Category Archives: HR Technology

T3 – Health Fair Connections @HealthFairGuys

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This week on T3 I take a look at the HR technology app Health Fair Connections. Health Fair Connections (HFC) is a unique software that allows benefit’s professionals to secure vendors for their internal health fairs, maximize employee participation, and organize their entire health fair information in one platform.

HFC is a technology, not an event company. The technology allows HR departments to list their event and receive interest back from vendors who have shown interest in attending your internal employee health fairs. The software automates the entire process. No meeting with tons of different vendors or having a million calls to make.

The technology allows you to control the entire process. Vendors send you an ‘interview’ sheet via the platform for your event. You simply pick which vendors you want to attend. You can also personally invite vendors from the platform that you want to attend as well. Part of the process is you building a profile of your organization and offerings so that each vendor you choose, you already will know they accept your insurance.

5 Things I really like about Health Fair Connections:

1. Setting up the annual, or Bi-annual, employee health fair is a pain in the butt! I’ve done it! Having a proven platform that basically does it for me would be excellent! HFC has done over 300 employee health fairs already this year, so the software is proven and they’ve worked out the bugs.

2. The platform has a reminder and rating system, so they have an extremely low drop off of vendors not showing up! The software has almost eliminated the no-shows at your fairs and having tables left open the day of your fair. As a user of the system you can see vendor profiles and they’re ratings given by other HR pros who used them at their events. You can also message vendors right from the system with any questions you might have.

3. No cost for organizations using it. Vendors pay to participate (and it’s fairly inexpensive for them as well), and if you personally invite a vendor they get to come for free! So, you can use all of your normal vendors and supplement with some new ones as well.

4. Customizable marketing materials, event flyers, etc. to help promote the event to your employees can be downloaded and printed right from the platform! It seems like HFC has thought of just about everything when it comes to running employee health fairs.

5. Wide selection of vendors for most large metropolitan areas, but even with markets as small as 50,000 you would be shocked at the number of vendors they have, plus HFC will go out and find others for you if you don’t find the type of vendors you want in your area. You can also use HFC for events other than health fairs, like lunch and learns, demos, employee workshops, etc.

Let’s be honest, employee health fairs are not sexy and technology running them won’t fall into the ‘sexy’ category either, but I was really impressed with this tool! For those of us who have put these on and it’s part of our job to put them on in the future, it can be a big headache and it’s awesome that someone knew this and came up with technology to help!

(Hat tip to Steve Browne, SHRM Board Member and HR Leader for LaRosa’s, for the referral of HFC – another HR pro who saw this and thought like I did!)
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.

Women in HR Technology Summit #HRTechConf

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Last week I was at the HR Technology Conference in Chicago and when I arrived on Tuesday afternoon there was this buzz in the air and folks talking about this great pre-conference event called “Women in HR Technology“.

Steve Boese, Co-Chair of the HR Technology Conference, was behind the creation and had this to say prior:

“In the traditionally male-dominated technology industry, there are many successful women leaders introducing new ideas, developing transformative solutions and leading their companies to success. We are proud to hold this long overdue ‘Women in HR Technology’ event, which will not only showcase more than 15 of the most successful women changing the industry, but also provide new insights for how other women can create their own professional roadmaps.”

The agenda was loaded with the leading women from various HR technology companies from across the globe. I spoke with a couple of the speakers including, Brynne Herbert, founder, and CEO, of MOVE Guides. Brynne shared with me that women trying to start their own firms in HR Technology have some serious challenges in that only 7% of Series A funded companies in HR Tech are founded by women, and that number drops to 3% that make it to Series B funding!

Herbert shared with me the three main reasons she believes women backed companies in HR technology struggle:

  1. Females are more risk adverse and starting your company is a risky proposition.
  2. Females don’t tend to be the ones to brag themselves up and when you’re starting a company it’s an important part of making your company success.
  3. You must be able and willing to evangelize your idea against all odds. Many people will tell you that it won’t work, and you have to truly believe it will.

Hebert also mentioned that another challenge is most new HR technology companies rely on VC-backed funding and only about 8% of VC’s are run by women. Like most things in life, we tend to back that what we feel most comfortable with. That makes is super hard for women to get backed by male-run VC’s.

Many people don’t know, but I’m extremely passionate about the concept of women in leadership. I was raised by a single mother who started a technology company back some 35 years ago when no women did this, and my master’s thesis for my HR degree was a study on women and leadership.

It was a big step for the HR Technology Conference to first recognize this issue and second make actually begin to do something about it. I look forward to seeing what will come out of this and I was told by Boese and Herbert that they definitely want to continue the conversation beyond just this one summit. As soon as those next steps become solidified I’ll make sure to share how you can also become part of this conversation.

2016 HR Technology Conference Themes #HRTechConf

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The 2016 HR Technology Conference is in the books!  I’ve said this a number of times, but it’s my favorite conference of the year. I love the interaction between attendees and all the great technology vendors at the conference, the energy is unlike any other conference on the planet.

Each year there are major themes that come out of HR Tech. Many we know even going in. We knew this year would be the year of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. You could not talk to a vendor that didn’t have some take on this. The problem is still what everyday HR and TA leaders believe A.I. is, is not what you’re being sold.

Here are the themes I took away from HR Tech 2016:

1. Confusion by the buyer is at an all-time high and getting worse. This is going to be a problem for vendors and most don’t get it. The main point of confusion is that so many of the technologies are now overlapping each other and claiming to do what the other does, but it’s usually to a lesser degree. The buyer is the one having to try to figure this out, and they can’t. That usually turns into a “no buy”.

2. A Talent Acquisition Tech Stack is starting to emerge and the HR Tech Stack (HRIS core providers) folks are trying to stop this from happening by offering up their own watered-down, vanilla version of what you really need.  The reality is today, HRIS providers don’t offer up the same level of TA technology that you can get from TA-specific tech vendors. What I haven’t seen yet is the TA Tech vendor community providing a model of what that TA Tech stack looks like – the first one to do that effectively will have a huge advantage in positioning.

3. Conferences, not just HR Tech, have a real problem that needs to be addressed and it doesn’t seem to me like anyone cares. Sessions are lightly attended. This has been a criticism of HR Tech in the past, but I think the HR Tech team addressed it by providing really strong content. The sessions I attended were really good, but not seen by most people. This is a problem because practitioners won’t keep coming if they think they’re going to sit in a mostly empty room. They want to feel the same energy as those folks on the expo floor, which happens when you have full session rooms.  Right now conference organizers don’t view this as a problem because vendors are falling over themselves to shell out more and more money to attend and sponsor. That bubble will eventually burst.

4. HR and TA Leaders still have this belief that you must have one system talking to each other at the enterprise level.  I heard more and more examples of this belief getting blown up and enterprise-level organizations starting to use the latest greatest HR and TA Saas-based software on the market. I don’t need by TA stack and HR stack connected for it to be great. Onboading can be my bridge point and any good BI software will pull the data I need from both.

5. If you are a CHRO of an organization that has 5000+ employees and you don’t have HR Data pros on your team, you’re losing out to your peer group and you have no idea why. Do yourself a favor and take a deep dive into this side of HR. Organizations are transforming themselves because of what their HR and TA data is telling them, and those not utilizing this information are falling behind fast.

Next year HR Tech 2017 will be back in Las Vegas for a three run.  If you haven’t ever gone to the HR Technology Conference and you’re an HR and/or TA Tech geek, it’s a must attend conference.  You can spend three straight days on the expo floor and not come close to seeing all the tech that’s available, and there are tons of great sessions as well.

HR Tech in 5 Minutes! #HRTechConf

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Gang! I’m at ‘The’ HR Technology Conference this week in Chicago. Steve Boese, Co-Chair of the conference, has added some really exciting and fun content to the program and I attended a session yesterday called “Discovering the Next Great HR Technology Company”.

It’s a Shark Tank-style presentation where 8 up and coming technologies were picked from an applicant list of 150 to present to a panel of HR Tech experts and ultimately the crowd voted on who they believe is the next great HR Technology. It was fast and furious, and actually fun to watch!

The companies that got chosen were all winners (that’s what we say when we feel bad for the losers!):

  • Invesitpro – Employee relations investigation software. Not sexy, but the most practical of the bunch and something almost everyone I spoke to said, “I’d use that!”
  • Clinch – Candidate CRM, microsite builder, powerful recruitment communication tool.
  • Qwalify – Spoke about their new product called Talent Dojo – scalable two-way communication to find out if a candidate is the right fit for you, and you for them.
  • RolePoint – Employee referral automation talking about their new product for internal Talent Mobility.
  • LifeWorks – Employee engagement app and recognition.
  • Chemistry – Candidate assessment using unstructured data, so basically assessing your candidates without making them take an assessment.
  • Click Boarding – Onboarding, but very personalized.
  • HighGround – Performance management reinvented, very cool UX.

Here’s what we learned: 

1. 5 minutes is too short to try and do a demo in front of a giant crowd. It turns into people talking way too fast and flying through screens and seems confusing.

2. If you only have 5 minutes you need to get three things out: 1) Tell me what you actually do and how I will use you in my daily life. 2) Give me your twitter name so I can tweet about you at the conference during this session – you get 5 minutes of free publicity, help me out! 3) Invite me to a full demo later to see the full show. None of the 8 did this. 6 of the 8 I’m still not sure what they actually do!

3. Love this format and the audience loved the format. Most practitioners won’t come to your booth for a full demo, but they do want to know what’s out there and if they have an interest in finding out more about you. I could see this going to ten or twenty minutes and being even better!

4. If you only have 5 minutes, it’s a risk to rely on technology to tell your story! (Which is very ironic being that this is a technology conference!) But the reality is you’re relying on conference wifi, other people, a foreign environment.  The people who fared best just told a 5-minute story about what it is they solve.

5. British, Irish, Australian accents play really well with an American audience. We believe those accents are smarter, even when they’re not! So, even if you’re an American company, find a Brit to get on stage and sell your product!

Check out all of the eight vendors highlighted in the session. All the tech was awesome and did different things.

T3 – @TextRecruit

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This week on T3 I take review the talent acquisition software TextRecruit. TextRecruit is the first centralized platform designed exclusively for recruiting teams to assist in texting, engaging and measuring the effectiveness of texting candidates.

TextRecruit does what most of our ATS systems won’t, which is give you an effective and easy to use platform to reach out and engage with candidates via text. If we know anything right now it’s that candidates are getting more and more savvy to recruitment communication. Emails and phones calls, which are the two standard ways to communicate with candidates get less effective each year.

Text response to candidates continues to have a high response rate, quite simply, because most recruiters still don’t use it. Let’s face it, email has made recruiters lazy, and more and more candidates would prefer to communicate via text or some other form of short range messaging.

5 Things I really like about TextRecruit:

1. TextRecruit makes it super easy for your recruiters to mass text (create a messaging campaign), personalized text messaging to candidates and make each candidate feel like they were the only one being texted by your recruiter.

2. TextRecruit gives your entire team one platform to text from, gather responses, measure campaign effectiveness, etc. You can also embed unique URLs to drive traffic to specific landing pages, jobs, Google maps for interviews, etc.

3. Compliance with texting is still a new frontier. If your recruiters are using their own phones, or individual work phones, you have very little insight or control of what’s going on. Using a platform like TextRecruit makes all of this heartburn go away! Messages can’t be deleted from the system, so you see everything your recruiters send, candidate responses, and the entire message chain between the two.

4. TextRecruit Chrome Extension easily and instantly allows you to text candidates from LinkedIn. For those recruiters who are LI super users this is an awesome tool.

5. With traditional response rates hovering anywhere between 10-20% (on the high side with email), TextRecruit clients are currently seeing response rates, on average, of 37%. That’s giant!

I’ve been a huge fan of using text messaging in recruiting for the past few years, but it’s always been a struggle with most ATS technologies on the market. TextRecruit seems to have this figured out completely and works well in conjunction with any ATS you’re using.

TextRecruit also has some other pieces to their platform to check inclusing TextApply (self explanatory) and TextHR (an employee engagement and communication tool via text). TextRecruit is a price per recruiter model based per month.

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.

The Best Feedback I’ve Ever Been Given – HR Tech Edition!

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Yo! HR Tech Geeks! I’m at The HR Technology Conference next week Oct. 4-7th and I’m doing a really fun project with the great folks at Halogen. If you don’t know Halogen they’re the HR technology leaders when it comes to performance management and recently did a full integration with Jobvite to offer a full end-to-end talent management suite.

At HR Tech 2016 Halogen, and I, will be collecting the best feedback you have ever been given and what the impact was on you! I share mine in the video below –

I would love to meet you in person at the Halogen booth #2209 on Wednesday, Oct. 5th from 10-10:30am or on Thursday, Oct. 6th during the Lunch Break. We can swap best feedback stories and if you’re up to it I would love to video you and your story and make you internet HR Tech famous! So, come check it out, we’re going to have a lot of fun with it!

FYI – Bonus points if you come to the Halogen Booth #2209 and bring me a Diet Mt. Dew!!! 

T3- Jobvite’s Annual Recruiter Nation Report

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Talent Acquisition software provider Jobvite released their annual Recruiter Nation 2016 report today. This report always has some gems I love to share and usually use in presentations throughout the year. Here are some of my favorites from this year’s report:

– 51% say that employment branding is their #1 investment that they will make in the next 12 months! In case you’re bad at math, that is over half! This doesn’t really speak to a “real” need for EB, it speaks to a lack of understanding of what their organization truly needs from TA. For most companies, this will be a waste of resources. An organization can be great at attracting talent with a brand no one knows. The fact that half of all organizations will have this as their #1 investment is a painful reality of a lack of great TA leadership in the industry.

– Internal hires (38%) are ranked highest quality by recruiters — followed closely by employee referrals (34%). I actually laughed out loud when I first read this! Really? I mean REALLY!? Internal hires rank as your highest quality? Well, isn’t that surprising…They better be your highest quality!!! They already work for you, Moron! Sometimes I just don’t get why we ask stupid questions. Another stat you might find surprising, water is wet! Also, stop giving internal recruiters credit for internal hires. They didn’t do anything to fill that job.

– According to recruiters, 43% of them rated diversity as somewhat or very important when making a hiring decision. But 40% of them were neutral about diversity and its influence. Want to know why your organization isn’t moving the needle on diversity recruitment? It’s this stat! Your recruiters hear that it’s important, but they don’t believe it’s important. Why? Because you don’t show them any internal statistics that more diverse work groups, in your own environment, perform better than those lacking diversity. Show them, or shut up.

– 60% of recruiters rate culture fit of highest importance when making a hiring decision — topped only by (you guessed it) previous job experience (67%)! What didn’t matter? Cover letters (26%), prestige of college (21%), and GPA (19%). Yep, all you haters that still think cover letters are a thing! They aren’t, go back to 1997.

– This year, recruiters are most focused on growing talent pipelines (57%) and the quality of their hires (56%). 

Can we be real for a second? I mean really, really!? You’all are pissing me off!

56% of Recruiters are concerned with Quality of Hire. That’s nice. Tell me how you measure that? Oh, it’s when a new hire stays 90 days in the job. That means quality? How does that align with the industry? Oh, you don’t know, because everyone measures QofH completely differently and it’s a freaking meaningless metric! I WANT TO SHOOT MYSELF IN THE HEAD!

Quality of Hire is not a Recruiting metric. Quality of Hire is a hiring manager metric! It’s something that starts with TA, flows through HR, ends up in Performance Management and ultimately is tied to Hiring Manager decisions and their ability to develop and onboard new hires. TA has very little to do with quality of hire. TA is responsible for Quality of Source, that is a different thing.

So, just stop it. Stop doing this. You’re giving me an aneurysm!

And now back to the survey…

– 87% of Recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates, the largest of all networks. 67% of Candidates use Facebook to search for a job, the largest of all networks. Do you see a problem here?

Definitely, go download the report! It’s loaded with a ton of data that can help shape some of your TA decisions in the near future, or just get you to do more of what everyone else is doing because you were told by idiots like me it’s the new hottest thing on the market to do, and fun wasting most of your budget developing your brand no one will ever know about.

T3 – The Next Great HR Technology Company

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The HR Technology Conference is coming in a few weeks and they just announced the list for a competition they are having this year called “The Next Great HR Technology Company”. Here’s what is, from HR Technology Chair, Steve Boese:

“Each year, the HR Tech Conference puts the spotlight on the latest innovations to emerge in the HR technology marketplace. As the industry as a whole continues to evolve and new challenges arise, there are many startups introducing game-changing solutions to help HR address the growing complexity. The ‘Discovering the Next Great HR Technology Company’ session will examine the offerings from some of the industry’s most promising startups, and allow attendees themselves to vote for companies they think introduce the most cutting-edge solutions to enhance how they do their jobs as HR professionals.”

So, who are these ‘startups’?

Clickboarding: is a comprehensive employee onboarding software focused on the new hire experience by not only leveraging cutting-edge cloud technology but also embracing regulatory compliance and providing a Candidate Care services team as an extension of the company.

Clinch is a Recruitment Marketing and CRM platform designed to centralize a company’s career pages, recruitment marketing, and talent network initiatives, enabling employers to source, identify, understand, engage and convert the best candidates – including the 90 percent of those who demonstrate an interest in their company but don’t apply.

Highground enables organizations to modernize performance development and engagement for a more productive, motivated workforce.

InvestiPro is a fully-automated workplace investigation solution designed to simplify the way employers conduct investigations.

LifeWorks will present its industry-first wellness and engagement platform that makes employees Feel Loved in any organization.

Qwalify will present its solution, Talent Dojo: a professional digital networking platform that is the evolution of talent engagement for recruitment.

RolePoint will present its leading internal talent mobility tool to deliver a streamlined career progression experience for employees and enable talent development teams to improve retention across their entire organization.

The Chemistry Group will present a combination of its technology and award-winning intellectual property allows its global clients to predict the future performance of potential and existing employees to an unparalleled level of accuracy.

I’ve known some of these technologies for a few years, others I’ve never heard of, so I’m really interested to see all of them, and then see what the HR Tech audience believes is the best Next Great HR Technology! Especially since all of these techs really don’t compete against each other.

For other HR Tech geeks like me, these types of competitions are awesome! You get to see a bunch of great tech in a small amount of time and you don’t feel like you’re being sold something!

An Introvert’s Guide to Recruiting Top Tech Talent

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Step 1: Listen really carefully to what your mind is telling you.

Step 2: Call someone who knows how to recruit and enjoys having one hundred small conversations per day and quickly building relationships with people they might never talk to again.

Step 3: Quit your job as a Recruiter.

Step 4: Find a career that values Introverts.

Step 5: Take that job.

Step 6: Tell your introverted friends to never go into Recruiting.

 

Thanks for the inspiration Heather Bussing, and check out her Introvert’s Guide to the HR Technology Conference. 

Live from CareerBuilder’s Empower

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I’m on the road at CareerBuilder’s Empower conference in Chicago.  This is the second annual conference designed for corporate talent acquisition and staffing agency pros. This year CB made a ton of changes to make it better from a content perspective for sure!

The first event last year seemed to be one giant commercial for CareerBuilder broken up by big name keynotes and food and drink.  It was fun, but not sure how much content and takeaways anyone really got.  This year’s Empower was totally revamped and after Day 1, I don’t think I really heard one product pitch at all!

Here are some takeaways from Day 1 at Empower:

– Sessions are practitioner-led for the most part. Great Day 1 speakers included: Kris Dunn, Jason Lauritsen, Stacy Zapar, Glen Cathey, and many others. This lineup is packed with practical takeaways that folks could take back to their shops and immediately put into action! Plus, the speakers are fun and engaging. CB did a great job putting the agenda together.

– Shinola (the Detroit Watchmaking Company) President Jacques Panis stole the Keynote show for the day. In an election year that’s all about asking ourselves whether America is great or not and how it needs to change, Panis gave a glimpse of how American companies, making American products, with American workers, is what is really great about America.

– CareerBuilder runs a first class conference and the conference this year was free for CB clients to attend. This means you need to cut money from other things like giant name keynotes and entertainment. What CB realizes is that recruiters don’t really need that stuff anyway! Give us great content and some good food and drinks, and we’ll entertain ourselves!

Best moment of the conference:

Panis from Shinola was being interviewed on stage and they opened up the mics for the audience to ask questions. One guy gets up and speaks a little bit about the challenges of hiring workers in Downtown Detroit, and asks, “Do you hire felons?”  Panis, without pause, said, “Well, they hired me!”

It brought down the house, and then he went off on a rant about America’s justice system and how we lock up way too many people in this country.  He spoke from the heart. He talked about how once you get into the system in this country you know longer have hope. He didn’t have all the answers to fix it, but one of his answers was that his company, Shinola, hires former convicts and gives them hope.

It was a great American story. Panis’s speaking fee was $50,000, and I’m sure the CB folks cringed when he told the audience this. He also donated all $50,000 to youth organizations in Detroit including the downtown boxing league that supports getting kids off the streets and teaching them discipline by providing an outlet and support.