Category Archives: HR Technology

Maybe Facebook Taking on LinkedIn is the end of Facebook!

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I’ve always been a huge proponent that Facebook could end LinkedIn at any point they decided. Facebook has more active users, more data, it’s a platform everyone is comfortable with, and companies love it as well.

So, when Facebook opened up a company’s ability to now create a job posting on your company Facebook page recently, and have candidates can apply right on that page, stuff just got real for LinkedIn!

It seems like the logical conclusion that Facebook can do what LinkedIn is doing better. But, should it be the logical conclusion?

It seems like all of these social media companies constantly stumble over themselves, primarily because they are constantly breaking new ground with each turn. You try stuff, it doesn’t work, you try more stuff, eventually, you find the secret sauce.

LinkedIn has gone through this pain, multiple times. They had one of the greatest things going ever when they were flat out a professional network and professionals flocked to LI to network, share ideas, etc. It was a modern day equivalent to the old school Rolodex. LinkedIn made professional networking popular.

Then they broke it. Let’s be fair, they broke it because eventually, we all need to get paid, LI was no different. But opening up LI to recruiting nation killed the desire for people to want to be on LinkedIn and get constantly pimped. But, at the same time they actually created a pretty cool job board 2.0, when everyone thought those were going to die.

So, now Facebook wants to come into the playground, push LinkedIn down and take their milk money.

The problem is, Facebook hasn’t really ever broken their platform before and had to recreate it into something new. The Facebook I use today is virtually the same Facebook I started using nine years ago. LinkedIn today, is not LinkedIn of five to seven years ago, it’s very different. Some people will say worse, some people will pay $26.2 billion for it!

I’m wondering if Facebook goes all full blown LinkedIn with their platform, what happens to Facebook?  Is it still a place where you’ll want to hang out four or five times a day? Do you want to share cookie recipes with your Nana and talk financial strategy with coworkers all in the same place?

It’s arrogant to think you can just come in do something better than someone who has lived the pain of creating something. LinkedIn’s history of development gives them an advantage. Can Facebook come in and do it better? Maybe, but I don’t think you’ll see it happen overnight.

I’m a huge advocate for ‘one-life’. I don’t want to live multiple lives. I don’t want to be one person on Facebook, and another person on LinkedIn, but I’m in the vast minority when it comes to that view. Most people do not want to mix their personal and professional lives. They want to be freaks in the sheets and a lady on the streets, err, LinkedIn.

Should be interesting to watch these two powerhouses fight it out. What do you think TA pros and leaders? Are you ready to do all of your recruiting on Facebook?

Notes to HR Tech Vendors #8 – If You Buy Today!

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I’ve done a few presentations titled something like, “HR Tech Buyers Guide”, “How to Buy HR Tech”, etc. The presentation is designed for HR and TA practitioners to help them become better buyers of HR Tech. To understand the crap that HR and TA Tech vendors do and say to get you to buy stuff you might not need, want, or will use.

The interesting thing about these presentations is that half the audience turns out to be the actual vendors themselves wanting to hear what it is I’m telling the real HR and TA leaders! It’s smart for the vendors. It helps make the better sellers as well. Well, at least some that actually listen!

Based on these interactions I decided to build a series of what has come out of interactions with the vendors themselves, aptly named “Notes to HR Tech Vendors”. Look I don’t alway have to be creative! Enjoy!

Notes to HR Tech Vendors #8 – If You Buy Today! 

“If you buy today we can ensure you’ll be a part of the beta product for free, but if you wait, we’re going to be charging future buyers for that product.” 

“If you buy today, we can wave the implementation fees.” 

“If you buy today, I can give you the rest of this quarter for free. That’s two free months!” 

“If you buy today, it’s $79 per user. I can only give you that today, next week it’ll be $99 per user.”

Look, Sparky. If I don’t buy today, and I buy next Wednesday I better still get the beta, and the two months, and the stupid t-shirt and any other crap you’re waving around to try and close me!

If you sell HR Tech like this, you suck! And not the cute, “Come on guys, you suck! #Winkyface”. It’s the “You Suck!” and hopefully bad things happen to you and everyone you know because you’re an awful person, suck!

I actually had this happen to me recently. Very good product and I definitely wanted to give it a try. The salesperson knows she has me very close to signing the deal, and then it happened. “Well, Tim, if you sign today, I’ll give you the last two weeks of the month for free!”

I said, “Thank you. I’ll let you know”, and hung up. She’s been trying to reach me almost daily since not understanding why I won’t return her messages, we were so close! Except then you did the worse sales pitch known to man, and now I hate you.

HR tech vendors stop doing this. If you’re willing to give a buyer two weeks for free, just tell them you’ll give them two weeks for free. If they buy tomorrow, or if they buy next Tuesday or next month! Also, we get your prices change, but if you are currently talking to me about $79 per user, that price better be good for a reasonable amount of time, like a minimum of 30 days at least.

HR tech buyers, if you feel like you’re being ‘forced’ to buy today! End the call. End the relationship. The company you’re dealing with is not a good company because good companies don’t sell this way. They don’t treat you like an idiot. They respect you and understand that you usually aren’t in a position to “Buy today”.

No one in HR Tech needs to be hard closing HR Pros. People’s careers are on the line for these buying decisions. It’s not something to hard sell them into. If they make a bad choice for their organization it could cost them their job. Ease up Boiler Room.

 

T3 – @InvestiPro

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This week on T3 I take a look at the employee investigation technology InvestiPro. Okay, I have to tell you that I first ran into InvestiPro at The HR Technology Conference when their Founder, Dana Barbato, got on stage during a new technology competition and by herself just got up and killed it! No flash, just real HR talk about one of the biggest challenges real HR pros face on a daily basis. I loved it!

To me, the best HR Tech is one that solves an actual problem that I’ve really had to deal with working as an HR Pro. Dana, like I, was a real HR Pro in the trenches. Before starting InvestiPro, real HR was her entire career. So, she gets it. She gets that having to run an employee investigation can be hard for a number of reasons. Having to run multiple investigations at the same time can really be a chore!

InvestiPro is a fully-automated workplace investigation solution designed to simplify the way employers conduct investigations. From start to finish the technology simply walks you through the process and ensures you remain complaint, legally, and keeps you and your organization out of hot water.

What I really like about Investipro: 

– The system allows you to maintain all of your investigations in one place. Keeps you organized and easily lets you see where you’re at in the process of each one. For those of us, like me, that had all of this in multiple files and doing it all by hand, this would have been a godsend!

– For those who don’t have to do investigations often, InvestiPro ensures you follow a process from beginning to end and helps you out along  the way. Many times investigations fail, from the corporate perspective, because something was missed along the way.

– InvestiPro helps HR pros answer all those questions that they just don’t know, or might not fully understand, in regards to liability, should you even be doing an investigation, should you hire outside council, what questions you should be asking, etc.

– Each investigation is reviewed by a qualified legal expert to ensure it meets normal legal standards in case your investigation might end up in a courtroom.

– It’s a fraction of the price of bringing in outside council. It’s the 90/10 rule. 90% of your internal investigations can probably be taken care of by you, the other 10% probably need outside counsel. Most organizations tend to use more outside counsel than is needed. InvestiPro helps save you money.

The HR Tech crowd was un-wowed by InvestiPro, that’s because most of that crowd aren’t actual HR Pros and Leaders who deal with this kind of thing on a daily basis. For me, InvestiPro was the most usable out of the box technology that was presented at the conference! It was brilliant in its simplicity and function. That’s hard to do! Take a look.


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 HR, 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 – send me a note.

Too Many Recruiting Tools Are Killing Your Recruiting Efforts

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You’ve heard of this concept of the Inverted-U Curve, right? It’s fairly straightforward. In the beginning, you have nothing or very little. As you increase the resources you begin to become more effective. Eventually, as you add more resources you’ll actually reach maximum potential.

In the attempt to go even higher, you keep adding more resources, but you don’t see an increase in effectiveness or output, you actually see a decrease. This is the basic concept of the chart above.

This happens in recruiting too many organizations.

We start out with a bunch of recruiters and some phones. That’s not enough we need to add some other stuff, these recruiters need tools! So, we give them email and an ATS. Then comes the job boards, postings, InMails, etc. Might as well automate background checks and references. We really need to fill the pipeline, here comes sourcing tech!

Wish we had a way to get our messages out to candidates more effectively! CRM, branding technology, data analytics, SMS messaging, etc. Just keep adding more tools! That’ll a fix it!

Except it doesn’t!

What happens to your recruiting team as you add more tools?

  • The complexity of the process increases.
  • Core recruiting skills diminish, or at the very least don’t increase. (Laziness factor)
  • Increased points of failure in communication with each piece of new tech.

What we know is technology doesn’t make you better at recruiting. Technology makes you faster at recruiting, but if you suck at recruiting, technology will only make you suck faster!

Great recruiting starts with your people. Your recruiters. That’s your foundation, not your technology. Technology can help cover up some hickeys of bad recruiters temporary, but eventually, we will all see the real hickeys!

So, before you sign that next contract for some new technology, first take a look at your team. Do you have the right people on your recruiting bus? Do they have the core skills they need? How will I get them the skills they need?

The continued increase in technology will only take you so far. You can either solve this problem on the front side, or eventually, you’ll face it on the back side, but either way, it’s coming. In my experience, it’s easier to solve up front then wait for it to come up when twelve technologies deep into your TA stack!

Notes to HR Tech Vendors #9 – Buyers Hate Buying Airline Tickets

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I’ve done a few presentations titled something like, “HR Tech Buyers Guide”, “How to Buy HR Tech”, etc. The presentation is designed for HR and TA practitioners to help them become better buyers of HR Tech. To understand the crap that HR and TA Tech vendors do and say to get you to buy stuff you might not need, want, or will use.

The interesting thing about these presentations is that half the audience turns out to be the actual vendors themselves wanting to hear what it is I’m telling the real HR and TA leaders! It’s smart for the vendors. It helps make the better sellers as well. Well, at least some that actually listen!

Based on these interactions I decided to build a series of what has come out of interactions with the vendors themselves, aptly named “Notes to HR Tech Vendors”. Look I don’t alway have to be creative! Enjoy!

Notes to HR Tech Vendors #9 – Buyers Hate Buying Airline Tickets

The biggest frustration that Buyers of HR Technology have is they feel like they’re getting screwed! It’s the same feeling you have when you go to buy an airline ticket.

You’re not quite sure you got a good price. You think it’s sounds about right. Okay, $400 to go from Detroit to Dallas, seems reasonable. Then you get on the flight and sit next to Mary and she tells you she got a great deal on her ticket, $179!

At that point, you want to throat punch every employee of that airline! Car buying is the exact same experience.

I’m not sure why an organization (HR Tech companies) would ever choose to have a buying experience where ever person polled will tell you they hate it! “Yeah, you know what we should do to become a successful tech company? Let’s piss off every buyer who purchases our product!”

Great plan!

The funnier part is, HR buyers would be happier paying a higher amount if they knew everyone else was paying that same amount! You can actually increase your margins by just going to an advertised one-price-for-all model! “Well, if Google paid $25K for it, I guess I feel pretty good we’re paying $25K as well!”

A few HR and TA Tech companies have taken on this strategy of publishing the prices of their products, but even most of those will still have that “magical” on disclosed “Enterprise” price which is based on higher volume! So, yeah, I’m paying $19 per user, like everyone else, but Google is paying something less…not sure how much less, but my mind is telling me it’s $3!

HR Buyers aren’t shopping for a used car. They’re shopping for a partnership. A company that will help them and their organization get better. They’re willing to pay good money for that. So, why are you still treating them like they’re an idiot?!

Oh, yes, you are! You trying to swindle them out of an extra grand or two is showing them you don’t respect them or the relationship, that you only care about money, but helping them get better. Even most of your salespeople hate it. They would rather just say, “Look it’s $25K, for everyone, we don’t negotiate price. What we will do is make sure you get every dime of value out of this and then some.”

That’s a much easier sale and starts the relationship off on the right track.

T3 – Fitbit Group Health – @Fitbit

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This week on T3 I take a look at wearable technology Fitbit, but not from the actual wearable tech perspective, but from their health wellness tech solution. Fitbit Group Health was developed specifically to support organizations that have decided to use the power of wearable tech to help their employees reach their wellness goals.

I was drawn to this tech because seemingly everyone knows the brand Fitbit. As an experienced HR pro, I’ve learned that the path of least resistance is critical when getting employee adoption of any HR program! Meaning, if my employees are already Fitbit fans, why would I fight the momentum!?

Fitbit has been around for a while now and because of this they’ve been able to do some long term studies with large organizations using their wearable tech and run side by side control groups to find out what impact this wearable tech has on wellness from a cost perspective, and it’s quite stunning!

Fitbit Group Health recently released a study that shows year over year results can reduce your overall healthcare spend by almost 25%! The study compared one group of employees with the Dayton Transit Authority (bus drivers who sit almost all day) with a control group of the same employees not wearing the Fitbit tech. For one year they followed this group and the group wearing the Fitbit incurred 24.5% less per person average overall healthcare cost as compared to the control group.

Fitbit’s own data amongst all their corporate users is showing similar great reductions across 2.6 million users in 70 of the Fortune 500. Wearing the tech leads to more active lifestyles and better health outcomes. Makes sense, right? Get your employees moving more and crazy enough they get healthier.

What I really like about Fitbit Group Health:

  • Employees already like Fitbit and are wearing Fitbit. This makes is super easy to gain adoption.
  • Fitbit Group Health makes it easy for you as an employer to supplement the cost of buying individual Fitbits and setting up a site just for your organization for employees to purchase the technology.
  • The Fitbit Group Health technology gives you a dashboard to track employee usage, set up contests and message individuals and groups of employees. The metrics you receive in HR allows you to track your own results and tie it back to cost savings.
  • It’s proven outcomes and reduction of cost over many industries, blue collar and white collar, fully supplemented, partial supplemented and non-supplemented. It doesn’t matter, it works!
  • It’s scalable and can easily be tested in an organization at the department level, location, etc.

What you’ll find is you already have Fitbit fans in your organization and you’ll easily be able to make some new fans, but you’ll also be able to drive a culture of wellness with employees supporting each other.

We all know the struggle of getting high adoption of wellness in our organizations. I think Fitbit Group Health is providing a great model of getting your employees moving and supporting each other. The fact is, that small thing, can give every organization huge positive results!

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 HR, 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 – send me a note.

Notes to HR Tech Vendors – #10 – Your Real Competition

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I’ve done a few presentations titled something like, “HR Tech Buyers Guide”, “How to Buy HR Tech”, etc. The presentation is designed for HR and TA practitioners to help them become better buyers of HR Tech. To understand the crap that HR and TA Tech vendors do and say to get you to buy stuff you might not need, want, or will use.

The interesting thing about these presentations is that half the audience turns out to be the actual vendors themselves wanting to hear what it is I’m telling the real HR and TA leaders! It’s smart for the vendors. It helps make the better sellers as well. Well, at least some that actually listen!

Based on these interactions I decided to build a series of what has come out of interactions to the vendors themselves, aptly named “Notes to HR Tech Vendors”. Look I don’t alway have to be creative! Enjoy!

#10 – Your Real Competition

Unless you’re buying some giant watered-down enterprise level HRIS or ATS/Talent Suite you almost never have competition!

Yes, you read that correctly. 90% of HR Tech vendors have “NO” competition! But, you believe the opposite.

Here’s the deal. HR and TA Tech buyers are fairly naive to the industry. It’s not our full-time job to track every new ATS that is being launched. We’re just trying to get people hired and stop people from quitting. Takes up about 99.9% of our job! So, when it’s time to buy new Tech we usually buy the first thing we’re sold!

The competition you face is not your real competitors. The competition you face is a “no sale”.

Almost all HR Tech buyers will buy your product, or they won’t buy anything. Primarily because they don’t even know you have competition. Well, they didn’t until you actually told them! “Hey, we’re the #1 CRM on the market, so much better than #2, #3 and #4.” What? There is more than one CRM!?

If you’re Smashfly (a CRM Tech) almost every single sale is going to be a “Yes” or a “No, we’ve decided we don’t need this right now”. It’s almost never “hey, we’ve decided to buy Clinch, or Avature, or Ascendify, or Talemetry, or Beamery, or”…you get the picture!

Almost never!

Your real competition is you. It’s your ability to sell your solution to a buyer that has some sort of pain around HR or TA. It’s shocking at how often this fails. I mean what can go wrong when you throw a 15-year-old on the phone with a twenty year HR vet on the other end, telling them how to fix her shop!?

And you think I exaggerate on the age! Almost every single HR and TA Tech sales person I speak is under the age of 30 and most have never worked a day in HR or TA. This leads to a ton of “no sales”.  If you can’t tell me how your solution is going to solve my pain, in my language, I’m probably not buying.

HR and TA Tech vendors, your competition isn’t the problem. Your technology isn’t the problem (it’s usually really awesome). Your sales strategy is killing you. The cute, little, naive babies selling your products is the problem. They don’t know me. They don’t know my pain. They don’t speak my language.

Your real competition is you.

Is Mobile more Trump or more Hillary?

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If you’re into broad political strokes, let’s play a game. Let’s say for the sake of this game, what would be considered traditional Democratic supporters tend to have less resources at their disposal than traditional Republican supporters. Most of us in HR would then believe that Trump probably should have a larger mobile strategy than Hillary, given the assumption that Republicans tend to have higher incomes and therefore more access to mobile devices.

 

We tend to act this way in HR. We believe that if you want to attract high-tech talent you must have a mobile job strategy. Our young, educated tech-savvy workforces want to do everything via mobile. Payroll, benefits options, retirement, transfers, etc.

 

The reality is, we have this totally backward!

 

The Pew Research Center found that low-educated, low-income wage earners – your hourly employees – are more likely…

 

Check out the rest of my article over at Paychex’s Worx Blog! Along with the 4 things you need to launch mobile-enabled software to your employees! 

 

T3 – Handshake @JoinHandshake

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This week on T3 I take a look at the recruiting platform for college students called Handshake. If you recruit new grads from college campuses you know the pain of not having a one-stop shop to get the students you need. Most companies still waste a ton of resources attending career fairs and negotiating individual college career offices one-on-one.

Handshake looks to break that cycle by doing what LinkedIn has failed to do, give college students one place, one networking site that is all their own to look for jobs and connect with companies. On the flip side, they are also providing a platform where employers can search for students by posting jobs or searching millions of student profiles by the university, major and grad year.

Handshake isn’t a new idea. Kris Dunn famously loves to tell people I singlehandedly put MyEdu out of business when I keynoted an event from them and the next week they went out of business! I get pitched probably twice a year from new companies trying to do what Handshake is attempting to do, build a platform that connects college students with employers. LinkedIn for college students, except they would hate to be called that, but you get the picture.

What I like about Handshake?

– Free to both students and employers! What to build critical mass, like LinkedIn? Give it away for free, except Handshake actually sells their platform to college career services offices on an annual subscription. Also, they will make money on premium services to employers. (See? LinkedIn!)

– Unlike most student-to-employer techs I’m pitched, Handshake has figured out you need to get some VC and use that money to grow your user base, both colleges, students, and employers. They currently have over 150 colleges using (Stanford, Michigan, Texas, Cal, etc. – a who’s who of universities), 140,000 recruiters/employers, and over 2.5 million student profiles.

– College career fairs aren’t going away anytime soon, as most employers still want to build a reputation on campus. Handshake helps out both employers and career services with tools to plan events, schedule interviews, etc. on campus. While most recruiting will be done on the site, the best employers will still maintain a presence on campus.

– They have a brand that feels like it will stick. Let’s face it, the student-to-employer space won’t be shared by multiple technologies. Someone will win this space and control the vast amount of college hiring that takes place. I like the Handshake brand and story, I think it could stick. That’s important in a game that has yet to be decided.

– They’ve built a UI/UX that students will feel very comfortable with and it’s as easy to use as any social media site they use now, and it’s clean. By uploading your resume most of the profile is auto-filled and it can be tweaked from there.

If you recruit on campus or from colleges, you need to check out Handshake.  The technology makes it easy to find kids on campus whereas college career service offices tend to be a pain in the butt to deal with and only want to post openings for you, versus give you direct access to students when you need them, not when the annual career fair is scheduled.

LinkedIn will have a say in how all of this ends. I can’t believe they’ll sit on the sidelines for this and watch Handshake just take the college market from them without a fight and a product of their own. Handshake has some first round funding, enough to make some noise, but not enough to send fear into LI! Stay tuned, it should be interesting.

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 HR, 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 – send me a note.

Your Recruitment Strategy Needs Focus!

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I’ve been in Chicago a couple of times this fall. The restaurant scene in Chicago is off the charts, just like it is right now in New York, LA, etc. It’s a great time to be a person who loves food!

If you like going to new restaurants you’ll find out quickly that the restaurants of today are not like the ones we grew up with. In Michigan, and my wife still makes fun of this, any non-chain restaurant serving “American” food basically has the same menu where they serve burgers, seafood, Italian dishes, Mexican dishes, breakfast, hell they would serve Ethiopian if people would order it!

Basically, they serve a little of everything, but nothing especially noteworthy!

The new restaurant scene has changed this completely and now you’re lucky to have 8 main dishes that are served on a menu, BUT every single thing kills! The entire menu is one side of page and seems like almost no options but each dish is better than the next. Chefs of these new restaurants found out the way to make money is to focus your menu and make fabulous dishes.

You have lower food costs because of less wasted ingredients, you’re more efficient in cooking fewer items, less complaints because you know each dish is awesome and you create signature asked-for dishes. Focus = success.

When I speak with most TA Leaders they are trying to serve a menu that caters to everyone with their TA strategy.

When you ask what they are focusing on you get an answer that sounds like this, “Well, candidate experience for sure, and branding, that’s really important to us, our tech stack is a disaster we need to figure that out, big project right now with onboarding, looking at some CRM products, new career site in the works, definitely analytics is a priority and working to really get our arms around the employee experience as well.”

What!? Sound familiar?

Their “focus” is to focus on everything! It’s the I can’t see the trees through the forest mentality of focus. It’s also a huge strategic recipe for failing in talent acquisition.

What should your focus be?  Well, that depends on what’s important you to and your organization, but it surely isn’t everything. What I find is that great TA shops have one main focus and one or two minor things they’re working on.  The main focus might be analytics and to help with that they’re also implementing some new technology and building out what impact those results will have. Those results will then become the next focus, and so on.

Do a few things really, really well, then move on to develop something else that will be world-class.