Do We in HR Need to Be More Technical?

The short answer is yes.

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Hey,

I’ve bought new technical gear.
And it’s allowing one thing. For me to record myself more easily while in the car.
Which means I will increase the velocity of my podcast.

So! The plan now is this for the FullStack HR-ecosystem (and you’ve probably seen some of it already)

Tuesdays = longer content
Saturdays = practical tips & tricks

I’m not quite there yet to record videos about tips & tricks, but that is the plan for the fall.

But the podcast then? It will be shorter, faster episodes in between, about news, thoughts, and general updates. All about the intersection between AI, leadership, and HR.

I will push the podcast out every now and then, but head over to Spotify or Apple Podcasts (or search FullStackHR in your favorite podcast player!).

That said, let’s get to it!

PS. If you see FullStackHR AI & HR Daily in your podcast player… that is my AI bot, Winston, creating a podcast for me every now and then about news he thinks I should listen to…

I got a question the other week. Do we in HR need to be more technical?

The short answer is yes.

But that wouldn’t make for a very good article if I just said yes and left it at that. So let me explain myself, because this yes comes with a fair amount of nuance.

I’ve said it before. You don’t need to become a programmer. And I stand by that. But I believe you need to be at least somewhat technically interested right now to understand what’s going on. And for some of us, that means a pretty significant upgrade of our skills.

So what do I mean by that?

I don’t mean you should write code. That would be counterproductive. Because what’s happening with tools like Claude Code and Codex isn’t that more people need to become programmers. It’s that more people need to be able to validate code. You don’t need to write it. You need to be able to judge what comes out.

What I mean is that you need a sense for where the technology is heading, and a basic understanding of how it works. What makes a product good, and what sits under the hood? How does an API work? What’s a database, and what different versions are there? How does AI connect to databases, to APIs, to MCP servers?

Why?

Because this affects us. With Codex, Claude Code, Antigravity, and all the other development tools available now, we need to understand that we have agency. We can do things ourselves with these tools.

I’m not saying you should build your own ATS or your own HRIS. (Even if you can do that.) But we need to know that the possibility exists. And it’s worth starting to play around with. Try Lovable, try Replit, or why not ChatGPT Codex or Google’s Antigravity.

It matters that you start poking at them, because it informs you about what’s possible and what isn’t. And what a lot of organizations are now discovering is that it also makes you a better buyer when you procure HR services that someone else is building.

Because we can reasonably expect our vendors' productivity to have gone up now. That their pace of building new things should have increased if they’re using the same tools. Hopefully, they have skilled people who are not only good at creating things but also at validating what comes out.

This felt scary to me too

And yes, it can feel scary in the beginning. Completely understandable. I can relate. I’ve been lucky enough to work in tech companies for most of my career, and it was intimidating at first, even though I’m genuinely interested in everything to do with tech.

When I started at Spotify, I had zero to very little knowledge about how to build backend services. I had to learn. And I think it’s important that you go through some form of upskilling or reskilling in your role. Not to become a programmer. But to try these tools out.

Because when you do, you inevitably learn things about code along the way.

API. MCP. What’s the deal?

So let’s jump into some of the acronyms here. API? What does it even stand for? It stands for application programming interface. It’s a way to connect different systems. Most people have probably heard the term; it’s not new. But at its core it’s a way for computers to talk to each other without having a middleman in the form of a human.

Let’s say you need to connect your HR system to your employee engagement system. Usually they have APIs, so you can connect the two. Update the HR system and the engagement system updates automatically. The person who gets hired is added, the person who leaves is removed, based on the information in your HRIS. No back-and-forth with spreadsheets or going row by row to delete stuff.

If this happened, we needed to connect the systems, which we normally did in HR a few years back, by going to IT and asking if they could connect the systems. They put it in a backlog. They came back and asked for the API documentation. There was a meeting. And that was that.

What we’re seeing more and more now is that you can do it yourself. You can connect systems fairly easily, either through a no-code tool or directly in the system. Or you use MCP. Another acronym? Yes.

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. A bit of a glorified API, you could say, that sends information between systems but without the hassle. With an API you need to be very specific. This is the information I want to retrieve, this is what you should return, this is what you should publish. With MCP you can instead tell an AI to do something, and the MCP finds its way through the system on its own.

And it’s fairly easy today to connect MCP servers from different vendors into Claude or ChatGPT.

The threshold has dropped. Now it takes curiosity.

What used to be hard and required a lot of IT development doesn’t require the same thing anymore, if we’re curious. And that’s where the curiosity comes back in to play! We need to understand this. We need to play with it.

Obviously, I wouldn’t start by connecting my real HRIS to my real engagement system in production. I’d do it in a sandbox where I can test, see what works and what doesn’t. Maybe a small personal project where I get to feel out what’s what.

But we need to do it. I think it’s our responsibility as HR people to take this leap. It’s not good enough to say you’re not interested, or that you chose HR because you’re not technically inclined. We need to do this, because this is where the world is heading. We’re not going to have less tech in our roles. So we need to start educating ourselves toward that future.

And yes, it’s the most worn-out analogy there is, I’m as tired of it as you are. But it’s still true. Wayne Gretzky and his “skate to where the puck is going.” (Feel free to roll your eyes.) But if you want to future-proof your career and your organization, I think this is a capability we need to start building.

It only takes one

I’ve worked with several organizations where you can see the difference made by the people who did this. It doesn’t have to be the CHRO. Not even the HRBP. It can be an HR assistant fresh out of university who takes it on themselves to explore what we can and can’t do.

And the upside for the organizations actively trying to figure this out is enormous. Someone who can be a good counterpart to IT, because we’ll still need their help to some degree. Someone who can be a good counterpart to the vendors where you buy external systems. And someone who can be a teacher and change agent internally.

It’s an important role to fill. And I’d strongly advise you to upskill the whole team, not just one person. To have the whole team start thinking, pondering and testing.

It doesn’t have to be complicated, and it doesn’t have to be expensive. You can learn a lot from tutorials on YouTube. You can take cheap courses for a couple of hundred bucks and be up and running. This is not an expensive technology to learn.

No excuses

It’s easy to say “yeah yeah, I know I should, but I don’t have the time, and it’s so hard, and I don’t know where to start.” And every other excuse you can come up with.

But don’t make any excuses for this. Because this is where the world is heading. I’m a firm believer that tech will become even more important. You can ignore it, but then you’ll have to play catch-up instead.

And sure, the technology will get easier and easier. I genuinely believe that too. But the understanding will help you regardless. I’m completely certain of that. Even if this becomes super simple in the future, this foundational understanding will help you.

It’s time well spent.