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Are job titles useless? After all, a title tells you what someone was hired to do three years ago. Skills tell you what they're capable of today.
That's one of the scorching hot takes from the first episode of the HR Coffee Break podcast, a casual chat over coffee about everything HR. For episode one, host Kush Linfied sat with three Sympa experts to discuss their perspective on what makes a HR system simply work. Meet Aino (Product Training Manager), Toni (Head of Partnerships) and Wendel (Senior Full Stack Developer).
Together, they landed on three words to sum up the ideal HR system: simple, flexible and future-proof. Along the way, they shared hot takes that may be considered controversial and some that didn’t even make the final cut. Here they are, unfiltered.
SIMPLE
Hot take #1: HR is simple
“HR is simple. If you have an HR system that fits the way you work. It's not simple if you try to make your work fit the system."
In order for HR to be simple, your HR system needs to deal with the complexity behind the scenes. That way, you’ll never have to sweat the small stuff. Everything starts with having one reliable place for all your employee data. The moment people start asking "is this spreadsheet up to date?", everything gets harder.
One Sympa customer, a group of eight companies that had grown through acquisitions, had a bonus calculation so complicated it lived entirely in spreadsheets. Once it was configured directly in Sympa, a report that used to take a full day came together in about five minutes. The task remained the same. It just stopped taking over someone's entire day.
Hot take #2: No one cares about your HR system
"No one cares about your HR system. And that's fine. Good HR technology should help people get something done in seconds and get out. Time spent in your HR system is time not spent on the tasks that matter."
Engagement was never about time-in-product. If someone can update their details, request a holiday or finish an onboarding task in 30 seconds, that's a much better experience than hours of clicking around. This is especially true for managers, who are often approving or updating things on behalf of their team, so every extra click is multiplied.
Sometimes the best experience is removing the interaction altogether: if an automation can trigger the next step on its own, why make someone log in just to click a button? The best design is often the one you never need to see.
Hot take #3: FTE reporting is fun
"FTE reporting is fun. It genuinely can be! If you have the right tool and your data's in one place, it should only take a few minutes. If it's not, it's a week-long argument between HR, Finance and Payroll about what 'employee' even means."
"How many full-time equivalent employees do we have?" sounds like a simple question, until you factor in different working hours, contract types, locations and data scattered across systems. Answering it comes back to the same fix as everywhere else on this list: one place you trust for the data. Sympa's FTE reports gives you an overview of how a workforce is distributed across contract types, locations and time, built for workforce planning and budget season rather than a one-off spreadsheet exercise.
FLEXIBLE
Hot take #4: All-in-one HR systems are overrated
"Every company needs something different. Stop looking for one system that does everything and start making your systems work together."
Does a truly all-in-one system even exist? A complete HR platform would need to handle payroll in every country, recruitment, learning, benefits, and everything in between. But many areas of HR are highly complex. Specialist providers spend years solving challenges such as applicant tracking or building comprehensive learning libraries.
But many areas of HR are highly complex. Specialist providers spend years solving problems like applicant tracking or L&D. When a HRIS that tries to fold every one of those into built-in modules, you end up with a half-baked module doesn't cover real needs. That's why Sympa connects with a wide range of best-in-class solutions instead of trying to rebuild that functionality from scratch. Recruitment can be managed through Teamtailor and learning through 360Learning, both connected to Sympa, so employees get one smooth experience regardless of how many systems are actually working behind the scenes.
Hot take #5: Excel is still the most popular HR system in the world
"Excel is still the most popular HR system in the world. Which tells you something. If HR is still relying on spreadsheets for everything, their HR system isn't making their job simple enough."
Believe it or not, spreadsheets are still the go-to for a lot of HR work, even inside organisations that already pay for an HR system. Plenty of these systems ship with dozens of features and still miss the one calculation, report or process a business actually runs on. That's the trap: a system that's ready to go out of the box works fine until your organisation needs something that doesn't fit inside that box, leaving you with half-baked features that don't solve real-world problems.
Sympa's approach is configuration rather than piling on more generic features. The bonus-calculation example above shows what that looks like in practice: a multi-variable calculation got built directly into Sympa to match how a business actually works, rather than forced into a rigid HR system. Once the system covered the real case, the spreadsheets stopped being necessary.
Hot take #6: Global HR is a myth
"Global HR is a myth. You can have one global strategy, but payroll, legislation and ways of working are always local."
As nice as it sounds, it's impossible to force one process across countries. An international company might run one HR system globally, but several different payroll providers underneath it, because every country has its own legislation, tax rules and collective agreements. The key is to keep employee data centralised in your HR system while sending the right information to the right local payroll tool. The workforce itself runs into the same problem: a manufacturing company might have factory employees in one country and office employees in another, with completely different contract types and processes, all inside the same organisation.
FUTURE-PROOF
Hot take #7: Job titles are useless
"Job titles are useless. A title tells you what someone was hired to do three years ago. Skills tell you what they're capable of today."
Jobs are changing fast. New technology is reshaping existing roles and creating entirely new ones, which means the skills someone needs today may not be the same in a few years. To keep track, HR needs a much clearer picture of the skills that already exist inside the organisation. That's the thinking behind Skills in Sympa. Define the skills that matter, assess where people are against them and see the gaps across teams. It changes the first question when a new team gets built from "who do we need to hire?" to "do we already have this?"
HR that simply works
Simple. Flexible. Future-proof. Three words, seven hot takes, and, going by the reactions in the room, not everyone at Sympa agrees on all of them either. But that's kind of the point. Listen to the first episode of HR Coffee Break and let us know which of these takes you'd argue with the most.
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