The Personnel Today Awards 2026, a beacon of innovation and best practice in the human resources sector, has unveiled a compelling shortlist for its highly coveted Digital HR and Technology Award. This prestigious category celebrates the transformative power of technology when wielded by HR teams to deliver tangible business benefits and redefine the employee experience. Faced with an exceptional calibre of entries, the esteemed judging panel meticulously evaluated projects ranging from comprehensive digital HR overhauls to targeted app deployments, prioritising those that demonstrated clear evidence of solving critical organisational challenges through technological intervention. The projects profiled here stand as testament to the ingenuity and strategic foresight within the HR profession, showcasing how digital solutions are driving efficiency, enhancing engagement, and fostering more robust, data-led people functions across diverse industries.
The Significance of the Personnel Today Awards and the Digital HR Imperative
For over two decades, the Personnel Today Awards have been a cornerstone event in the HR calendar, honouring organisations and individuals who push the boundaries of excellence in people management. These awards are not merely accolades; they serve as a benchmark for industry best practice, inspiring innovation and elevating the strategic importance of HR within the wider business context. The Digital HR and Technology Award, in particular, reflects the accelerating pace of digital transformation across all sectors, underscoring the critical role technology plays in shaping modern workplaces.
In today’s dynamic business environment, HR is no longer solely an administrative function but a strategic partner, driving organisational performance and competitive advantage. Digital HR tools, encompassing everything from AI-powered recruitment platforms to integrated employee experience portals, are at the forefront of this evolution. They enable HR teams to move beyond transactional tasks, leveraging data analytics to inform decision-making, personalise employee journeys, and foster cultures of continuous learning and development. The 2026 awards, proudly sponsored by industry leaders such as LHH, NatWest, Reward Gateway | Edenred, and Tusker, highlight the imperative for HR to embrace technology not just for efficiency, but as a core enabler of business strategy and employee wellbeing.
The judging process for this category is rigorous, with experts scrutinising entries for originality, impact, scalability, and the demonstrable return on investment. Projects must illustrate how technological interventions have directly addressed a specific problem, improved processes, enhanced the employee experience, or delivered measurable business benefits. This year’s shortlist paints a vivid picture of how leading organisations are leveraging digital solutions to tackle complex HR challenges, from talent acquisition and retention to internal communications, benefits administration, and conflict resolution.
Aegon: Pioneering a Unified Digital HR Experience
Aegon’s nomination for the Digital HR and Technology Award stems from its ambitious Digital HR transformation, the culmination of a broader people function overhaul initiated in 2024. The financial services giant recognised that its existing HR model was fragmented, characterised by limited self-service capabilities, cumbersome manual hand-offs, poor visibility into employee queries, and insufficient management information. This created a disjointed experience for colleagues and hindered the HR team’s ability to operate proactively and strategically.
With a clear vision to place colleagues at the heart of its HR experience, Aegon embarked on creating a simpler, more connected digital ecosystem. The organisation strategically selected Workday Help as its HR service delivery solution, integrating knowledge management and case management seamlessly within its existing Workday platform. This decision underscored a commitment to future-proofing its HR infrastructure, prioritising simplicity, and delivering a superior colleague experience by establishing "One place for all things people," rather than introducing yet another standalone system.
The implementation was distinguished by a human-centric approach, involving colleagues extensively in mapping current journeys, co-creating future workflows, and rigorously testing the solution through demonstrations, roadshows, and feedback sessions. This collaborative methodology proved crucial in identifying potential friction points, shaping adoption strategies, and tailoring engagement activities to resonate with diverse colleague groups across the organisation.
Launched in October 2025, Workday Help rapidly transformed Aegon’s HR service landscape. It established a single, intuitive entry point for accessing policies, guidance, and comprehensive HR support. Queries, once scattered across various channels, are now centrally captured, significantly improving visibility for both employees and HR staff, and enabling seamless tracking and continuation of conversations. The immediate success was evident in the knowledge base, which garnered an impressive 10,000 article views within weeks, further enhanced by AI-enabled search and intelligent answer capabilities.
The impact has been profound and quantifiable. Phone calls to people services witnessed a dramatic 50% reduction in less than three months, with over 80% of all queries now efficiently routed through Workday Help. This surge in digital self-service directly contributed to a 15% reduction in people services headcount, freeing up HR professionals to focus on more strategic initiatives. Employee satisfaction soared from a baseline of 3 to an impressive average of 4.5 out of 5 across more than 4,000 queries. A senior HR leader at Aegon remarked, "This transformation has fundamentally shifted our HR service delivery from a reactive model to a proactive, insight-led function, empowering our colleagues and enabling our HR team to drive greater value for the business."
BT Group in Partnership with Sapia.ai: Revolutionising Frontline Hiring with AI
BT Group, a telecommunications giant, faced a formidable challenge in its frontline hiring for its EE brand: an alarming 50% attrition rate among new joiners within their first year. Annually processing approximately 150,000 applications for some 7,500 frontline roles, BT urgently needed to enhance both the candidate experience and the quality of its hiring decisions at scale.
The incumbent hiring process was heavily reliant on traditional psychometric testing, which resulted in over 70% of applicants dropping out, followed by a slow and resource-intensive phone screening stage. BT recognised that to improve retention, it needed a more consistent, measurable hiring signal that could be rigorously tested against actual performance outcomes.
The strategic partnership with Sapia.ai introduced a groundbreaking solution: replacing early-stage screening with a structured, mobile-first chat interview. Every applicant now completes the same untimed assessment, accessible on any device, and meticulously designed around BT and EE’s core values and role-relevant competencies. Critically, BT initially ran the Sapia.ai assessment concurrently with its existing process, enabling robust validation of its predictive relationship with later-stage outcomes before fully integrating it into hiring decisions. Following overwhelmingly positive results, the approach was gradually expanded across the organisation.
The impact of this digital intervention has been transformative. Completion rates for the initial assessment skyrocketed from 30% to an impressive 90%, while candidate satisfaction reached an exceptional 9.1 out of 10. Withdrawal rates significantly decreased from 18% to 13%. Internally, recruiter capacity within contact centres roughly doubled, allowing teams to manage a higher volume of applications more efficiently. Moreover, the inclusive nature of the chat interview led to a notable increase in applications from parents, carers, and older workers, diversifying the talent pool. In EE retail, BT achieved a remarkable 10 consecutive months where more than 50% of frontline hires were female, demonstrating the solution’s positive impact on diversity and inclusion.
A comprehensive 15-month predictive validity study further cemented the value of the partnership, directly linking Sapia.ai’s hiring scores with real performance outcomes. Sapia-recommended retail hires achieved their first on-target month one month sooner than their counterparts and delivered an astounding 86% more on-target months over time. The AI-driven approach also proved adept at identifying differences in attrition risk even before a new employee’s first day. The Head of Talent Acquisition at BT Group lauded the initiative, stating, "This partnership has not only delivered significant annual savings through vastly improved first-year retention but has also established a governed, data-led hiring system that continuously learns and adapts based on our own internal outcomes, truly future-proofing our talent acquisition strategy."
Dishoom in Partnership with All Gravy: Cultivating Connection Through a Unified Platform
As the beloved restaurant chain Dishoom expanded its footprint to over 2,200 people across 16 cafes and 13 delivery kitchens, a new challenge emerged: preserving its distinctive culture of connection amidst rapid growth. The existing infrastructure, comprising three separate platforms for communications, learning, and resources, led to fragmented information, necessitating multiple logins for managers, and consuming over 40 hours of central administration time each week for updates and analytics. Dishoom recognised the urgent need for a single, cohesive source of truth that could deepen, rather than dilute, its unique cultural fabric.
To address this, Dishoom partnered with All Gravy to collaboratively build "Dishoom-walle," a mobile-first platform designed with simplicity, capability, enablement, and integration at its core. This innovative solution seamlessly consolidates communication, knowledge, and learning into a single environment. Key features include personalised feeds, a searchable and version-controlled knowledge hub, an AI assistant trained on Dishoom’s proprietary knowledge base, and role-specific learning journeys spanning more than 50 different positions. AI-driven workflows further automate elements of learning coordination, while a continuous feedback loop actively shaped the phased migration and launch of the platform.
The launch of Dishoom-walle was met with immediate and enthusiastic adoption. A remarkable 2,162 users were active at launch, with 91% logging in within the first three days, and monthly active usage consistently reaching 94%. The platform has since generated an impressive 1.62 million post views, over 22,000 likes, and more than 60,000 monthly feed interactions. Chat messages more than doubled within five months, notably including increased engagement from less tech-confident chefs, highlighting the platform’s intuitive design.
Learning outcomes have also significantly improved, with a 95% completion rate for the most recent compliance reissue. The platform now hosts 178 courses, 3,107 learning modules, and 1,319 "Adda" articles, signifying a rich and accessible learning ecosystem. Administratively, Dishoom now saves over 40 hours of central administration each week, a direct translation to increased efficiency and reduced operational costs. Crucially, team happiness scores have seen a substantial 20% increase from the baseline, now consistently registering above 8.6 out of 10. Dishoom’s Head of People commented, "Dishoom-walle has been instrumental in ensuring our teams feel connected and supported, even as we grow. It’s not just a platform; it’s a digital embodiment of our culture, freeing up valuable time for our teams to focus on our people, their development, and delivering exceptional guest experiences."
Domino’s Pizza UK & Ireland in Partnership with Talos360: Unifying Recruitment Across a Franchise Network
Domino’s Pizza UK & Ireland faced a significant recruitment challenge inherent in its complex franchise model, which encompasses 66 independent partners. Historically, each franchise operated its recruitment independently, utilising disparate technologies and manual processes. This fragmentation led to an inconsistent candidate experience, administrative inefficiencies, and critically, a lack of centralised visibility for the central HR team. The core challenge was to establish a connected, scalable recruitment approach that simultaneously respected and preserved the local autonomy of individual franchisees.
To overcome this, Domino’s Pizza UK & Ireland partnered with Talos360 to implement a franchise-wide recruitment and onboarding solution. This solution expertly balanced central governance with essential local flexibility. It established a bespoke careers site, providing candidates with a consistent, Domino’s-branded destination regardless of the specific franchise they were applying to. Centralised workflows, standardised application forms, and automated communications drastically reduced administrative burdens for both central and local teams. Features such as auto-screening, templated roles, and candidate self-scheduling further empowered local hiring teams to identify candidates and coordinate interviews with unprecedented efficiency. Crucially, group-level reporting now provides central HR with comprehensive visibility across all franchises, enabling robust performance monitoring, identification of recruitment trends, and data-driven decision-making.
The results of this strategic partnership have been swift and impactful. Within just six months, application volumes surged dramatically from 1,280 in January 2026 to over 18,000 by April, a testament to the improved candidate experience and streamlined process. Since the partnership began, more than 2,200 vacancies have been advertised, with approximately 40 franchises actively hiring at any given time. The average time to offer has been reduced to an impressive nine days, while the average time to hire stands at just 16 days, with some highly efficient franchise partners achieving offer-to-hire cycles in under five days.
This programme, deservedly shortlisted for the Digital HR and Technology award, has successfully created a connected recruitment ecosystem across a previously fragmented network. Franchise partners now benefit from a significantly reduced administrative burden, while candidates enjoy a simpler, more consistent, and engaging journey regardless of their location. For the central people function, the ability to monitor recruitment activity across the entire franchise estate, informed by live data, represents a monumental leap forward. The HR Director for Domino’s Pizza UK & Ireland noted, "This initiative has provided us with a scalable foundation for future growth and a far more digitally efficient recruitment capability, ensuring we attract and retain the best talent across our entire network."
HomeServe: Elevating Employee Benefits and Recognition with ORB
HomeServe, a leading home assistance provider, embarked on a mission to revitalise its employee benefits strategy for approximately 2,000 employees across the UK, encompassing 600 field-based engineers, contact centre teams, and office-based support functions. The organisation’s legacy benefits platform suffered from limited flexibility, slow discount redemption, and declining engagement with its recognition programme. Furthermore, traditional salary sacrifice structures inadvertently created financial barriers for lower-paid colleagues, resulting in a workforce that technically had access to benefits but demonstrated limited practical engagement.
In November 2024, HomeServe launched ORB (Our Recognition and Benefits), a transformative platform powered by Benifex. ORB seamlessly integrates benefits, discounts, and recognition into a single, mobile-accessible interface. It boasts AI-powered search capabilities, instant discount redemption, and an expanded offering of 29 diverse benefits. A crucial innovation was the introduction of net pay deductions, effectively removing financial barriers for lower-paid colleagues and ensuring that employer-funded benefits provided tangible value irrespective of an individual’s affordability constraints.
The technological implementation was bolstered by a meticulously planned and focused engagement strategy. This included in-person roadshows specifically for engineers, comprehensive benefit fairs, "ask me anything" sessions, and year-round communications disseminated across multiple channels. This multi-faceted approach was vital in making ORB accessible and relevant to a diverse workforce operating in varied environments.
The results of ORB’s launch demonstrate genuine and sustained usage. Between April and December 2025, an impressive 91% of employees logged into the platform, averaging four logins per month, indicating consistent engagement. By February 2026, 88% of employees had actively selected at least one benefit, and 86% had utilised the Discounts portal, generating significant personal savings. Field engineers, a critical segment of HomeServe’s workforce, were particularly well-represented in their engagement, accounting for 29 of the 36 electric vehicles taken up through salary sacrifice. The recognition aspect of ORB has also been profoundly transformed, with a remarkable 10,069 peer-to-peer recognitions sent since launch. HomeServe’s Chief People Officer commented, "ORB has moved beyond being a once-a-year benefits exercise; it has become an everyday resource, deeply embedded in our employee experience and a true testament to our commitment to employee wellbeing and recognition."
ICS-digital: Crafting a Bespoke Global Talent Management Platform
ICS-digital, an international SEO, translation, and content agency, operates with a vast and diverse extended workforce of over 1,700 writers, translators, editors, and subject-matter experts spanning more than 100 languages. The agency faced significant challenges with existing systems, which struggled to provide sufficient visibility of talent, offer niche expertise quickly, and support efficient communication across its globally distributed workforce. This hindered project activation and client delivery for highly specialised language pairings.
Rather than adapting an off-the-shelf platform, ICS-digital’s Global Resourcing team embarked on an ambitious journey to partner with in-house developers and build a custom global talent management platform precisely tailored to its unique workflows. This bespoke solution seamlessly integrates freelance, casual, and internal staff into a single, unified environment. It features live profiles detailing skills, qualifications, language pairs, sector experience, availability, and performance data. Leveraging AI-assisted retrieval principles, managers can now swiftly identify relevant expertise, while real-time reporting provides comprehensive visibility across workforce and project activity.
The platform also meticulously redesigned internal communication, replacing fragmented email chains with centralised notifications, task-level comments, and a built-in editor, fostering clearer and more efficient collaboration. Additional features include automatic plagiarism checking, one-click task acceptance, automated invoice generation, extensive training resources, and a unique feature request centre, empowering users to actively shape the platform’s ongoing development.
The impact of ICS-digital’s custom platform has been substantial, resulting in thousands of hours saved annually for both internal staff and freelancers. Project activation time for less common language pairings, a previous bottleneck, has dramatically fallen from two weeks to a maximum of five days, directly contributing to increased client revenues and improved service delivery. Freelancer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with 77.5% rating communication 5/5 and 84.5% rating invoicing 5/5, indicating a vastly improved experience for their extended workforce. The user-driven development model is thriving, with the feature request centre receiving 158 suggestions, approximately 120 of which have already been built into the live product, ensuring the platform continuously evolves around the needs of its people. The Global Resourcing Director at ICS-digital stated, "Our custom platform has given us a significant competitive edge, allowing us to deploy highly specialized talent globally with unparalleled speed and efficiency, directly impacting our client success and growth."
UNICEF UK in Partnership with Consensio: Democratising Conflict Management Skills
Rounding out the shortlist for the Digital HR and Technology category at the Personnel Today Awards 2026 is UNICEF UK, in partnership with Consensio. This collaboration addresses a pervasive workplace challenge: managers often defer conflict resolution to HR due to a lack of confidence in handling difficult conversations themselves. The Consensio app aims to democratise conflict management skills, providing employees with practical, on-demand guidance and continuous learning opportunities to build confidence and enhance conflict resilience.
UNICEF UK initiated a one-year pilot of the Consensio app in April 2025, strategically aligning it with its inclusive, values-led culture, its strong commitment to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), wellbeing initiatives, and its established conflict resolution framework. The app delivers practical conflict support through monthly bite-sized live training sessions, an extensive library of on-demand videos, and interactive content. This multi-modal approach empowers colleagues to address immediate challenges while simultaneously building enduring skills for navigating future workplace issues.
The focus of the pilot extended beyond mere technology deployment; it prioritised making support accessible, relevant, and engaging. A dedicated stakeholder group played a crucial role in shaping the platform and cultivating internal champions. Comprehensive internal communications, strong leadership sponsorship, regular newsletters, posters, and video content were deployed to drive awareness and adoption. A particularly effective strategy was the direct addition of monthly training sessions to employee calendars, removing the need for pre-registration and resulting in a remarkable fourfold increase in attendance.
Within the first year of the pilot, an impressive 50% of UNICEF UK employees actively used the app, with 60% of users returning each month, indicating strong sustained engagement. Employees rated their likelihood of recommending the app to a colleague at an outstanding 9 out of 10. Furthermore, 97% of live training participants reported that the content would help them better manage conflict. Qualitative feedback consistently highlighted that users felt more confident and approached difficult conversations with a more "open" mindset.
The impact of the Consensio app extends significantly beyond usage metrics, fostering stronger communication, greater self-awareness, and earlier resolution of workplace disagreements. UNICEF UK’s decision to continue with the app beyond the initial pilot phase underscores its profound confidence in the platform’s long-term value and its potential to cultivate healthier, more resilient workplace relationships. The Head of HR at UNICEF UK commented, "The Consensio app has been instrumental in empowering our colleagues to navigate conflict with greater confidence and skill, reinforcing our values and fostering a more supportive and inclusive workplace culture."
Broader Implications for the Future of HR
The collective innovations showcased by these shortlisted organisations paint a compelling picture of the evolving HR landscape. Several overarching themes emerge, highlighting the strategic direction of digital HR:
- Employee Experience (EX) at the Core: Nearly all projects prioritise enhancing the employee journey, whether through simplified HR services, intuitive recruitment, engaging benefits, or empowering communication platforms. This shift underscores HR’s role in creating a positive and productive work environment.
- The Power of AI: Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept but a practical tool, evident in AI-powered search, intelligent answers, predictive analytics for hiring, and AI assistants for knowledge management. AI is enhancing efficiency, decision-making, and personalisation.
- Data-Driven HR: These projects consistently demonstrate how technology enables HR to collect, analyse, and act upon data. From recruitment analytics to employee satisfaction scores and learning completion rates, data is empowering HR to become more strategic and demonstrate tangible ROI.
- Integrated Platforms: The move away from fragmented systems towards unified, mobile-first platforms is a clear trend. This reduces administrative burden, improves data consistency, and offers a seamless experience for employees and HR teams alike.
- Strategic Partnerships: Many organisations are leveraging the expertise of specialist HR tech providers (Sapia.ai, All Gravy, Talos360, Benifex, Consensio) to accelerate their digital transformation, demonstrating the value of collaboration in innovation.
- Wellbeing and Culture: Projects like Dishoom’s Dishoom-walle and UNICEF UK’s Consensio app highlight how technology can be a powerful enabler of organisational culture, connection, and employee wellbeing, addressing issues like conflict resolution and engagement.
- Scalability and Flexibility: Solutions are being designed to scale across complex organisations, including franchise networks and global extended workforces, while maintaining the flexibility needed for diverse operational contexts.
These innovations collectively signify a pivotal moment for HR. Technology is empowering HR professionals to transcend traditional administrative roles and become true strategic partners, driving business outcomes, fostering inclusive cultures, and cultivating highly engaged and productive workforces. The Personnel Today Awards 2026 Digital HR and Technology shortlist not only celebrates these individual achievements but also serves as a blueprint for the future of HR – a future that is digital, data-driven, and profoundly human-centric.
The winners of the Personnel Today Awards 2026 will be announced at a prestigious ceremony, celebrating the trailblazers who are redefining the capabilities of HR through digital innovation.
Book a table at the Personnel Today Awards 2026 to celebrate these pioneering achievements.
