HR product theories and timelines

Introduction to HR products

As an HR evangelist I often have questions on how a product came to be.  The products of an Human Resource age fall into the following categories :

1.  NexGen
2. ConverGen
3. ParaGen

These terms are coined by me over six years of hard work with HR products.  There was a time and era when the only product for the HR industry was a Resume writer.  Though indispensable, the thoughts of a new generation of legacy in the Human Resource Industry towards furthering a theology that would be becoming to all kind of clients is endearing.  I started 6 years back with NexGen products thinking that was the future and soon as I hit 2018, realising lack of evident data on ConverGen, I coined the term to take care of Nemesis Skill evaluator.

The HR products

Human resources is a mind tool game and will continue to remain so.  There are things that human beings say and then there are things they express only to willing minds.  Would you take an outright negative feedback and walk out of a company peacefully.  I can guarantee that for every feedback given by the HR to an employee on an entry or exit interview, there is a Mind Feedback (thought economy of sorts) being generated for other HR to evaluate at entry.  The ParaGen products deal with the Mind Feedback.

Developing the ConverGen product of Skill evaluator was a progression over time, I never knew what I was doing till it all clicked to a business plan I had made for the Human Resource industry in 2016.  The desire to excel and succeed at what ever I did made me believe that there was something good waiting for me around the bend.  I was busy doing carpentry when suddenly it turned out, that I could see the work of every body with me on wood.  It was a router I worked on and the wood turned a dream with some people and with others it was an effort to get the router to move.  I gradually shifted to my old alumni to see if I could work out their work skills and found that ConverGen worked indeed very well.

The Classification

I started documenting for I knew I had on something big, Converging skills to woodworking is what it would be for me for a good two years (2016-18).  I looked at CVs and many other devices people use to make recruiters in companies lend their ears to the message in a CV.  Realising the futility of the existing method to evaluate skills, came out a method to evaluate them with ConverGen, with the Skill Evaluator.  That was the birth of ConverGen, but it was not till 2021, that I had a methodology for convergence and come 2023 would see me using the Guitar to find out level of Skills.

I will not touch on NexGen product, assuming you have heard a lot about it, and instead jump to ParaGen products.  The Artificial Intelligence of Fuzzy Logic systems take this category of products to the top.  Then, you could think of NexGen products as the products that we used before any AI and it consisted of CVs, telephonic interviews, face-to-face interviews, on-site testing for skills etc.

The ConverGen products consisted of converging skills to a real-world skill, like wood working to find out skills by the skill evaluator and the ParaGen products take inputs on skills from the real-world skill and give it to an AI engine, which outputs a crisp value for skills.

ConverGen Skill evaluator

ConverGen products take the input from a real world skill, like wood working or guitar playing and then on observation output a rating on the scale of 1-10. These are different from NexGen products in that:

1. Involve Real-world skill.
2. Accuracy is higher sometimes 100%.
3. Precision.
4. Require a CV.

These products are indeed the mainstay of HR, though here I think it right to differentiate between HR products and the Skill Evaluator ConverGen product, which I would be focussing on. The former are a line of products that use a software to evaluate a person based on statistical input of human intelligence, that is to say, they are purely observational and could be lead by biases of human nature. If you were conducting a performance appraisal, the inputs to the Review software are from Human intelligence.

The Skill Evaluator ConverGen product on the other hand derives it’s inputs from a real-world skill, and may or may not output it to a software. It is more than observational though, because the skills of the person being evaluated and the skills estimated by the real-world skill have to converge or overlap. It is in the convergence that we derive the product as:

1. More than observational.
2. A hint of AI is evident in the product.
3. Skills overlap or convergence.
4. Could have a software that stores the data.

The Skill Evaluator is a ConverGen product, and further I would like to make another distinction with the word “Skill Evaluator” being used to identify the human who conducts skill evaluation. These are distinctions merely of the word that define who or what a Skill Evaluator is, I have called the product as Nemesis Skill Evaluator, while also calling myself a Skill Evaluator.

ParaGen products

ParaGen Skill evaluation products are useful methods and tools to skill evaluate using Artificial Intelligence. AI is the force behind the products and causes the product to not only evaluate (done by the real-world skill) but to also learn. The diagram below will, I am sure, correctly slot all the three Skill evaluation products in perspective:

With the distinction or categorisation out of the way, it is a matter of choosing our product carefully for skill evaluation. The cost of the product is in its complexity, as is obvious from the diagram above. Also it is hoped, that as the Learning Algorithms take over, with time and samples, the need for a real-world skill would not be felt, in short, we would eliminate the real-world skill in 2 years.

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