finance, construction management and oil & energy industries. Sherriza joined CIMB from PwC Malaysia, where she worked for eight years, first as a senior HR manager and then as the Employer Branding & Talent Acquisition Team Lead, where she led a team of recruiters in developing the firm’s brand and attracting and recruiting talent.
1. What are some of the major challenges and trends that have been impacting the HR Tech space lately?
Trends on HR Tech space today
• utilization of AI for candidates’ selection with culture fit assessment elements
• utilization of a cloud-based platform to enable community and team building
• utilization of a common platform to enable onboarding & community building among new hires regardless of geography including chatbot capability via AI technology
• bots and AI to process claims and payroll administration
• gamification as learning and engagement tools
• Chatbots to answer Frequently Asked Questions from staff
Major challenges
• There is a perennial debate on investment vs expenses. Pandemic has taught a lot of management, not Bank specifically, to be cautious about spending. With digitalization efforts, HR needs is often de-prioritised. While we have a lot of ideas on how to improve our processes, end of the day, we end up using Excel sheets as it is cheaper and common to many people
• Operational risks matters – especially so, in the Bank where it is risk adverse. Although cloud-based platform enables collaborative working, it is also susceptible to the risks of being hacked. More investment needs to be made in the whole IT infrastructure to safeguard the Bank’s servers.
• Engaging differently: we are used to face to face engagement and virtual engagement is something foreign to many leaders. Apart from making sure team members are effective and Sherriza Nor Rashidi has over 20 years work experience in various aspects of Human Resources Management in services, manufacturing, banking & finance, construction management and oil & energy industries. Sherriza joined CIMB from PwC Malaysia, where she worked for eight years, first as a senior HR manager and then as the Employer Branding & Talent Acquisition Team Lead, where she led a team of recruiters in developing the firm’s brand and attracting and recruiting talent. Sherriza Nor Rashidi productive to this new ways for working, keeping them engaged is another important factor. How do we continue to build and strengthen the team without physical interaction. How do we start new approach “out of sight not necessarily out of mind.”
CIMB specific examples: attracting candidates differently especially the young talent since career fairs are no longer the tool and means. CIMB started many external engagement initiatives pre Covid e.g CIMB Catalyst, Digital Career Fair and partnering with companies like Graduan, Talentbank and LinkedIn in our pursuit of best talent.
2. What keeps you up at night when it comes to some of the major predicaments in the HR Tech space?
I started work in the advent of internet – where Google was not a verb and emails were still not widely used. Fast forward to today, I experience the same predicaments as before.
a. While it is fancy to have the tools in place, the HR tools is as good as how it is being used.
• If the data that is keyed in isn’t reliable, the output will not be useful. (Garbage in, garbage out)
• If the AI report on new hires isn’t used to validate the candidates’ behavior during interviews, the Company will still need to deal with non[1]performance.
• If the leader doesn’t make a point to engage with the team members, no collaborative platform can help with team bonding.
b. Working around the time. Collaborative tools such as MSteam and cloud server OneDrive enables people to work ‘on the go’. However, if documents dumped into the server isn’t organized correctly, people may still find their time spent searching for documents. Worse, as I have seen before, where the files are not ‘decluttered’ habitually, there will be a lot of saved files and this may create confusions for all the teams sharing.
c. Changing the mindset that productivity may not necessarily determined by work location or work hours. Team members don’t need to be in front of our face all the time to be productive. This pandemic teaches us productivity not necessarily be translated into number of hours. Some leaders may still have challenges to grasp this concept which may then impact our value proposition. This is not uncommon and not just unique to CIMB.
d. Security – educating own HR staff about the danger of ransomware & malware. Many people are still oblivious to this – especially in a multi-generational workforce. HR holds highly confidential information and if own HR staff isn’t aware of the risks, we might cause big damage to the bank. The Bank runs mock phishing test and thankfully, I find more of HR staff are able to advise their colleagues that they are phishing emails. Still – shouldn’t rest on our laurels – we don’t know what else the (hackers) can think of?
Bottomline, no matter the tool available and time, one thing in common is HR practitioners need to have a high appreciation to detail, a discipline to manage document, a process driven mindset and an appreciation to data. It’s fundamental, isn’t it?
3. Can you tell us about the latest project that you have been working on and what are some of the technological and process elements that you leveraged to make the project successful?
Nothing in particular but we’ve used common platform to run ‘Data Conquest’ challenge (a treasure hunt, if you like) in our bid to unleash the potential of our internal talents. Also, we ran a series of knowledge sharing session cover topics beyond tech like leadership, CX etc which now everyone across the region can participate and getting tips up close and personal from leaders.
“If the leader doesn’t make a point to engage with the team members, no collaborative platform can help with team bonding”
Most recently, we collaborate with ‘Naluri’ and independent business that provides tools to help deal with wellbeing – be it health, financial or general well being. The tool is so cool too because it can be linked to any of your wellness gadgets – so long as they can be synchronized with Google Fit. Staff of CIMB are also connected to virtual Councilors in their areas of interest. Just the other day, I received a reminder because they haven’t heard from me. It’s really cool.
4. Which are some of the technological trends which excite you for the future of HR Tech space?
Certainly one with capabilities to provide people analytics that can help predict workforce trends (during different cycles of business) and capabilities. This will help our sourcing strategy tremendously (Build, Borrow, Buy & Bot) especially now that there are increasing number of talents preferring to work as a gig. Currently how we do this is by migrating the data into Excel or Tableau.
I’d love to see more collaboration tools that can be trusted and secured since our data is highly confidential – if you can imagine. I am not sure about the technicalities of this, though but my wish is some day, it is seamless and we don’t need to rely on password to work.
