On January 29-30, 2025, we attended at HR Technologies France 2025; an engaging event at Paris Expo, Porte de Versailles, bringing together 4,000 HR and recruitment professionals alongside over 400 exhibitors..
In addition to visiting the exhibition stands, there was the opportunity to attend presentations and round tables with key note speakers from major companies such as Airbus, Credit Agricole, Free, Bouygues and Carrefour.
The three major themes were professional formation (technical, linguistic, behavioural), talent attraction and HR management. The latter included sub categories such as employee health, diversity and inclusion. We even had motivational speakers, including olympic ski champion, Edgar Grospiron.
No prizes for guessing which technology dominated! And yes most of these pitches were likely created before the impact of DeepSeek’s chatbot app this week. We had AI employee assessments through to AI driven training (including Neuro Linguistic Programming), AI driven recruitment and Virtual reality. An exhibitor in the latter included My-Serious-Game game, a resident of the MAME and local success story who had invested significant time in their stand. They showed me a couple of scenarios they had worked on recently, including healthcare and agriculture (champagne). I was surrounded by BNP Paribas CIB employees shortly after so interesting to see what sort of scenario they would be interested in. Role of compliance professional on the trading floor perhaps?
Stand out exhibitors for us were :
Flatchr – an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) provider that also aggregates job boards. Their pitch was humble and they were quick to signal that they don’t have the capacity to challenge their American and Japanese competitors. It was good to see a young, creative French firm stake their claim however.
Your-Comics – Why? Fun factor. An agency that creates content for companies in the medium of comic books. They make otherwise dry subject matter more accessible to the wider public. Examples they showed me were GDPR as well as regulatory compliance.
Parlons RH – Why? An HR agency that help with employer branding, content and social media. Their stand included a giant treasure map to the ‘Heart of HR’. Basically a giant colouring in exercise which attracted a lot of interest.
Closing thoughts
Despite the epic services on display, I left the exhibition hall wondering whether AI is the universal solution to a ‘Human’ industry. Would over investment cost HR professionals their jobs?
What about external recruiters? As technology accelerates, this may affect us more deeply. What we still and will always bring to businesses however is our powers of persuasion for both the candidate and the client. That may be through knowledge, experience, empathy, benchmarking or cultural awareness. For now at least humans won’t completely outsource their decisions to non-humans!
And no this post was not rewritten with AI… 😇