Every employee is a tech worker

It's fairly simple. If every business is a tech business now, every employee has to be a tech worker — a tech manager if not a tech creator. The ability to not just adopt tech but actually leverage it is now the key to success in any role. And AI has pushed that line further: the gap between someone who uses the tools well and someone who doesn't is no longer small — it's the difference between one person doing the work of five and one person slowing five down. So your candidate evaluation must check for techyness. Let's take a few roles to see how it sits at the core of the job.

A SALES job is about CRM, web communication, social, and pre-emptive analysis. Do you understand emails, InMails, social pages? Which CRM do you use, and why? Which tool updates prospect status easily after a call, SMS or WhatsApp — and reports on its own? How do you keep your prospect base engaged: do you automate birthday wishes, festive wishes, product updates, offers? Can you track prospect, client and competitor conversations with everyday tools, and feed that into your action plan? Today, can you put the right AI tools to work on all of the above?

An ACCOUNTS job is about tools like QuickBooks, collection reminders, payroll. What do you use for invoicing and recurring billing? Have you integrated payment channels to smoothen collections? Are your reminders automated — with a polite "ignore if already paid :)"?

Name a role and you'll find it's about using the right tool well. Most of the knowhow is inside the tool anyway.

An HR job, for instance, is about running every HR process through a proper system. Do you know how to advertise jobs so the boards crawl and re-post them? Have you set filters to screen candidates and save management time? Can you read employee sentiment, get referrals, set up micro-networks of learning, build training videos and host them under a secured login for every employee?

I guess you get the point. Change your interview questions — you're hiring a tech worker for every role now. There are no non-tech roles anymore.

At plugHR, we help entrepreneurs make sense of the new talent paradigms: rewriting role definitions, skills maps and hiring processes, and training managers for the new game. That's what we do before breakfast. After breakfast? We let the tech work.

If you need help, reach out to plugHR.

Originally published on the plugHR blog.