3 HRIS trends for 2025 with Sylvain LETOURMY from Oracle France

The HRIS sector is evolving rapidly, and SQORUS regularly shares with you the trends we identify for you.

For over 30 years, our firm has been developing expertise in this field, as well as solid relationships with partners.
Among them, the most historic is certainly Oracle, with whom our dedicated HR teams carry out integration projects for major customers.

With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to interview one of their HR and HRIS transformation experts from Oracle France, Sylvain LETOURMY, to find out what he sees as the structuring HRIS trends for the next 12 months.

This article invites you to discover them, against a backdrop of artificial intelligence, personalized employee experience and sustainable transformation.

The acceleration of artificial intelligence for Human Resources

You couldn’t get past the AI wave that’s been sweeping over us since 2023, and we’ve already seen that the opportunities for HR are manifold.

Sylvain LETOURMY explains below how this is integrated into the Oracle HCM HRIS.

Predictive artificial intelligence

The latter is used in particular in skills management with “Oracle Dynamic Skills“.

Using Machine Learning, Oracle surveyed millions of public documents (resumes, job descriptions), sorted them by language and referenced them – in other words, more than 130,000 skills and 16,000 jobs – to create a kind of universal repository.

Functionalities like Oracle Dynamic Skills represent a significant evolution in talent management, using a sophisticated deep learning engine to discover, manage and cultivate the skills essential to a robust talent supply chain, focusing on three key aspects: understanding employee skills, connecting individuals to relevant skills and supporting career development.

Generative artificial intelligence

On this topic, Oracle is collaborating with Cohere, a leading AI platform for enterprises.
Cohere is not only a partner, but also a customer, since Cohere’s functionalities are built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
This enables Oracle to offer this new feature in its products at no extra cost to its 4,000 HCM customers, and to guarantee a high level of security, since the data does not leave the Oracle Cloud environment.

Why use generative AI?
First of all, in its construction, generative AI analyzes document corpora and deduces, for example, the words most frequently used together, to then build coherent content.
The problem of language does not arise in the same way as with predictive AI.

What’s more, the data used is never customer data, but external data, thus guaranteeing confidentiality.

The estimated gains from generative AI are 60% in employee experience/personalization, 30% in task automation/productivity, and 10% in decision support.

But here are a few examples to better understand its potential:

• Performance management and objective setting: Based on the title of an objective, generative AI produces the objective description in SMART format (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely), which usually requires a great deal of effort to write down the 5 criteria – this makes it easier to adopt this type of methodology, and avoids data leaks from collaborators using, for example, a public ChatGPT.

• Annual interviews: generative AI suggests a synthesis of annual interviews based on the elements provided at each stage, according to feedbacks expressed, mid-year points… However, it must be borne in mind that generative AI will not be able to propose a synthesis in the absence of this prior data.

• Employee survey: by entering a survey theme for his team, the manager is presented with a complete framework of questions and suggested answers for multiple-choice surveys.
  The manager can modify the content and submit the survey to management in just a few clicks.

• Business intelligence: in BI tools, generative AI adds the ability to analyze information in free text and render it in word clouds, with colors indicating the positive or negative tonalities of the analyzed texts.
  This enables instantaneous, multilingual analysis, as well as specific focus (on a population or by cross-referencing with other HR or organizational information).

We can report that the SQORUS customers we support in HRIS selection are now all keen to incorporate criteria linked to generative AI into their specifications.

A more central role for employees in HRIS

Historically HRIS tools tools have been designed primarily to meet regulatory and administrative constraints, mainly for HR users.

In recent years, however, we have seen a growing interest among organizations in collecting more individual data, so as to offer each employee a personal career path.
As a result, tools are increasingly aimed at managers and employees who are best placed to provide this information.

The question then arises of our ability to capture their attention, create engagement, and ensure that interaction with the HRIS adds value, through a seamless experience.

In particular, integrated suites make it easier to align HR approaches, and more recently, to link actions not to processes, but to events in the employee’s life.

A good example is “Journeys” within Oracle HCM Cloud.
This is a navigation model that is triggered according to what happens in the employee’s life.
The notion of modules is forgotten here, and we adapt according to context.
In this way, we move away from a transactional tool and into an event-driven one, providing more context and therefore more meaning for the employee.

The tool also adapts to the employee’s personal navigation: suggested content (based on Dynamic Skills mentioned above), suggested shortcuts according to habits or entity, reminders for expense reports when the rest of our team has done theirs, etc…

But we can cite other elements that point to a significant improvement in the HRIS employee experience:

• The mobile-first HRIS experience, with, for example, the new Redwood version of Oracle HCM Cloud, focused on performance and ease of navigation.

• Inspiration by HR from best practices observed in the field of customer experience, for example, a mailing module in the HRIS enabling people to be targeted, surveyed and voted on, the aim here being to contact who needs to be contacted, in a personalized way, and to avoid the spam that employees sometimes complain about.

• HR support is facilitated by improved productivity via the HRIS tool (HR Helpdesk).

Note: the transformation of the employee experience, inspired by that of the customer experience, is a subject we regularly address at SQORUS.

The essential role of HRIS tools in ESG initiatives

After years of racing towards digital transformation, sustainable transformation is now a priority for many organizations.
In France, we speak of CSR, but more globally, we’ll use the term ESG for Environment, Social and Governance.

S de Social is directly linked to Human Resources, and more than 20 indicators needed for required audits and compliance will come from the HRIS, which will regularly provide structured data, down to a very fine level (right down to the individual).

Gradually applicable from January 1, 2024, the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) sets new standards and obligations for non-financial reporting.
It applies to both large companies and listed SMEs.

This directive is very qualitative for HR, as it provides indicators that can be used as a basis for corrective action.
It is imperative to keep this point as an obligation, but it is also interesting to have it in theHR tool for decision-making, which will be based on live data, and not just on an annual meter reading.

But that’s not enough, of course.
Companies and publishers must do their part.
Oracle, for its part, powers 100% of its European data centers with renewable energy in Europe, and soon worldwide by 2025.

Oracle also adopts original, sustainable approaches for its data centers.
In Marseilles, for example, they use a “river cooling” system, which consists of using fresh water from the old Gardanne mines, north of Marseilles, unused since 2003, to cool their servers.
This method avoids the need for air-conditioning 99.9% of the time, and generates energy savings 30 times greater than a conventional cooling system.
An efficient method that makes this infrastructure one of the most energy-efficient in France.

It should be noted that SQORUS is also part of this ESG approach, via its CSR strategy, its Raison d’Etre, but also via the missions we carry out around HR & CSR actions, Green IT, or Sustainable Finance.

Conclusion on HRIS trends 2025

So, beyond the traditional HRIS challenges (data quality, performance improvement, time saving for HR, cost control…), new projects are underway.
These have an impact on our environment, on employee commitment and retention, and on aligning organizations with new technological leaps such as artificial intelligence, whether generative or not.

SQORUS already supports its customers in these areas.
If you would like to find out more, please contact us.