HRTech Interview with Vidhya Srinivasan, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Magnit

Vidhya Srinivasan, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Magnit chats about the power of AI in HR and other HRTech innovations that are transforming the future of HR in this Interview by HRTech Series:

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Hi Vidhya, tell us about yourself and more about your role at Magnit…

As Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Magnit, I spearhead the entire product journey from concept to go-to-market, reinventing how we deliver technology value and ensuring our product vision delivers unparalleled, high-impact results for our global customers.

Prior to joining Magnit, my career spanned leadership roles at tech companies including Blue Yonder, ServiceNow, BMC, Cisco, and Oracle. I bring this diverse set of deep tech experience with me to my role to empower our clients through global shifts. Coming to the HR industry from tech, I see great opportunity in the contingent workforce management space to disrupt the status quo and drive meaningful change with next-generation technology to completely transform the way organizations work.

We’d love to hear more about Magnit and how the platform has evolved over the years, tell us about some of your most recent enhancements? 

Magnit is a global leader and pioneer in contingent workforce management. With more than 30 years of radical innovation in our DNA, Magnit combined cutting edge technology, dedicated services expertise, and a vast data ocean all in one unified platform.

We recently unveiled the Magnit Platform, the industry’s first AI-powered, outcome-driven platform, which drastically improves workforce management by simplifying user engagement and delivering tangible impact on day-to-day use cases, from requisition to sourcing to analytics – powered by Magnit’s expansive data ocean.

Our goal was to take all the technology we gathered from our strategic acquisitions and not just integrate it, but rethink, modernize and build a single, seamless experience that works for all users. Magnit Platform strategically integrates multiple industry-leading capabilities including pay and talent intelligence, blue-collar, shift-based workforce management, direct sourcing and more at a level that has never been achieved.

We aspired to harness the power of AI and other tech innovations in bold, fresh ways to significantly minimize the friction associated with today’s workforce processes. With Magnit Platform, all stakeholders across the ecosystem — hiring managers, suppliers, MSPs and more – have access to diverse talent channels and the power of AI/ML to create talent-forward strategies. These capabilities empower organizations to remain competitive in today’s dynamic economy and job market by accelerating time to hire, optimizing contingent workforce spend, ensuring compliance, and scaling access to quality talent.

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How is Magnit’s new GenAI companion an enabler for HR teams? How is it unique from an AI powered HRTech perspective?

Maggi, Magnit’s new GenAI companion, serves as a game-changing enabler for HR teams by delivering cutting-edge AI capabilities on Magnit’s robust platform and empowering everyone involved in the workforce journey. Maggi is designed so that HR professionals, hiring managers, suppliers, and workers can operate within a unified system, eliminating silos and fostering seamless collaboration. It is connected to diverse datasets, including customer, public, and curated industry data.

What sets Maggi apart in the AI-powered HR tech landscape is three key areas that can provide value to HR teams: execution to streamline daily tasks, informing through predictive insights and planning for strategic long-term initiatives. In the first area of execution, Maggi simplifies talent sourcing and management across various workforce segments—whether blue-collar, white-collar, skilled, unskilled, or blended. It also automates workflows across critical HR functions like recruitment, onboarding, payroll, and compliance, significantly reducing manual effort.

The second area Maggi brings value to HR teams is in its power to inform with its proactive and reactive alerting system. For compliance, Maggi notifies users of updates to local labor laws and regulations, enabling businesses to stay ahead of changes. Beyond operational efficiency, Maggi informs users through unparalleled data-driven analytics, offering insights into pay rates, market trends, and candidate profiles. By synthesizing data from talent pools, job descriptions, and market benchmarks, Maggi ensures hiring managers receive actionable recommendations without the need for cumbersome manual inputs. This not only reduces administrative overhead but also drives cost savings and competitiveness.

Finally, Maggi delivers strategic planning by utilizing Magnit’s data ocean and AI/ML tools to help clients achieve their goals, such as launching programs in new geographies or scaling existing operations. By generating tailored templates and actionable insights, Maggi becomes a trusted advisor in workforce planning.

Maggi uniquely combines execution, information, and strategic planning to empower HR teams with intelligent, seamless, and future-ready workforce solutions.

What recent AI enhancements in HRTech from the global HRTech market have piqued your interest the most? And why?

AI has become a strategic tool for HR, especially in recruitment and workforce planning. With 87% of companies facing or anticipating a skills gap, HR teams are under pressure to quickly find, source and hire the right talent to meet immediate and long-term workforce needs, all while controlling costs. AI has proven a powerful solution in alleviating this burden, helping HR to scale access to talent, forecast workforce needs and proactively plan for shifts in talent supply and demand, and autonomously match qualified candidates to work. For example, AI-based resume and job description algorithms can proactively match and redeploy high-quality workers nearing the end of contingent work assignments with open opportunities from participating organizations based on location, job title and bill rate.

Enhancements in AI have also empowered decision makers with instant access to large amounts of valuable data to inform strategic planning and hiring. AI’s ability to instantly process and interpret expansive datasets, such as labor market trends and employee data, gives business leaders unparalleled insights to better plan for the future. In addition, emerging technologies are transforming organizations’ approach to hiring. By emphasizing objective, data-driven criteria, AI is helping to reduce unconscious bias during the recruitment process.

Finally, AI is also becoming an indispensable change management tool for HR. As AI continues to evolve, HR teams are increasingly focused on upskilling their workforces to use AI as an assistant for daily tasks. By embedding AI into work culture and driving the strategic adoption of the technology through training and upskilling, HR can ensure their organization remains skilled and prepared for an AI-driven future.

For HR teams at the early stages of adopting new HRtech and AI powered HRTech to fuel their HR cycles, what top tips would you share? 

When implementing AI into an organization, the first thing HR teams need to think about is where exactly they want to drive efficiency and impact. If we can impact stakeholders in the hiring process where they feel the most friction, that is the most powerful use case to drive adoption. HR teams must understand where pain points are for employees and find solutions that create impact on everyday tasks for every role, maximizing productivity and empowering people to excel in their jobs. The emphasis should be on making the technology work for the user, not the other way around.

Second, interactive training is critical to encouraging users to embrace technology and create an intuitive experience with AI. Whether it’s onboarding a candidate or creating a new job requisition, hiring managers can lean on AI like a companion or assistant to speed work processes and seamlessly integrate into existing workflows. Ensure that team members feel comfortable using the technology through intentional, engaging and tailored trainings that showcase the technology’s capabilities and benefits for the end user.

Finally, teams must highlight the impact of the technology by slowly integrating it into everyday workflows so teams can organically accept it and begin to use it for their daily tasks. Making the technology as native an experience as possible will ensure that workers utilize it.

Five predictions on the state of HRTech and impact of AI on HRtech before we wrap up.

1. AI and GenAI adoption will grow significantly in talent acquisition over the next year, from recruiting to candidate sourcing, matching and screening.
2. As upskilling and talent development come further into the spotlight amid ongoing talent shortages and skills gaps, leaders will increasingly rely on technology to identify skills that are lacking and build talent development trainings as a result.
3. AI will become critical for workforce planning for its ability to look at large datasets such as labor market trends, current employee data, and business goals to help organizations prepare and plan for the future.
4. Tech and AI will play an important role in mitigating unconscious bias throughout the hiring process by focusing on objective criteria for recruitment.
5. The gig economy and uberization of skills will continue to expand across more industries and roles within organizations as people look for more flexible opportunities to simultaneously follow their passions and expand their skillsets.

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