Blockchain and the Chief Human Resources Officer

This white paper, brought to you by the Brightline Initiative and the Blockchain Research Institute, explores how blockchain will enable organizations to find the right skills and talent at the right time for the right price. That capability will be critical to project management and strategy delivery. Through distributed ledgers, human resources staff can obtain better information about potential contractors and partners than traditional recruitment methods. With a prospective employee’s consent, an employer will have access to verifiable information uploaded, stored, and managed on a highly secure, distributed database.

Idea in Brief

The role of a chief human resources officer (CHRO) is to place the best possible talent, leadership, and capability in positions throughout the organization so that it can achieve the best possible outcome. Procuring top talent in inefficient labor markets and increasing productivity of the organizations’ largest cost—its people—are essential challenges of the HR role.

A persistent HR issue is verifying candidate credentials. At best, the hiring process weeds out unsuitable candidates. At worst, productivity suffers from poor team performance, reputational damage, and cost of replacement. When a candidate is placed successfully, the ongoing operational tasks of onboarding and retraining, labor contracts, benefits assignment, and payroll management are costly and time consuming.

Technological advancements strive to enhance position specification, talent sourcing, and management, but blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt business practices and workflow in the HR space fundamentally. Candidates could share relevant details securely with prospective employers. Information such as qualifications, accomplishments, references and skills could be digitally verified and provide confidence throughout the talent management landscape. A positive match would become a seamless digital contract managed on secure distributed databases.

Over time, organizations will be able to find the talent they need when they need it. As the gig economy becomes more transparent, liquid, and beneficial to all stakeholders, organizations will require fewer full-time employees. Blockchain should reduce recruitment costs and give able HR professionals direct access to a pool of top candidates, fundamentally changing the role of HR and creating radically new work organizations.