Why Don’t We Have a ‘Yelp’ for HR Tech?

The HR Technology ecosystem is a multi-billion a year enterprise. It is estimated that there are over 20,000 different HR technology solutions in the marketplace. If you can think of it, there are at least a dozen solutions on the market or in development in our space.

Every single day, in some form or fashion, I have some ask me a question about which solution they should select? While I demo and review over a hundred different technologies across the entire landscape of HR technology each year, I only see a small fraction of what’s on the market, and within a year of seeing a certain technology, most have changed so much that you would need to demo them all over again.

All of this makes me wonder why don’t we have a practitioner lead site, like Yelp, where we all share and talk about the technology we’ve used, implemented, demoed, purchased, etc.

There are small pockets of this in certain spaces. Chris Hoyt and Gerry Crispin, the two principles at CareerXroads, started something like this for their members. ATAP has talked about starting this for our members. SHRM has chat boards that are active with members who are asking these questions and sharing. But the reality is, there isn’t a one-stop shop to get these answers, especially if you’re an SMB HR shop!

The enterprise HR shops will go to places like Bersin by Deloitte, Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc. and pay a ton of money to work with specialized analysts in the field who work to try and stay on top of the tech. Some will go with smaller specialized firms shops like Aptitude Research, Lighthouse, HRWins, H3 HR Advisors, etc.

It seems crazy to me that we can’t just log into a TripAdvisor-type site, search for “Workday” and hundreds, if not thousands of reviews come up. New reviews, old reviews, reviews segments by module, etc. Segmented chat groups talking about how good or bad a tech company is at implementation. A group about how much they are paying for a tech!

Why isn’t this a thing!?!

I think there might be some reasons:

  1. We all think our tech stack is some big differentiator and the secret sauce of our success. (This isn’t true, by the way)
  2. The HR Technology community, especially the biggest players, have nothing to gain from a site like this.
  3. You have to start something like this without a revenue model and hope that somehow down the road, the revenue model is the data you collect. (I would think someone like TechStars, etc. would easily find funding for a site like this)
  4. It’s so hard to get all those parties together in one place – HR, benefits, compensation, recruiting, LOD, etc. We all have our own associations and spend time on separate sites.

I wish we had this. Imagine the power of our collective knowledge of what we are using that is working and what we are using, or have used, that isn’t working!? Holy crap, the time and resources we could save our organizations!

What do you think? Do we need this? Why don’t we have it?

 

11 thoughts on “Why Don’t We Have a ‘Yelp’ for HR Tech?

  1. @Yonica- Would love to hear more about your project and see if you need any contributions. Tracking, commenting and rating HR tech (via my own database, not published anywhere) has been a project of mine since around 2016. I’m a Sr. Generalist (not an analyst, blogger, etc.) so I just do it for fun and would be interested to chat sometime! Mine is not limited to any specific category either; I demo everything from talent acq, engagement, perf mgt systems, et al.

    Please drop me a note! (Or anyone else who is passionate about this topic) Melissa.patterson@roanresources.com

  2. This exists. It’s called G2 crowd, Capterra. Software Advice. Before you wrote this article did you do any type of research?

    • Kelly,

      You’re an idiot. Of course I knew of these sites and these sites aren’t even close to what I’m wanting. There are thousands of HR Tech products in the marketplace – we need something that goes deeper than just major HCM, ATS and Payroll.

      Also, leave your real name and email next time so you can troll me for real.

      Tim

  3. There are sites like Capterra and Software Advice that receive reviews from actual users of the HR software. They do exactly what you describe.

  4. Well, ask and you shall receive. I started a little passion project collecting data on the numerous HR Software solutions out there. This is something I have been working on for a while now, and I’m slated to have this site up and going this summer. There are numerous reasons why I decided to create the site, and some are mentioned in this post as well as in the comments. So I will leave it at that. HR Software is a huge industry and I feel as if some of these software companies are mislabeling themselves (especially A.I.) and they’re trying to sell their products to HR because they don’t know any better. So someone has to look out for HR. Just know there are real people out there like myself who have used and tested a lot of HR software products and I’m looking forward to getting the site going soon. No fake reviews will be allowed. Cheers.

  5. Sorry, I’m reading a lot of paranoid and conspiratorial thinking on this and thread where I think very little exists.

    First, the reason analysts don’t write much about SMB products is the customers for those products have no money to spend on researching them. And free research can only be done by end-users. Analysts have to get paid, except for the free chum they toss on the water to attract the paying fish.

    I know after 30 years of writing about them that no vendor ever wants to read a single negative word about itself. But Workday never put out a contract on Tincup for inspiring negative public reviews on its Recruiting.

    Hard to reform G2, whose problem for us in HCM is they cover too much different software to get granular enough about what we care about.

    I think Bonnie is showing the way with Raven Intel about software implementation firms, who are even more chary about criticism.

    Let’s she if she can sustain it. Dunno if an HCM-only G2-type customer review site is sustainable. Guess where her money comes from? The vendors, of course, who are the only ones who have it to spend. Tough to maintain integrity with that business but she’s managing so far.

  6. How HR-tech specific you want, Tim? Free analyst level reviews that take thousands of (wo)man hours to produce? Ain’t gonna happen. The gazillion people who responded to Tincup bashing Workday on social networks? Was that the kind of depth you want? You want Yelp? G2 is Yelp.

  7. Tim, think you have nailed the reasons why this doesnt exist, especially 3 & 4. Also the info/market changes quickly so a vendor in a particular cell on a Fosway grid might make an acquisition that changes its portfolio but it still shows up in the old cell till the grid is updated. I am tracking anything having to do with tech for coaching, which means I need to look across training, L&D, leadership devt, mgmt devt. Appreciate any suggestions, pls! Buyers talk to one another via formal circles and informally. That’s probably where the info gets shared. Thanks for this post.
    Carol

  8. Anonymity, or lack thereof, is a big reason why a service like this doesn’t exist. A system like Yelp would require an ID to accompany every review, and most HR types aren’t comfortable signing their name (and company) to such things. And on the flip side, if you allow anonymous reviews, vendors would just pay for a bunch of positive feedback and 5-stars.

  9. This exists already–G2 Crowd, Software Advice, TrustRadius and many others offer peer reviews of all of the HR software you mention. For HCM implementation partners & project success, visit http://www.ravenintel.com. We have over 300 HCM implementation reviews that provide a ton of detail in this very area.

    • Bonnie,

      We won’t agree on this (but that’s okay – a lot of folks have been messaging me about G2) – G2, Software Advice, etc. are so shallow on what they have it’s really not a great resource to make actual decisions with. I want a HR Tech specific site.

      T

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