Category Archives: HR Technology

HR Technology is Outpacing Leadership Skill #HRTechConf

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It’s the big HR Technology takeaways 2017!

So, as you’re reading this I’m flying back home from ‘the’ HR Technology Conference. Another great show put on by Steve Boese and the LRP team!

There are so many things I take away from this year’s show and I wanted to share some of the bigger ones:

– HR and TA Technology sophistication are surpassing leadership ability in those functions. That’s a broad statement. There are many great HR and TA leaders out there that understand this tech at a very deep level, and they’re doing amazing things at their organizations. 90% don’t. This is a competency we have to increase!

– Artificial Intelligence will take your job. The A.I. company’s marketing will never tell you this, but you’re an idiot if you don’t understand how this works. A.I. will take away more and more task-level work. If you’re a practitioner that spends most of their day doing task-level work, you’re no longer needed, or not as many of you are needed. The ROI for A.I. is not more profit, it’s expense reduction.

– Technology doesn’t stop to let you breathe and catch up. I’ve been coming to HR Tech for years and the one thing is very consistent, every year the technology advances at an increasing rate. You have to work really hard to try and stay up with it.

– HR and TA Technology salespeople continue to struggle to connect the dots. And I think it’s getting worse! I think the biggest issue is trying to sound too sophisticated, and using too much ‘marketing’ speak to explain how your product can help. For the most part, we (HR and TA) are pretty unsophisticated. Just tell us like it is, show us how it works, and what impact it will make. 90% of us will never want to know how the sausage is made, or even care that you know. We get it. You’re smart. Now help us actually solve a real problem.

– This stuff is really cool! I wish we could break everything down easier so everyone felt more comfortable digging into their HR and TA tech stacks and want to get more involved because it’s pretty awesome to see how this industry is evolving our profession!

– There are good guys and gals selling great solutions who truly care about helping you make your company better. And there are assholes who want to make money and could care less about your success. Search out the good guys. Much of the tech we use is not that awfully different from one competitor to the next, but how much they truly care about the success of your organization can vary widely!

The future of HR and TA Technology is very bright. There are really smart people working on stuff that you can’t even imagine. Our industry will look very different in five years, and most of the direction will be coming from successes in other functions like marketing, sales, operations, supply chain, etc.

Keep demoing. Keep advancing your stack where and when you can. Don’t allow IT to pick what you use. Fight for better technology for your teams and your employees.

The Next Great HR Technology Company! #HRTechConf

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Yesterday opened the 20th HR Technology Conference and I attended one of my all-time favorite sessions hosted by Steve Boese called The Next Great HR Technology Company.

The idea is kind of a Voice-like competition where you begin with a number of organizations all competing for the title, once you get down to the final four, each organization has an expert coach. The coaches for this competition were Lance Haun, George LaRocque, Madeline Laurano, and Ben Eubanks.

The four finalist were:

Beamery: A CRM/Recruitment Marketing platform out of the UK. Combining Recruitment CRM and Marketing Automation, Beamery is built to source, attract and engage passive candidates. Very impressive and in my opinion the most polished of the products presented.

Best Money Moves: A Financial Wellness App built to help your employees reduce their financial stress. This one surprised me the most in how functional it can actually be to help real people. What we know if the more stable your employees are in their financial health the longer tenure they have, so great retention tool as well.

Blue Board: Blueboard is the experiential employee rewards and recognition platform for the modern workplace. Memorable, personal and shareable employee rewards. Give your employees experiences ranging from $150 – $25,000! The example they gave was turning an employee into James Bond for a day, jumping out of a plane in a tuxedo, driving an Aston Martin, and learning how to make the perfect martini.

Papaya Global: Papaya integrates your entire workforce and payroll management on a single global platform and connects you to a network of verified local vendors. Specifically built for the small fast-growing global company, this was very impressive as well, especially to those who have ever tried to grow an employee population in multiple countries!

My voting on these four went like this:

  1. Beamery
  2. Papaya Global
  3. Best Money Moves
  4. Blue Board

The thing is, Blue Board won the overall crowd vote, and as soon as they presented I knew they would. It wasn’t about the technology, which is fairly basic, it was the cool factor. Everyone watching the presentation wanted one of those experiences!

So, great learning for all the HR Technology companies out there, and one thing I’ve noticed for years in this space, the best tech doesn’t always win. HR Tech buyers and users are like us all. We buy iPhones, not because the iPhone is best, we buy it because we love the design and it’s cool.

Blue Board has a great story, one everyone wants to be apart of, and it’s an easy sell. We want those experiences, and we want to give our employees those experiences. Is it a great technology? Probably not, but it doesn’t matter because it will flat out sell!

The others will sell as well. That’s what I love about this competition, all involved are winners. Even to make it to the stage means you’re one of the top technologies on the market. If you’re in the market for any of the technologies that presented, these are all well worth your time for a demo!

 

Building the Perfect TA Tech Stack! #HRTechConf

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Arguably the hottest tech at HR Tech will be in the Talent Acquisition space. TA Tech has blown up over the past decade with billions of dollars entering the marketplace in investment. It seems like every single day I’m getting an announcement in my email about the launch of a new TA Tech company.

All of this has caused massive confusion amongst TA leadership in trying to keep it all straight. The common questions are:

  • What does the tech even do?
  • Do I need this tech?
  • Doesn’t my ATS do this?
  • What is my competition using?
  • What should we be using to attract more talent?
  • Etc.!

It’s really just a never-ending list of questions because the TA Tech marketplace has been moving at such a fast pace and the innovation within the space is truly unparalleled in comparison to anything we’ve seen in the overall HR Tech space, ever!

Luckily, the HR Technology Conference is here to help you feel much smarter about the TA Technology space.  On Wednesday at 11am PT in the Venetian Ballroom A & B (come early they tell me this will be a standing room only session), a group of brilliant TA leaders and I, will take the stage tackling the dilemma of Building the Perfect TA Tech Stack! The experts on the panel are some of the top TA Tech brains on the planet – Jessica Lee from Marriott, Allyn Bailey from Intel, and Graham Pionkowski from Bazaarvoice (and of course me!).

The session is designed for both TA leaders and practitioners, but also all those TA Vendors trying to sell to us!

Completely vendor agnostic, which is a fancy way to say, we’ll be talking about the TA Tech we love, the TA Tech we use, the TA Tech we wish we could use, and maybe even a few TA Technologies we wish we could punch right in the face!

Our goal is to completely share our own TA Tech Stacks with the audience and have an open dialogue around what’s working and what’s not working. To help us all have a better understanding around the TA Tech that we see is foundational to our success, and what TA Tech we will need in the future to maintain our success.

It might be the most topical session of the entire show! We all need talent in a big way. Most of us will increase our chances to getting that great talent by having the perfect TA Tech Stack!

@LinkedIn Announces LinkedIn Talent Insights at #TalentConnect

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LinkedIn made a pretty major product announcement today at their annual Talent Connect conference. By the way, no one talks about this, but quietly Talent Connect has become the single largest Talent Acquisition Conference on the planet! SHRM National (HR) has 15,000+, HR Technology Conference will go 6,000+, Talent Connect I heard was around 3,000+!

That’s a ton of TA pros and leaders in one location!

This morning in Nashville, LinkedIn let everyone get a peek behind the curtain on a new product that is just being released to beta with a select group of customers, with the goal to have this available to the entire market in the first quarter of 2018.

The new product is called Talent Insights.

For years LI users have been begging for more access to data and LinkedIn has responded in a major way with their Talent Insights product. Talent Insights is basically two major reporting tools that allow those using Talent Insights to pull in data like never before.

The first report is called Talent Pool. This report is a multi-filter report with a very familiar Recruiter-like interface. This tool is used by organizations to examine the available pool of candidates based on the filters you put in. Need to hire 50 Developers in Ann Arbor? This tool gives you all the information you need to make to launch the strategy to make that happen.

Talent pool gives your team the ability to be able to prioritize their efforts and sourcing strategy by seeing out of the entire available pool of talent, based on your search criteria, which ones are already engaged with your brand on LI, then if you’re using Recruiter you can quickly see that list and decide how do you reach out from there.

Let’s say that available pool of Developers in Ann Arbor is 10,000, but 1,500 of those developers have actually connected with you, looked at your LinkedIn company page, etc. This allows you to know who already is engaging with you, but also who hasn’t.

Within Talent Pool, you can also see where there are other available talent pools via a map function which allows you to click the locations on a map to see where these other pools are, and along with tons of data on active those pools of talent are.

The second reporting tool is the “Corporate” report. This is very cool in that you can now pull information on your competition in real time. Want to see who your competitors are hiring and in what roles? Done. Want to see where your competitors are hiring their talent from? Done. Want to see who your competition is losing talent to? Done.

By the way, it’s not only competition. The Corporate report will pull this data on any company, including your own.

The Corporate reporting tool also shows trends over time. Maybe your competition hired a ton of engineers from one company over the last twelve months, but in the last two months, they’ve hired no one from some others. Again, this gives your team insight to competitive behavior and skill sets like you’ve never had before.

Not only can you see what skill sets your competition is hiring, but the Corporate report will also show you how your own team stacks up in those skill sets against your competition from a hiring standpoint.

Like I said, great first step out of the gate on giving LI users more access to the data they’ve been asking for, and it’s easy to see where this could lead to down the road with some very robust, real-time business intelligence. We’ve known forever that LinkedIn was sitting on maybe the world’s largest data set, next to Facebook. We are now seeing the power of how that data can help your organization attract and recruit talent.

T3 – @Entelo Launches Envoy prior to #HRTechConf

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This week on T3 I review the newest addition to Entelo, Envoy. First, who is Entelo? Entelo’s recruiting platform enables top talent professionals to find, qualify, and engage with in-demand talent. So, basically, Entelo was one of the first passive candidate aggregators that allows you to search for passive candidates.

Since they launched six years ago they’ve continued to add in functionality and features, including products to assist your organization in diversity recruiting, help you search your own ATS database better, and engage in outbound recruiting campaigns.

Yesterday, they’ve announced their most advanced product to date, Envoy. EnteloEnvoy uses artificial intelligence and deep learning to automatically find, nurture and deliver interested job candidates directly to the email inboxes of recruiters. This algorithmic approach to sourcing is the latest data-driven innovation from Entelo, the leader in helping talent acquisition teams hire better-qualified candidates, faster.

So, what does all this really mean?

With Envoy, recruiters simply set candidate criteria and the technology works in the background to sort and rank millions of potential candidates using machine learning algorithms that analyze fit across a number of different dimensions. Once top talent is identified, Entelo Envoy will personalize messages and send emails to candidates at optimal times and deliver replies from interested candidates directly to a recruiter’s inbox. Because the discovery, qualification and outreach portions happen instantly and automatically, companies hire faster and significantly reduce cost-per-hire and time-to-hire.

EnteloEnvoy will take the heavy lifting of sourcing and recruiting, and automate most of the steps. Your recruiters put in the job requirements and Envoy will go out and source over 300 million potential passive candidates, rank those candidates by who is the closest match, reach out to those candidates via email communication, and at the end of the process your recruiters will have a list of interested candidates who match the specifications you’re looking for.

It’s sourcing and recruiting for dummies! Envoy has basically idiot-proofed the process, and put your recruiters in a position to close! No longer will they spend most of their day on LinkedIn searching for candidates. Now they’ll spend most of their day speaking to interested candidates who closely match what you’re looking for.

Entelo has had Envoy in beta for a while working live with 50 of their current clients, and those clients are raving about the results. What TA leaders are seeing is Envoy is making their recruiting teams much more productive as they are now focusing their efforts on talking to candidates about their organization versus spending most of their time looking for candidates.

I love how TA tech is beginning to really increase the productivity of our recruiting teams and EnteloEnvoy looks to be leading the charge into this arena. Entelo Envoy will be demonstrated in Booth No. 2928 at the 20th Annual HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas from October 10-13, 2017.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Leaders are just Interpreters of BullSh*t! #HRTechConf

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I was on the phone yesterday with George Larocque who is an HR advisor to HR technology companies worldwide. George also does some consulting with companies on selecting HR technology, research, etc. He’s one of the few people in the industry that I listen to, primarily because I know he knows his stuff and isn’t trying to sell me something! Check him out!

George described what he did as being an interpreter between HR and Talent leaders, and HR Technology vendors. The vendors tend to talk about stuff that practitioners could care less about. “We’re mobile first!” Really!? We don’t care, just show me how it works on mobile. George can speak HR and Talent, and he can speak HR technology, so he’s perfect to ‘interpret’!

He got me thinking about that concept. I loved how he described his role, and I feel like many times when I speaking at a conference and talking HR tech, I’m doing the same thing. I taking in all these buzzwords and concepts, and then just breaking them down in a way that real, in the trenches HR leaders and TA leaders can then easily understand what the heck all of it means.

I think Leaders, in general, do a lot of interpreting as well!

They mostly have to interpret the bullsh*t our c-suite is selling, into real actionable stuff for all of us in the trenches doing the work each day! The best leaders I ever worked for could take all of this crap and repackage it in a way that made sense to me and my peers, so we knew what direction we were actually going, and what needed to be done.

Let’s face it, the best CEOs in the world are really good at this as well, but far too often you don’t work for one of the best! You work for someone peddling bullsh*t. The problem with the bullsh*t language is it’s really hard to understand because there are no straightforward meanings for the bullsh*t words and phrases.

Leaders who are great bullsh*t interpreters have the ability to hear the bullsh*t words, know the bullsh*tters motivations, and piece together what is actually being said. Then, they will take this interpretation back to the people and rephrase it in a way where we don’t try and kill the bullsh*tter!

I like it. I like believing that I can interpret most bullsh*t as a leader. Thanks, George! If you’re going to be out at the HR Technology Conference, you can find both George and I filtering through mountains of bullsh*t! Come find us!

The Next Great HR Technology Company? #HRTechConf

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It’s my favorite time of year when ‘the’ HR Technology Conference is right around the corner and I’m getting all my meetings set up, and getting ready for my panel on “Building the Perfect TA Tech Stack”.

One of the really awesome things that HR Tech has added is a competition where we all get to vote on who we believe will be the next great HR Technology company. The 2017 finalist for this award are:

From this list over 5,000 people voted to get the final four that will present on stage at the conference in October. Those are:

PapayaGlobal

Beamery

Best Money Moves

Blueboard

The winner will be named on Tuesday, October 10th at the “Voice”-style presentation from 3:45-4:45 pm PT. Congratulations to all the finalist, just being named is a huge honor!

I’ve been to each of these shows the past couple of years and it’s an awesome way to be able to show the attendees what you have in a really short condensed way. It’s like a cross between a mini-demo and commercial, with HR technology experts on stage asking insightful questions.

For me it’s one of the most exciting presentations of the entire show (well, besides mine!). Also, these are 4 companies that I will be doing a demo with and writing about on my T3 series for sure!

 

T3 – The 100 Hottest HR and TA Technologies on the Planet #

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My good friend William Tincup (@WilliamTincup) is probably the single smartest person I know in the HR and Talent Technology space, worldwide! That’s saying a lot because this space is filled with smart men and women.

At HR Tech Fest this year, William made a comment on stage that there is roughly 21,000 HR and Talent Technology companies in the world. Seems like a number I can’t even get my head around – I might know 250 or so!

To prove his point, William quickly puts together 100 of the hottest companies on the market and shared them on LinkedIn. Since most of you don’t visit LI but once or twice a month, I wanted to share them here as well.

My suggestion is to demo one of these companies each month. One hour of development per month, 12 hours total for the year. Any of us can do this. Pick out the ones that make the most sense to you, in your role. This will change you professionally. You’ll be smarter. You’ll see what your competition is doing. You’ll begin to think more strategically. Yes, just be looking at, and better understanding the technology that is shaping your profession!

Yes, just be looking at, and better understanding the technology that is shaping your profession!

You can meet both William and me at The HR Technology Conference in October. Use the Promo code “SACKETT17” and receive $200 off your rate! Also, check out the HR Tech Insiders Blog for great content before, during and after the event!

This list is alphabetical. None of these organizations are paying me (yet). If you’re not on it, but want to be, connect with William on the Twitters and just ask.

T3 – @ZipRecruiter – They’re not what you expect!

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This week on T3 I review the upstart job board with 6+ million customers, ZipRecruiter! Okay, I have to admit, I wasn’t super excited to review ZipRecruiter. I had heard their commercials at least a million times and I thought I knew exactly what they were. Job board for the lower end paying jobs. I was wrong, and what I found, made me a fan!

ZipRecruiter is a job board with a lot of jobs and great marketing engine behind it. You can turn on the radio, TV, or Podcast without listening to one of their commercials. Their sweet spot is SMBs, the majority of their clients are in that space 2-100 employees, but they also are starting to go upstream as well into larger enterprise clients. Zip didn’t set out to cater to lower paying jobs, under $20/hr, but it is something they’re very good at. Zip is built for volume.

Zip is growing like crazy. Over 3 million jobs on their site, with over 60 million job seekers using their site, and over 40 million email subscribers for job alerts. They built a machine that drives applicant flow in a big way, and in a hurry. 48% of the jobs posted on Zip get a qualified candidate submitted in the first hour! 80% within 24 hours!

ZipRecruiter is also working extremely hard to increase the experience for the job seeker in a way that helps both the seeker and the employer with some of their new functionality that lets a job seeker know if when new jobs come on when employers are looking at their profile, etc. Job seekers are taking notice and coming to Zip by the millions.

Things I really like about ZipRecruiter:

– ZipRecruiter is super cheap to use, so you have to be crazy not to test them out and see if they’re right for you.

– Zip makes it super easy through machine learning to let them know if candidates are meeting the quality you expect or not, with a simple ‘thumbs’ up, thumbs down widget where the algorithm will continue to help flush out more candidates that closely fit your liking.

– In the SMB space, if you don’t have an ATS, you can use ZipRecruiter as your ATS pretty easily, and many do this. Zip now has a ton of jobs that are listed nowhere else on the planet because of all of these small employers only listing their openings on Zip.

– “Online Now” is a function within Zip that allows candidates and employers to know who’s currently active online in the system and employers can reach out and “Chat Now” live with candidates. Employers can even do an ‘Instant Interview’ via video with candidates at the moment if they desire using Zip. Also, candidates will see “application viewed” when an employer looks at their application, so candidates know they didn’t fall into a black hole. This helps make Zips users more active than many other sites.

– ZipRecruiter was one of the few original Google for Jobs integration partners so the jobs you post on Zip will show up high in Googles search results.

– Zip offers an exceptional mobile experience for candidates with one-click apply, text message alerts when new jobs are posted in their area, and skill sets.

I was expecting ‘same old job board’ type of stuff when I sat down to demo ZipRecruiter. What I got in return really surprised me! Zip does not want to be a job board of a decade ago, and they are constantly working to add functions for both candidates and employers to make the experience uniquely their own, and one that is extremely valuable to both parties.

It’s free to test ZipRecruiter, and if it works for you it’s very low cost to use it going forward. It’s really a no-brainer to add this to your list of technology in talent acquisition you need to test. The number of employers using and coming back to use it again says all you need to know about the value ZipRecruiter is delivering.

 

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

T3 – Guideline – Easy 401K for SMBs

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This week on T3 I take a look at the SMB technology 401K solution Guideline. Guideline is an all-inclusive 401(k) plan for growing businesses that’s easy for employers to set up and even easier for employees to enroll and save.first full-service 401(k) without management fees or hidden costs. Employers pay a flat fee, employees pay a low fund expense, and everyone understands what they are paying for. We know that being straightforward saves time – and money.

Guideline claims to be the first full-service 401(k) without management fees or hidden costs. Employers pay a flat fee, employees pay a low fund expense, and everyone understands what they are paying for. We know that being straightforward saves time and money. The platform simplifies retirement saving by making it easy for employees to learn about investment options, manage their portfolio, and monitor performance.

Let’s be clear, this is not your local bank’s 401K plan with a dashboard. Guideline is specifically designed for small businesses. Currently, Guideline has over 1500 SMBs on the platform and is growing at a rate of 150-200 new businesses each month. This growth alone shows how ridiculously awesome this technology is! The average Guideline client has around 10 employees, but it can work for businesses as small as 2 employees and as many as 250.

What I like about Guideline: 

– Everything you pay (the fees per employee) and anything your employees would pay, is clearly stated. This is a complete departure from your typical bank 401K plan that has fees baked-in and hidden you and your employees have no idea you’re truly paying.

– 100% auto enrollment of all employees. This is a best practice in larger organizations and I love that they made this a non-negotiable within their technology. The default is all of your employees will join 401K, the hardest step in beginning a retirement plan. It’s up to them to then opt-out. Almost none will, and they’ll thank you for it!

– All non-discrimination and safe harbor testing is built right into the technology and will deliver you back recommendations of things you can do to stay compliant. Banks scare you into believing you can never handle your own 401K because of these issues and Guideline has you covered.

– Company 401k match is optional, but built into the system as well if you choose to use it.

– Guideline connects right to your payroll provider, with built integrations with Gusto, BambooHR, Paylocity, etc. You can also manually upload if you do your own manual payroll.

– Guideline is built to be native on mobile. Easy to use mobile app for all employees to check, track and change their investment options.

You know I’m a fan of any SMB technology that is truly built to help small and growing organizations compete at the same level as the big boys. Guideline fits that bill perfectly. We know 401K participation has a direct line to a higher tenure of employees, and Guideline makes it simple for SMBs to now offer a retirement savings plan to their employees no matter what your size.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net