Ever been in a meeting, heard a new acronym, and panicked? You’re not alone. In fact, you’re probably in good company.
Rather than slyly but frantically searching the term (probably on your phone under the table in the middle of the meeting) to get up-to-speed, HR Brew organized a glossary to keep you conversant in meetings about HR software and technology. No shame in bookmarking us!
HR Brew consulted two pros to help us digest this HR tech alphabet soup. George LaRocque is an industry analyst in the HR tech space, and founder of WorkTech. Erik Brynjolfsson, from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, is the co-founder of Workhelix, a tech company that helps businesses figure out how to leverage AI at work.
HCM. Human capital management is used to describe platforms that include processes throughout the entire life cycle of an employee, from hiring to exiting. LaRocque said customers might find an HCM doesn’t do everything well, so there may be opportunities to connect to other platforms.
“The interesting thing about HCM…is it’s [also] used as a category, so you could say HR tech or you could say HCM, and almost interchangeably,” LaRocque said. “Context matters.”
Customers expect HCMs to include some sort of payroll management process, he said.
HRIS. Generally a system of record for a company’s HR data, HR information systems (HRIS), may or may not include payroll processing, according to LaRocque (HCMs generally do, he added).
HRMS. HR management software is generally used interchangeably with HRIS and meets the same needs for an organization.
ATS. In recruitment, HR and talent acquisition (TA) pros use an applicant tracking system, or ATS. It’s a system of record for hiring. A place to create and manage requisitions and run the hiring process all the way to an offer letter. Some ATS also include onboarding processes.
LMS. An organization’s learning management system is where employees go to complete needed coursework.
“Anything from learning how to run a cash register to taking your sexual harassment training to doing a course on project management, LMS will house all of the company’s internal content…as well as bring in external content,” LaRocque said.
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PMS. Performance management systems hold information related to an employee’s performance. Annual reviews can be housed here, as well as feedback, objectives and key results (OKRs), and goal setting processes.
SaaS. Software-as-a-service is a system in the cloud that an organization subscribes to in order to use. FWIW, a “cloud” is just a term for a large network of servers used to store data and run applications.
LLM. A large language model takes words and generally predicts the most logical next word based on statistical analysis.
ML. According to Brynjolfsson, machine learning is “a branch of artificial intelligence that has really taken off recently.” LLMs are a good example of machine learning.
In the early days of artificial intelligence, developers would write out complicated sets of rules—if X, then Y, for example—now MLs can derive those rules themselves based on large sets of data.
NLP. Natural language processing is a field of AI that specializes in the language of humans, “as opposed to computer code or other kinds of constructed programming languages,” said Brynjolfsson. With NLP and large sets of data, AI is able to understand statistically how language works without necessarily being taught syntax and grammar.
“One of the things we use NLP for…is what’s called sentiment analysis where you can look at all the things that a customer is saying, and see whether they’re happy or not so happy, based on the kinds of words they’re using,” he added.
GPT. “As an economist, when I heard the words GPT, I would think, ‘general purpose technology,’ like electricity, the steam engine,” Brynjolfsson said. “I used to say AI is our current generation’s big GPT, general purpose technology.”
But that acronym has (obviously) evolved to mean something else too. AI researchers use GPT to stand for generative pre-trained transformer.
“The GPT that OpenAI has [with ChatGPT]…Those are different generations of this generative pre-trained transformer,” he said. “It’s a set of AI algorithms that…do natural language processing.”
