Is there a use case for blockchain in HR?

When speaking about blockchain technology, Hjalmar Turesson cites his own experience coming to Canada as an example of how useful the fledgling technology could be.

A Schulich Business School AI and business analytics professor, he is originally from Sweden and worked as an academic in many areas of the world before becoming a Canadian citizen.

“When applying for the permanent residency, I had to show my educational certificates. I had to write the old universities where I was and ask them to send it to me in a format that will be accepted here in Canada,” Turesson said.

“I lived in Brazil, I had to write to Brazil and ask for my police records, and from Denmark and from Germany and Mexico, wherever I lived. So instead of me doing this, those records could live in the blockchain.”

Blockchain data storage could remove borders during hiring

The financial industry has been particularly affected by blockchain as decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, which use blockchain, disrupt traditional banking. Supply chain management has also seen blockchain adoption, with companies such as IBM Chain being used in complex industrial supply chains.

In HR, blockchain could be very useful in the particular case of hiring internationally, Turesson said.

A job applicant, with all of their documentation such as educational records, criminal records, citizen records, even cover letters and CVs encrypted and stored on blockchain, could give a temporary key to potential employers for exactly the documents they wanted to share.

Because of the decentralized nature of blockchain, the records could be accessed the same way from anywhere in the world, he said, with applicants giving employers access to the documents they need for a specific length of time, be it an hour or a week.

“The beauty of blockchain is that it is transnational, it’s not like one blockchain per country,” Turesson said. “So, the idea would be that this is truly an international kind of storage, which would make it easy to interface between Mexico and Canada … now that we live and move and cross borders so much, it would be much easier if we had a documentation system that was built on this kind of borderlessness.”

Standards and buy-in main barriers to blockchain adoption

While blockchain has been mostly associated with cryptocurrency as a way to track transactions on a decentralized ledger, the data storage potential of the technology has been eyed by industries for years with varying levels of uptake.

“Technology wise, that’s a question. It's not very complicated, there are many services that can do it today. It's more a question of having all organizations accepting it,” Turesson said. “There will be, of course, a bit of a leap to start accepting it in some other form.”

However, he pointed out that the use of PDFs instead of paper documentation went through the same process of widespread adoption over time as organizations and individuals realized the convenience and reduction of paper and administrative labour PDFs offered.

The benefits of this technology in an HR environment are obvious, but it would take widespread buy-in for it to really be useful, Turesson said, explaining that due to the ability to use encryption keys to lock blockchain documentation, the mode could have the same level of security as a stamp on a piece of paper.

However, blockchain has yet to have its “killer use case”.

“If one person uses it or one organization uses it, it's meaningless,” he said. “The majority have to start using it for it to be useful, which can be a little bit difficult to get going.”