Reworked TV
In Brief
- Tech fluency is now table stakes for HR — HR professionals at every level need a working understanding of technology, data and AI. This fluency helps HR retain its “seat at the table” by speaking the language of business and transformation.
- HR and IT collaboration models aren’t one-size-fits-all — Just because Moderna combined IT and HR into a “Chief People and Digital Technology Officer,” doesn't mean that approach works for every company. It depends on their size, culture and talent mix.
- AI adoption in HR requires realism, not hype — Murray urges HR leaders to stay enthusiastic about innovation but grounded in data readiness, change management and pacing.
On this episode of Three Dots, LinkedIn's Director Digital HR Strategy & Innovation Tiffani Murray explores the evolving relationship of HR and technology, something she's witnessed first-hand in her 20-year career as an HR technologist. She argues that tech fluency is essential for HR to retain their position as strategic leaders and that even at a time of AI hype, people remain at the center of HR efforts.
Tiffani also shares her perspective on emerging HR-tech operating models, why change management will make or break AI implementation and how she builds strategy at a time when everything is in flux. Tune in for more.
Table of Contents
- A Career Move From IT to HR Technology
- How Have Attitudes in HR Changed Around Technology?
- Expectations of Technical Literacy for HR Team Members
- Who Wore It Best?
- You Can Embrace New Technology and Still Put People First
- How to Be an AI Realist
- Advice for HR Business Leaders to Temper Unrealistic AI Expectations
- New HR Technologist Job Descriptions
- How Do You Think About HR Technology Strategy When Everything's Up in the Air?
A Career Move From IT to HR Technology
Siobhan Fagan: Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of Three Dots. I am your host, Siobhan Fagan, editor in chief of Reworked, and today I am bringing on Tiffany Murray. I'm happy to have Tiffany here today. She's the director of Digital HR Strategy and Innovation Global Talent Organization at LinkedIn.
Tiffany, welcome!
Tiffani Murray: Hello, thanks for having me. I am so excited to be here and having this conversation today.
Siobhan: This conversation is kind of a continuance. We've been chatting back and forth for over a year now, and first started talking mainly because you are that rare unicorn, the HR technologist.
We discussed you joining the show shortly after Moderna had brought their head of HR under the IT umbrella to create a new role, Chief People and Digital Technology Officer. What do you think of that move?
Tiffani: It's exciting, I've been in this career for close to 20 years and originally started out in pure information technology, to see where HR tech has gone. I remember when I was that HR information systems girl in the corner that people would come over to and say things like, Can you help me get connected to the printer? because there really wasn't a full understanding of the role — to now seeing HR technologists like myself get a seat at the table and to see that role valued.
I think what Moderna has done is innovative in saying Yes, we are going to put people and technology first and combine that and remove some of the silos that have existed in the past. So I think it's great.
Siobhan: I want to dig into your story a little bit. How did you make that transition from information technology over into HR technologist? What brought you over to the other side?
Tiffani: That's a great question, but I think it's part of my career journey. I've often heard people want to get from A to B and think it's a linear path, but careers are nothing close to linear.
I was working in consulting and I was purely on the IT side of the house. I think back to some of those initial early projects, like working on Y2K post implementation projects, working on data center moves, etc. Having an industrial engineering and computer science background, that was the career path that I went into — as a consultant for one of the big four firms.
A chance came up when I was not staffed to work on HR projects. That was the of thing that you did when you were on the bench, when you weren't billable. So I found myself drawn to that, whether it be working on something around mentors and mentees or working on performance management projects.
Again, non-billable. No one wanted me to work on those things, but they were like, hey, if you're not billable, go do those things, diversity projects. Eventually there came an opportunity to implement a learning management system for my employer for North America and I raised my hand to do it. And when I went there, I was thinking, I'm just going to go implement this system. But they said, No, you're part of learning and development now. So I have to go teach onboarding. I have to create e-learning.
I had to do things far beyond just implementing the LMS, but the rest was history. I fell in love with it as a budding career path. It wasn't something that people were saying, I'm an HR technologist, but it was something that was emerging.
How Have Attitudes in HR Changed Around Technology?
Siobhan: That's great. I love that organic growth and how there's no turning back once you got in there. You're like, OK, this is good, this feels right. I'm curious because you do have this perspective, you just brought up Y2K ....
Tiffani: I'm dating myself, but yeah.
Siobhan: HR has a reputation for not necessarily being the most technologically forward. When we're looking at your career trajectory, when we're looking at this move by Moderna, how have the attitudes around that changed in the years that you've been doing this?
Tiffani: The attitude has changed, I think, in two ways. One, when I first went over to the dark side, as people say, into HR, taking my backpack of technology experience with me, HR was just struggling to get a seat at the table with the business.
I did a little bit of digging on the history of human resources. And it was really just there in the beginning as a personnel function, like get people paid and get people hired and fired, right. And that had slowly evolved to being less transactional and HR saying, we want a seat at the table. So that was when I first kind of stepped in as an HR technologist. And it was like, we want a seat at the table, but HR tech is over here. Like just get us off of on-prem, right. And you probably know, we went from Y2K to get us off of on-premise HR systems to getting us into the cloud.
And it was also in conjunction with getting us off a paper, right? Everybody was going green and paper free. And so there were a lot of initiatives around, you know, efficiency and making things easier for this personnel department. And by the way, HR was also saying, we're important, right? We're valuable. The workforce is the most valuable part of the organization. But it was kind of separated, right? We've got the HR as a strategic function of the business and then this HR tech enablement.
And now we're seeing that fusion, which again, I'm excited to see that and there's this uplift that an HR tech is not just in the corner making sure the printers work, and making sure that people get paid. It is now about transformation and transformational HR technology. And that goes hand-in-hand with HR retaining that seat at the table, because it's one thing to get the seat at the table, but you've got to stay there, you've got to retain that — and technology is going to be a primary way that HR organizations stay in that seat within their organizations.
Expectations of Technical Literacy for HR Team Members
Siobhan: I love the parallel trajectories between HR getting the seat at the table and being seen as more strategic, moving away from the paper pusher and you moving away from fixing people's printer connections.
But if I'm hearing you right, it sounds as if you're saying it's not just people who have your skills who will be helping or supporting HR. You're saying everyone in HR should now have some level of technological literacy and savvy. Can you go into that and where you would draw the lines?
Tiffani: Absolutely.
I think it's very important that everyone look at things like AI fluency. It's not just for me as the HR technologist to have that expertise or that knowledge. There's opportunity now more than ever for everyone to have a deeper understanding of technology. In saying that, I do think it's important that organizations retain domain expertise, right?
We are not going to be in a situation where you don't need someone with a highly technical background like myself in your organization to help drive digital transformation forward for your HR organization. We're not at that point. And I think, whereas I used to struggle earlier in my career to get other HR counterparts to want to understand what it was that I was working on or what we were doing with the technology or go in and be a lower level admin to help, now we have people across the organization, but specifically in HR organizations, wanting to buy code, wanting to create their own agents, wanting to do things with technology. But I do think that there's going to be different tiers of expertise that will exist within a department.
Whether you're an HR business partner, whether you're in compensation, whether you're in performance management, whether you're in my seat, you should seek to learn and seek to grow because it's only going to aid in whatever functional area that you're leading or supporting.
Siobhan: It sounds as if you're saying that this literacy is the price you pay to retain your seat at the table, that this is going to be part of how: you speak knowledgeably to the business about technology and still advocate for the things that HR are supposed to be advocating for, like employees actually matter.
Tiffani: Absolutely. This is how you're going to retain that seat at the table. Now, are things going to happen overnight? It's the same thing that I brought up with going paperless. It wasn't as if someone snapped their fingers and everything across an HR organization's processes all just went from paper to being in the cloud. It was done in a strategic manner. There was the low-hanging fruit. There were some things that people in organizations knew would take longer.
It's going to be the same thing within HR as we look at some of the innovations and technology around AI and automation. There will be some things that are low-hanging fruit that everyone's going to be able to say: we can tackle this job to be done faster, like recruitment, for example.
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And there will be other areas where, OK, we really have to make sure we understand compliance. We've really got to make sure we understand the policies, not just across different countries and things of that nature before we can say, Let's just automate all of this or replace this area with AI.
So it's about making sure that you structure what you're learning in pace with how you're going to execute, and knowing that things need to be planned out strategically and time bound in a realistic way.
Who Wore It Best?
Siobhan: I'm thinking about Moderna still and I'm thinking about that HR role. She had previously been working very closely with the head of IT before they brought her in and then when that person left they kind of folded her in there.
I want to play devil's advocate for a second and ask: does it make sense just to have people, and I don't want to say stay in their lane, but to speak to their domain expertise and to have those lines, but have more cross-company collaboration? Does that make sense or do you see an argument against that?
Tiffani: I love this question because there isn't a cookie cutter to any of this. There is no absolutely perfect operating model when it comes to HR and technology. It's going to depend on your organization. As you know, I love analogies. So when I think about this ... I love awards season. So Emmys, Oscars, Golden Globes, that kind of thing. And you often hear the red carpet commentators say things like, Who wore it best?
So it's the same thing with this, right? Other companies will look at what Moderna has done and think, should I put on that outfit? I mean, you have to determine, one, are you gonna look good in that outfit? Do you need some accessories?
To answer your question, it's like, do you have internal talent, someone that can play both of those roles? That is a huge role. Someone who has maybe had years of partnering, whether that's on the HR side or the IT side. And now they truly have the experience and the competence to fuse those two things together.
The size of the organization is also a factor. Moderna, I think, is somewhere below 7,000, don't quote me on that, but not a large conglomerate or enterprise. That's going to play a role too, because then you start looking at span of control and how much that one singular person may have to run. Look at those like the pros and cons and not have bias one way or the other.
So there's different ways to slice it. And you can still have a Moderna-esque approach, right? And have an outfit, but your accessories around that, maybe you have a center of excellence that combines these two functions, or maybe you have an operating model that has checks and balances between HR and IT in a way that can mirror that.
But you're not trying to pull off the same exact outfit because maybe you can't.
You Can Embrace New Technology and Still Put People First
Siobhan: I love this outfit analogy. I could talk about it all day.
For anybody who's considering going into HR now, somebody who's drawn into it because they do like the people aspect of it, because they do like advocating for and helping people along on their career. What would you say to allay any fears they might have about losing that aspect of the role as they go into technology?
Tiffani: Everyone's interested in either HR or HR technology. And when I made this shift, I can admittedly say part of the reason why is because I think the most valuable asset of any organization is the people. When you think about technology, it's so polarizing these days. It's either you love it or you hate it — there's no in-between. There can definitely be in-between of anything, right?
I have friends who are very much team iPhone and I have both, I have an Android and I have an iPhone, right? You don't have to choose an electric car, you can have a hybrid. So you don't have to be on one side. I'm totally pro everything. With automation, AI or everything, we're gonna lose all of our emotions and feelings. There is a middle ground and so I don't think there should be a fear that you have to choose.
And I think that we're in this place especially when you see the news articles that are coming out and things that are being said about the future of work, you feel like you have to choose one or the other. You really don't. You can be both forward thinking and innovative and embrace new technology while still focusing on things that make sure that there's no bias, or make sure that there's empathy, or make sure that we're remaining aligned with our vision.
Any company has missions and values and things that they abide by. And they may very well say, We want to be doing the breakthrough things, but they may also say, We value people first. You can have both. And that's the thing I would remind anyone going into this career, whether it's on the HR tech side or the HR side, that you don't have to be just one or the other.
How to Be an AI Realist
Siobhan: Yes, just because we're talking about computing doesn't mean that it's a binary choice.
You give me a perfect opportunity to make a segue there because you did talk a little bit about automation.
Continuing along the same lines, a lot of times when we look at AI and AI's introduction into the HR role, a lot of people are seeing it as this either/or thing. If you criticize it, you're just behind the times, you're a Luddite. And if you say, we're going all in, you know, the companies that say If you don't use it in some way, then you're out the door.
Where do you see the happy medium in between the two?
Tiffani: It takes time. That happy medium is realizing that you don't have to be binary to the point you made. You can say, Where are the areas that we can have immediate impact?
One of the things I think that gets glossed over is data and content. And these are not new concepts, right? Even early in my career, a bad process put into a new technology is still going to be junk, still going to be trash. Same thing with AI. If you layer some AI or automation on top of poorly organized data or content, it's still going to be trash.
So I think it's just remembering that you don't have to boil the ocean. You can start out small.
These aren't new concepts. It's the same thing when we were going paperless or going into the cloud. Someone had to go to these executives, whether that be on the business or on the HR side and say, OK, we can be 100% green by year X because it's not all going to happen in a month. It's not going to happen in 30 days. It still applies now.
And so it's quite OK to not say we've got to automate everything right now by the end of 2025. You can say, what are the things that are going to have the most measurable impact around productivity, efficiency, and what functions do those things lie in? Do we have the data in the right place to empower that? And it's like, now, pilot and assess and repeat. My dad's a golfer, so that's an acronym PAR. So you know, you pilot, you assess, and then you repeat. And you do that over time in different areas. Eventually you'll get to that 100% paperless. But if I was in an organization in, what was it, 2018, and we still had a file room, right? And many organizations did that. There was no knock on that company. It's just where we were in terms of document storage in the cloud.
Siobhan: I have a brother who still works with fax machines. There are systems that are built around these technologies, and it takes time to move on from them.
Tiffani: And you look at the industries, right? Whether that's healthcare, government agencies or manufacturing, sometimes the adoption is going to be different based on the makeup of your workforce.
And there's the change management piece, which we didn't really talk about, but there's technology and you can turn a whole bunch of things on. But if somebody came into my house, and I don't have a fully automated house, but if somebody came in and just installed all of these things, I would need, even with my background, help to understand OK, how do I use this wireless oven?
The change management is also a piece that adds to the timeline. Because sure, you could just call somebody by next week and have this house totally AI powered. But would I adopt all those things? I would I still do things manually because it's just second nature and I didn't get that change management part yet.
Siobhan: I think it goes back to your point that just because AI is capable of doing new things, because we're interacting with a machine that is talking back to us, that kind of sounds like it could be a human — it's not magic. And it is still needs a lot of the processes that we've gone through with technological innovations before. So the change management part is still there. And you still need to go through these steps that a lot of people don't want to think about because they want it to be magic to get to this final result.
Advice for HR Business Leaders to Temper Unrealistic AI Expectations
Siobhan: If you were speaking directly to an HR business leader out there, what advice would you give them to not necessarily deflate, but bring down to reality the expectations of their C-Suite who are hearing about the magic of AI and saying all systems go?
Tiffani: I 100% would not use the word deflate because, there's a big part of my job across the time I've been in this space that is marketing. So it's definitely letting the leaders know that you are excited about the technology. You understand technology, especially with what LinkedIn does, we are on the cutting edge of providing innovations to our customers, members and clients.
You want to make sure that you retain that enthusiasm, but with that dose of what's realistic, especially from a time perspective and especially that realism around where you are as an organization.
Like when you asked the question about the Moderna model and would every organization be ready for that? It's the same thing with rolling out any new technology. It's where are we ready and where could we use a little bit more time? Where is the change management going to require a little bit more effort? And so it's pacing.
And this is where I think as HR technologists stand, I think there's two types. There's currently the kind of that HR technologist that can do the rhythm of business, that keeps your lights on, your systems are up, everyone's paid on time. But then there's those digital transformation HR technologists. And I think you're going to see a lot more of us [digital transformation HR technologists] emerging and working, because we're the ones saying: here's the roadmap. And here's what's on the short-term roadmap and here are the things organizationally or even across an industry that are going to probably be a longer runway on any type of a transformational road.
New HR Technologist Job Descriptions
Siobhan: You shared a chief HR systems officer role description with me, which I'm going to read. The role's key responsibilities were: deliver a fully automated HR function that supports global talent operations at scale, eliminating the need for traditional managers or manual processes.
Do you think we're going to be seeing more roles like this listed?
Tiffani: I do think that North Star is rather lofty, right? Fully automated, won't need managers. No one called me about that job, so I'm not speaking from any interview experience that I had for any role like that. But I would imagine the questions I would be asking is, is this more of startup organization where it's a green field?
I think maybe that you could start out that way, but if it's an organization that has any type of any longevity or tenure, there is an existing current state and then there's this future state you want to get to. And it's back to me speaking about a roadmap and how do you get there? But to answer your question, I do think we're going to see more of this fusion of people–process–technology into these chief roles. I do think we'll see that.
If you had asked me this 15 years ago, I might not have seen it coming. HR tech, like I said, was in its corner and HR was at the table. And sometimes HR would turn around and say, Hey, HR tech person, I need this information or I need need this system implemented, it was very transactional.
Now that could be the same person sitting at the table or maybe both sitting at the table with the business to be able to talk about how are we going to achieve these business outcomes through our workforce and empowering our workforce to do their best work?
Siobhan: I want to drill down because you said people, processes and technology, which is the long-standing framework, but the description is getting rid of the people to a certain extent. Like the description is saying, eliminating the need for traditional managers. So what happens to the people part there?
Tiffani: Bye-bye. But that's why my first question in that context would be, is this a startup organization? Because I do think we will see new companies come into the forefront that may adopt that principle of just starting out, less people doing certain roles. But I think that has to be measured against pros and cons, right?
When we talk about managing a workforce, could you automate everything? Sure. Look, I'm a two-time cancer survivor. When I think about healthcare, would I go if there was some robot doctor that could do my surgery 100%, or it could be a human doctor with a robot? I'm going to pick the human doctor with the robot. I think that organizations are going to have to determine how far they want to take the elimination of managers or elimination of people because there is something that will be lost if that's not there.
Now, there may be someone that watches this and they say, I would take the robot doctor because maybe they're less prone to error. They didn't get into an argument with their partner that morning that may affect how they do deal with the surgery. But I'm thinking that there's some things that we can't yet fully solve for, when I hear that word fully, that is what removes the human element completely from every aspect of HR. I don't think we're there yet.
Siobhan: Yeah, and I mean, I'm speaking for myself. I don't know that we want to be there. The fact that a lot of this is happening immediately after the pandemic, where we saw managers being cut back at the same time that people were reporting being unhappy in their jobs and the managers being the primary reason why they were unhappy in their jobs. And so I guess some people would say, Well, get rid of them and then they'll be happier. It's like, that's not it, that just means the manager wasn't trained properly. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Tiffani: I agree. I don't think the answer is ever, again, back to this concept of this polarized, it's this or that. You're absolutely right. Like, drill into why did someone leave an organization? Okay, it was the manager. Well, what was it about the manager? And that's why you have your employee surveys, right, to understand sentiment. And that's where you can use the technology to help you.
You comb through that and find those common themes, and maybe the common theme is the managers need more training or the managers need to understand, you know, to lead with empathy or whatever the case may be. And then you can use that same innovative technology to very quickly create training, right? So it's not so much where the answer that we should get from having access to this technology is to remove people. It may be that the technology helps the workforce, helps the managers, helps these organizations to make sure that if there is human interaction, it is the best possible human interaction that can be had, and it's high value.
And then, yeah, things that are transactional, repetitive, those are the things that maybe you take off of the plate of the workforce so they can focus on more strategic work and more meaningful human interaction.
How Do You Think About HR Technology Strategy When Everything's Up in the Air?
Siobhan: I want to ask a final question before giving you a chance to raise anything that we didn't talk about: Your title is Digital HR Strategy. How do you approach strategy at a time like now when everything is so uncertain? How can you make those plans for a roadmap when none of us know what's coming down the pike?
Tiffani: That question has been on my mind a lot recently, because I think we changed what it means to have a roadmap and to have a strategy.
So in the beginning of my career, the HR tech roadmap would be something that was three to five years. Like we would really talk about three to five years from now. You can't do that anymore because the technology is changing so quickly. When you think of a roadmap, it may be as anywhere from six months, at max 18, because by the time you try to stagger things out years upon years, it's become obsolete. Whatever it is you planned or thought you were going to do has become obsolete. So it's really a balancing act. One thing I try to stay on top of is what the trends are, what's coming, what's succeeding, what's failing. Cause I think that's all part of this, right? There's going to be success stories and we're going to see some not so successful stories when it comes to innovation and technology and trying to learn from peer organizations, learning within, I talked about PAR of piloting, assess and repeat and learning from that as you expand and having that roadmap be flexible.
One of my mentors, she always says to me, blessed are the flexible for they will not be bent out of shape. And I think that's something that our leaders have to embrace as well, that change is gonna happen and change may be going in one direction and then three months later, something drops, some new technology, some new innovation, and you need to be able to pivot. Pivot makes perfect, right?
And I think that's something that we should all try to remember because we've been taught to kind of stay the course, stay the course. We're going to implement this thing, stay the course, but you need to be able to pivot as the technology progresses, as lessons are learned, as insights are gleaned.
All of that's very important to success, being flexible, pivoting, and being mindful that something you decided, you know, six months later, maybe you need to shift that decision or adjust that decision.
Siobhan: You're kind of making me think of the advice to writers where when you're going through the editing process, sometimes you have to kill your babies. So it's sort of like you can't hold on to these ideas that you had as being so precious. I mean, it's a horrible analogy, but you get the idea that you have to be able to let go of this great idea that you had at one point, you might have to give that up a few months down the line.
Tiffani: Yeah, one last analogy. It's like, again, if you're building a building a house and there are certain things that you have to put in place like that foundation. And as I talked about with with AI, it's having that data and content foundation done in the right way. But as you build the house, you may decide, I actually need this extra bathroom. Now you have a time frame in which you need to tell the people building the house, hey, I want to do this. And it's the same thing with with technology and HR, you have to be ready to make those kind of decisions on the spot and be ready to drop something like, I guess we're not going to get this extra bathroom. We're not going to be able to do this now. We're going have to do something later.
Siobhan: Yeah, Tiffany, I love this conversation. I love talking to you. I do want to give you the chance, though. Is there anything that we did not discuss that you would have liked to have raised?
Tiffani: One thing I'll do, I'll do a little pitch, because I like to think HR technology is a career path that more people should think about. And I think when I got into it, I stumbled into it with that project, that special project that I mentioned to you. And never would I thought that I found this pairing of things that I truly can say that I enjoy and I'm passionate about. And so I would just say I would welcome others who are thinking about a career change, if you've been sitting in HR, if you've been sitting in IT, and you're like, hey, this sounds interesting, pursue it. The time has never been better. There's going to be a need for more and more people, professionals with this type of lens and background.
Siobhan: Well, I think that that is a fine note to end on. Tiffany, I really appreciate you joining me today. I'm so glad that we got to have this conversation and I will follow up with you when the next thing changes and we need a new bathroom, I guess.
Tiffani: Right? Thank you, Siobhan. It's always a pleasure to speak with you, whether in this forum or just in general. So I appreciate the invite.
