Category Archives: HR Technology

There is a huge disconnect in mobile recruiting!

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Pew Research  came out with some cool data recently on mobile usage and recruiting and a few things actually shocked me!  Check this out:

Americans with relatively low levels of educational attainment tend to lean heavily on their smartphones for online access in general, and this also play out in the ways members of this group utilize their smartphones while looking for employment. Among Americans who have used a smartphone in some part of a job search, those with higher education levels are more likely to use their phone for basic logistical activities – such as calling a potential employer on the phone or emailing someone about a job. On the other hand, smartphone job seekers who have not attended college are substantially more likely to have used their phone for more advanced tasks, such as filling out an online job application or creating a resume or cover letter.

If you’re an HR Pro like me, you believed the opposite of this was probably true! I think most TA pros and leaders would believe they couldn’t rely on mobile recruiting technology because those with lower education (thus lower income) would not have access to a smartphone. The opposite of this is true.

Lower educated individuals actually rely more on their mobile device to get online and communicate about things surrounding employment.

Currently, in the TA space most of the mobile recruiting push is around Tech hires.  Everything you read in regards to mobile recruiting will speak to the importance of having if you hire IT, but almost nothing if you’re trying to hire unskilled workers.  In fact, conventional wisdom still holds court when it comes to unskilled recruiting – paper applications, career page applications, job fairs, etc.

So, what is the major issue facing unskilled and lower skilled job seekers?  

Employers are still stuck on resumes and applications to get someone to apply.

Have you ever filled out an application on the screen of an iPhone 5?  It sucks! You won’t complete it. You’ll go to another company that is hiring and makes it easier to apply via another means, or by giving way less information.

Employers who are struggling to hire lower-skilled workers need to make some major changes to their mobile recruiting strategy.

Here are some tips: 

1. Have a mobile recruiting strategy, specifically designed for unskilled and lowers skilled candidates

2. Figure out what is the bare minimum of information you need to have some apply to a position via their mobile device. Get the rest when you see them in person.

3. Start measuring how your candidates are coming to you. Understand, while they might come to from a job board or online resource, that is still probably done by a mobile device. We need to change our mindset about how we attract lower-skilled workers via mobile.

This is a huge eye-opener to TA pros and leaders. Take note. Lower educated workers are more likely to use a mobile device to apply to your jobs than a highly educated worker!

 

 

T3 – Modern Survey

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This week on T3 I review employee engagement and talent analytics technology Modern Survey. I’ve been aware of Modern Survey for the past five years or so, as a great employee engagement survey technology. I’m glad I took a recent look because they’ve grown up over the past few years into a really advanced human capital measurement technology.

They still do employee engagement really well, but they also do performance, onboarding, exit interviewing, 360s and a really powerful analytics dashboard that will fully integrate with your enterprise level ATS, HRIS and CRM HR systems. It’s a content agnostic system as well, which basically means if you have a survey tool you currently use, they can integrate that into their platform.

Modern Survey’s platform has seven different modules that you can mix and match with: their business intelligence tool “Heat”, mThrive for employee engagement, m360, mPerformance, mExit, mSpark for onboarding and mReasearch which manages all of the content on the platform.

5 Things I really like about Modern Survey: 

1. Modern Survey has taken continuous measurement of your employees to the next level with employee engagement pulse surveys, onboarding and exit surveys all integrated into your existing HRM systems.

2. mSpark their onboarding tool is a game changer. Not only does HR find out about potential trouble early on, the predictive analytics basically tell you who is going to turn before they even know themselves!

3. Modern Survey is a true business intelligence tool for HR.  Some vendors are beginning to sell this out in the industry, but none have it figured out on the HR side of the business like Modern has currently. Their HIPO and High Performance 9 box analytics is something you need to see. Perfect to use for workforce and succession planning.

4. Modern Survey goes beyond just giving you your own data and has integrated great benchmark analytics into their platform to give your HR team the decision-making tools it needs.

5. Modern Survey goes one step past most technology vendors and gives you the knowledge you need to go with the tools. They just don’t provide software, but they also provide the consulting you need to kick off a major project like implementing new employee engagement surveying!

Modern Survey’s President is Don MacPherson.  He’s one of the good guys, Minnesota born and bred.  Rides a white horse type of guy. Sure he needs to make money, but I truly think he would rather put out a great product then make money! Because of this, you won’t find a better vendor to work for.

Modern Survey is blowing up right now and has taken on a number of large enterprise clients, but they started in the mid-market space.  Their sweet spot is going to be 1,000 employees and above.  They work across all industries: retail, healthcare, manufacturing, entertainment, etc.  Well worth your time to check them and demo!

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 – send me a note.

What is your most valuable hiring source?

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As many of you know I’m a writer over at CareerBuilder’s recruiting blog called The Hiring Site. Great group of industry practitioners writing about everything related to talent and recruiting. Because of my relationship, they share cool data with me, that I can share with you!

Some of the most eye-opening stuff I’ve gotten recently is all around hiring sources, and it’s not stuff you normally hear about or see.  Let’s face it. We (Talent Acquisition Pros) hate sharing our data because it makes us feel like we’re giving up our secret sauce!

It’s not really secret sauce, that’s the secret, we all pretty much do the same thing when it comes to talent attraction. We get referrals, we leverage our internal databases, we use job boards and postings, we pray. We pray a lot!

Here’s the data that CB shared with me from crunching the data of 1600+ CareerBuilder clients in 2015:

– 21% of hires came directly from using CareerBuilder.

– 41% of hires actually could have come from CareerBuilder, if the client was fully utilizing the technology they purchased!

– 45% of companies added more sources of hire over the past five years

– On average a candidate will use 18 sources to search for a job!

What does this really mean?

Every organization’s talent acquisition strategy has to have a multi-pronged approach.  You have jobs that you can post on CareerBuilder and find great talent. You have jobs that you will need a great referral strategy to fill. You have jobs that you’ll need outside specialized help to fill. You have jobs that need hardcore sourcing and bust-your-butt on the phone recruiting to fill. You need all these approaches, just one won’t work.

You need all these approaches, just one won’t work.

The key is are you fully utilizing the easiest, fastest sources you have?  We tend to want to discount our job board vendor (mine is CareerBuilder), but the numbers usually tell a different story.  41% of hires seems like a lot, but the data is deep! 1600 clients equal ten’s of thousands of recruiters banging on CB technology. The data is real.

What does this really mean, to you?

1. Make sure your recruiting staff is fully trained on the technology you give them. Then, retrain them!

2. Make sure you’re accurately measuring your source of hire. This is the single most important thing that recruiting leaders miss, consistently. It drives all of your purchasing decisions. I can’t tell you how many recruiters I speak with that truly believe LinkedIn is their most valuable source, and, so far, 100% of the time, the data says it’s not when we pull the numbers.

3. Are you looking at your existing internal database first? It’s the most valuable source in the industry and this is consistently underutilized.

Happy recruiting my friends!

 

T3 – The Complete List of 2015 HR and Talent Tech Companies Reviewed!

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I put a lot of work into reviewing a host of great HR and Talent Technology companies throughout the year. It’s something that I really love to do, and it’s has taught me so much, I can’t even tell you!

Here is the complete list of companies that I ‘officially’ reviewed in 2015:

January:

QueSocial: A social talent acquisition tool that will help you with your TA content strategy.

Avature: One of the hottest Recruitment Marketing technology platforms on the market.

Jibe: A very cool mobile recruiting and analytics solution.

February:

TalkPush: A technology that automates your normal phone screening of candidates.

NAS Recruitment Innovation: Recruitment marketing and advertising platform that helps you attract more talent.

OrgVue: HR Business Intelligence tool, one of the most powerful tools I demo’d all year!

LeoForce: Recruiting robotics software to take your sourcing to the next level.

March:

BrandAmper: Employment branding solution that utilizes the voice of your people to build your brand.

Talemetry: Recruiting marketing and automation software, one of the hottest segments in HR tech in 2015.

HarQen: Recruiting efficiency tools that help your TA shop get more done with less.

HoneIt: Digital interview platform that helps job seekers.

April:

PapirFly: Employment branding software that helps ensure consistency of your brand worldwide.

Gr8People: All in one recruitment platform solution. ATS, assessment, marketing, analytics, onboarding, etc.

Workshape: A tool that will describe your jobs in a new non-textual way, helping you hire better for organizational fit.

May:

iRevu: Micro-feedback performance management mobile real-time tool.

Breezy.HR: ATS light, Breezy is to recruitment technology what BambooHR is to HR technology.

Greenhouse.io: New ATS player for the SMB space that has partnered with some of the best recruitment technology on the planet.

June:

CoPilot: A reinvention of self-serve relocation management technology, that’s pretty sweet.

ZipRecruiter: Online job distribution and job board that took the U.S. by storm in 2015.

RecruiterSidekick: Add-on tool to your ATS that helps you mine the great talent hidden in your ATS.

PeopleDoc: Top document management and HR service delivery software on the planet, helping HR shops become more efficient.

July:

Hirabl: Specialized staffing vendor software that helps staffing companies catch missing revenue.

RocketLawyer: Online service helping your employees deal with all their personal legal needs. (Editor note: I personally made my own will using this service!)

LifeGuides: Job description type reviews by your employees to help candidates determine if this job and organization is for them.

HRCloud: HR system of record designed for the SMB market that has a very cool and modern feel.

August:

LearnKit: Custom e-learning agency that actually produces employee e-learning that isn’t cheesy.

Hyphen: Hyphen is a mobile app that allows employees to communicate anonymously, but within a company parameter.

Glassdoor Employer Center: The employer side of company review site Glassdoor and all the great tools available to employers.

September:

Betterific: A crowdsourcing, communication platform that allows employees to present and share ideas.

TalentStream Technologies: CareerBuilder’s new entry into pre-hire recruitment technology space that is very powerful.

EmployUs: A mobile app that offers employees money for giving you referrals to hire.

PaySavvy: Fully integrated payroll, HR, and time management for mid-sized companies in Canada. An alternative to ADP.

October:

Microsoft Excel: Like it or not, about 70% of in HR and TA still use Excel as a technology we rely on every day.

Halogen Software: Simply the best performance software platform on the market.

ElevatedCareers: A new career site by eHarmony that leverages their date matching technology to find you great talent.

Phenom People: The newest entrant to the Talent Relationship Marketing (TRM) technology market, that helps companies from visitor to candidate on your career site.

November:

Anthology;: Formerly Poachable, they are replacement to the traditional job placement and headhunted candidate services. 

UlitPro: One of the major HCM providers that is anchored by great customer service.

December:

Lever: A new ATS to the market that is born from CRM. Positioned to be a major player in the ATS market.

Clinch: Recruitment marketing and automation software that just might have more functionality than any of the players in the space.

StandOut: One of the newest players in performance management built on Marcus Buckingham’s philosophy of focusing on employees strengths.

Can’t wait to continue this series into 2016 and keep bringing you the latest and greatest in HR and Talent technology that is on the market!

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 – send me a note.

T3 – StandOut by The Marcus Buckingham Company @StandOutTMBC

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This week on T3 I review the engagement and performance management platform StandOut.  StandOut was the product created by The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC), to further his work and research on helping organizations become world-class. For anyone who has read Marcus’s books or heard him speak, you can imagine this technology is very important to him.

If you’re like me, and like what Marcus has to say in regards to engagement and performance, the philosophy about why and how StandOut was created becomes an easy sell. StandOut was built around the concept of leadership and coaching, specifically around what is it that the best leaders, across industry do, and how do you get your own leaders to emulate this behavior.

The StandOut platform is a comprehensive engagement and performance management suite designed around the interaction between your team leaders and team members, not around HR.  I see more and more HR technology going down this path. If you want high user adoption, design the software for the end-user. Makes sense. With performance management, HR is not the end-user, your team leaders are the end user.

StandOut’s feedback philosophy is designed around a quick ‘pulse’ concept. The process should only take a few minutes each week to complete. It’s not task management, but more of a sharing of priorities, getting everyone on the same page quickly and going about the work at hand. Social recognition is built within the platform as well with ShoutOuts amongst the team members.

5 Things I really like about StandOut: 

1. Engagement Pulse is built around quick and easy questions that are nationally benchmarked, and also give your Team Leaders real in the moment coaching suggestions to drive great conversations with their team members, specifically around their needs.

2. Performance Pulse gives you a great view of the organizational as a whole and allows you to drill down via each team. Ultimately, organizations still need a way to compare the performance of their employees, and this does an excellent job. All the data is also weighted across the organization so it gets calibrated accordingly, so you don’t have one team always ranked higher because that team lead is an easier rater, etc.

3. ShoutOuts. Social recognition is huge, and having a system that encourages this, and tracks this is great.  This can also help those team leaders who want to do more recognition, but get caught up in the daily grind and they just forget to do it. ShoutOuts helps establish great habits by your team leads that drives positive engagement.

4. Engagement dashboard is a great tool that allows you to see who is leading your most engaged teams, but also who and how you need to help with those teams that aren’t as engaged as the rest.

5. The entire platform philosophy is built around how do we leverage our employees strengths, which you could assume being its a product of TMBC. Still, this sets it apart from many performance management platforms on the market.

StandOut is well worth taking a look at and a demo if you’re in the market for engagement and/or performance management software. It’s quite new and they have a ton more on the roadmap they are looking to add.  The team they have in place to is top notch, so I expect to see more great stuff from StandOut in the future.

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 – send me a note.

T3 – @Clinch

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This week on T3 I’m reviewing Clinch. Clinch is a recruitment marketing software that will help organizations attract, identify, and convert active and passive candidates, and oh so much more! It does a ton, so much, I will struggle to actually tell you all Clinch can really do, you’ll have to demo to see everything.

So, I’ll start off with an example we all have in TA.

Most passive candidates won’t spend time applying to your jobs. They’ll stop by the careers site, check you out, lurk on some content, watch some videos, etc. But, probably will never apply the first time they look you up.  This is a problem for all of us, because we really would love to know who these people are. Clinch solves this for you, and it’s really cool!

Clinch lets you know how candidates are engaging with you, when you don’t even know them yet. The technology tracks people who come to your site, without them knowing (by the way, most sites do this to you now, you just don’t know it).  The tech doesn’t actually know much about you at this point. When that candidate comes back, and maybe inputs their email address to get download a whitepaper, or something, now the tech puts all these dots together, and begins to share all the data back to you.

How awesome would it be to know that some engineer, who just downloaded a cool piece of your content, also was the same engineer who had already stopped by two other times and the tech shows you exactly what they looked at and for how long. Also, the tech sends your recruiter a quick message to your recruiter saying “hey! he’s on the site right now checking out a job, but isn’t applying!” So, your recruiter can send them a quick message!

That’s cool, right?!

Clinch also makes it super easy for your team to quickly set up landing pages for jobs, with unique content, etc. Basically, enhancing the ATS experience for your candidates. As well as automating candidate messaging so your candidates, or potential candidates, are getting messages to them that make sense to the context in which they are engaging with your brand, not just generic emails sent to the masses. Talk about raising your candidate experience game!

5 Things I really like about Clinch:

1. Clinch lets you show candidates something new every time they stop by to see you. Your normal careers page has a lifespan of about two years, and candidates just see the same thing over and over. Clinch makes it unique for them and every position that candidate looks at.

2. Automatic scheduling for all of your companies employment branding social feeds of when to promote certain content, jobs, etc., how often and which platform.

3. Clinch grabs candidates before they even hit the ATS, which is great because most drop off before they get too deep into your process. Gives you searchable lists of these candidates, and allows you to still engage with these potential candidates. Think about how you could easily use this in campus recruiting. Just input a student’s email address, or have them do it on tablet at your booth, and BAM, Clinch allows you to market to them and track them, especially as they begin to engage with your brand, career site, etc.

4. Clinch gives you a way to go after your competitors employees, by letting you know when an employee from a competitor is visiting your site, and will even show that competitors employee a specially designed landing page built to speak right to that individually!

5. On the Clinch roadmap is a tool that so many of us in TA will want. The ability to begin tracking the behavior of how our hiring managers engage with the candidates we sent them! You will have to check this out, it’s really cool. Dare to say, this is something every TA leader will be talking about next year!

There are a number of really great recruitment marketing tools in the space right now, and Clinch is showing it wants to be a market leader. Well worth a demo. Be prepared, it’s a lot.  I can see some TA Leaders getting overwhelmed about how they will use all of this. Clinch is designed for larger companies (mid-market to enterprise, 100-1000 hires per year) that probably have recruitment marketing as a position or function, or are seriously considering adding this function. I will say, regardless of your size, it’s very affordable for what you get.

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 – send me a note.

Sackett’s Guide to Visiting Sydney – Part 1

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First, let me say, I’m VERY American. This means I like all my American comforts and stuff.  This will help put this post into perspective when you read it.  I recently got a chance to visit Sydney, AUS to speak at HR Tech Fest 2015.  It’s a great HR Tech conference based in Sydney, with great HR and Talent Pros from Australia and New Zealand.

My wife and I stayed for a week after the conference, because if you’re going to make that 14-hour flight from the states, you really need to stay a while. A week wasn’t long enough, but The Sackett’s kill vacations, so we get a lot done in a week.

I read a bunch about visiting Sydney before we went, but it never seems to tell you the really important stuff. Stuff that will cause an American to be uncomfortable, or slightly put off our normal routine while leaving our great country! So, I wanted to share some real tips for anyone traveling to Sydney from America.

Tim’s Tips to visiting Sydney:

–Soda or Pop (Coke, Pepsi, etc.) seems to be hated by Australians.  Soda is super expensive in Sydney. Like $3-5 for a 12 oz can. Plus, you get very limited options. Most places only had Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero or Pepsi Max. That’s it! If you searched you could find Diet Dr. Pepper and Mt. Dew, and a few local sodas, but it’s clear that soda drinking is not something Australians are really into.  Also, no free refills at restaurants! So, you pay $4 for a small glass of Coke, which won’t come close to quenching your thirst or getting you to the finish of your meal! As you can imagine this was a major problem for me! In some bars we went to (during happy hour) the beer was the same price as pop!

–Bar and grill type restaurants are everywhere in Sydney, and most have the same exact type of menu: Burgers, which they use as a ‘title’, chicken sandwiches are also called ‘burgers’. Pizza, thin crust, fresh mozzarella, almost no place had pepperoni. Steaks, which were wonderful everywhere we went (great beef in Australia). Some kind of seafood, also very good and fresh in Sydney!  Almost no Mexican food is available, it’s rare. Asian restaurants are everywhere and in all kinds (Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, Korean, etc.).

–Food is extremely expensive in Sydney. Restaurants, stores, etc. doesn’t matter. Plan on spending a ton to feed yourself. Also, portions are much smaller in Australia then in America. The one thing that was similar in portion size and value was the Fish and Chips, which you can get everywhere, and always good!

–Customer service. People in Australia are extremely friendly, but they have a different attitude towards customer service. Which is basically, help yourself! There is very little tipping in Australia, and wait staff gets paid like $18-20/hr. Not having to rely on tips to get paid makes them indifferent to really waiting on you! Most bar and grill restaurants you have to go up to the bar and order your own food. If you come in and sit at a table, you will sit there forever and no one will come ask if you want something!

–Take Away (takeout) – you will get asked at every eating place if you want to ‘take away’, which means you just want to take your food and leave, not eat at the restaurant. I think this is done because they don’t really want to wait on you! Most locals seemed to take away. The foreigners were the only ones you really wanted full service!

–Television is Australia is weird. First, there news broadcasts are very global. Also, there news hosts actually give their opinion! Sometimes very strong opinion. In the states we just hire models with no opinion to give us our news. Australians love American TV, but it’s not on the networks you think it should be. An NBC show in the states might be shown on ABC or Fox in Sydney, but still have the NBC logo! Also, they will bundle a bunch of reality shows on different networks in the states on one network in Sydney. Plus, they’ll show ‘new’ shows that probably played a few years ago in the states, but also mix in new shows as well.

–There are almost no African or African-American people in Sydney! Like strangely absent! In a week I literally saw 4 ‘black’ people in a city of millions! It was a bit unsettling. This is also weird since it seemed like Australians were really into HipHop culture.  You heard the music and fashion everywhere, just no black faces. I never did figure this out. But plan on not seeing black people, but seeing Asians and Indians who have Australian accents, not their own countries. This will throw you as well. 

Part 2 tomorrow…

T3 – @Lever #ATSDifferently

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This week on T3 I get to look at a rather new entrant to the applicant tracking system (ATS) field, Lever.  Lever was designed from the ground-up to be different than every other ATS on the market.  Most ATS software are built for the recruiter in mind. The thinking being this is a software used by recruiters, we need to design it so the recruiters will love it.

That all makes perfect sense, if the basis is true – used by recruiters for recruiters.  Lever decided that basis wasn’t totally true. ATS software should be used by everyone in the company. Yes, recruiters definitely need to use it. Also, hiring managers need to use it. Those in the interview process need to use it, etc. If attracting talent is a key component of your organizational success, then you need an ATS that is designed to be used by everyone, not just recruiters.

Lever is designed for organizations who are really focused on talent attraction, where hiring managers own the talent on their teams and are keenly involved in the talent acquisition process. Lever isn’t trying to be the ATS for everyone. They’re trying to be the ATS that companies in tough talent markets use, where talent is an organizational priority, not an HR or TA priority.

5 Things I really like about Lever: 

1. Lever structured their database differently so that you don’t end up with duplicate profiles within your ATS.  It’s structured around the candidate, not requisitions, so you end up with a much cleaner database overall.

2. Lever is designed around CRM functionality, it didn’t bolt on a CRM to it.  This makes a difference when it comes to the functionality of how it automatically follows up in the future for you.  The hope is you don’t end up with a gold mine of talent in your database that you can never mine. Lever is constantly working to mine the gold you already have.

3. Lever’s reporting is a step above most ATSs in that they, again, went at it from an organizational need, not HRs need. Within Lever you can instantly see your pipeline speed and conversation rates all at a granular level to see the detail you need to make quick decisions.

4. Candidate interview scheduling is built within Lever, and integrates all parties, the candidate, hiring managers, interview teams, HR and TA. No back and forth stuck in the middle go between any longer. You select who to involve and the system will instantly show you when and what conference rooms are available to get it done. All in one step.

5. Collecting candidate feedback is another strong functionality within Lever.  It’s a simple interface any hiring manager or anyone on the interview team, can use easily. Plus, there are auto reminders that will continue to bug all involved until it’s done!

Lever is fairly new but already has over 700 customers, with some major tech companies who have recently switched over from some very big ATS products, which really speaks to how they are doing things differently within the ATS space.  Definitely worth a demo if you are not happy with your current ATS, or in the market looking for something new.

Lever is led by a great team, and I suspect you’ll continue to see innovation come out of this camp.  I met with them personally at HR Tech, and their CEO, Sarah Nahm, was one of the few HR Tech executives who truly seem to care what I thought about the product and took written notes as we discussed it. Most just want the free publicity, she wanted to know how to make her product better. That’s rare, and exciting!

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 – send me a note.

HR Tech Fest in Sydney

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This past week I got the chance to attend the HR Tech Fest conference in Sydney. It was an awesome experience to be around great HR and Talent Pros from Australia, New Zealand and a surprising number that came in from the UK.

I was told by a number of folks, before I came to Sydney, that Australian HR is about 3-5 years behind the United States.  What I found was that about 80% is actually probably about the same. While some things might be a bit behind, some of that has to do with the differences in regulations and culture, more than lack of knowledge!

Australians have to some major people issues to deal with that we don’t even consider in America.  First, Australian’s compensation systems and processes are far more complex than their U.S. counterparts. Also, Australian HR Pros have to deal with productivity issues that we wouldn’t even consider.

There is a push to pay waitstaff and service level people in the U.S  a living wage. Australia already does this. Guess what?  It’s cause major productivity issues in Australia. When you pay a server $20/hour how do you incentivize them to give good service?  I constantly witnessed business losing major revenue because servers weren’t coming back to the table to ‘sell’ that next drink or food item, or pushing to turn tables over quickly to get another party in.  In the states, this doesn’t happen because servers get paid more the more the table orders.

This isn’t just a restaurant issue. In grocery stores, clothing stores, etc., there seemed to be little motivation for anyone to sell anything! If you want it, you can buy it. If you don’t, don’t. The workers will ring you up, if they don’t have something else they would rather be doing!  Can you imagine working in operations and HR in the states having to fight this, daily?!  A cultural phenomenon, that has a major impact to how you perform HR.

The HR and Talent Pros at HR Tech Fest spoke and talked about the same issues we all talk about.  How do we get better at using the technology we have? How do we improve the technology we have?  How do we get our hiring managers and employees to use our tech? How do we attract great talent to our organization? Etc.

I’m not sure if it’s the international mix of HR and Talent bloggers and thought leaders that continue to build around the world, but it seems like the distance and differences between HR pros worldwide continues to narrow.  The access to great HR knowledge is a click away, and more and more pros are clicking to find answers!

What I learned is Australian HR and Talent Pros have many of the same HR Tech issues facing them as their U.S. counterparts.  Are they behind the U.S.? Well, some are, but guess what, those are the same ones who are behind in the U.S. as well. It’s those pros who refuse to get involved and find the information they need.

The Australians I met were engaged, on top of their business and involved with making it better. I think that’s all we can ask out of any HR Pro, regardless of where you’re located in the world!

T3 – UltiPro – @UltimateHCM

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This week on T3 I take a look at one of the big boys in human capital management (HCM) software Ultimate Software. If you’re like me you probably have some confusion of what or who Ultimate Software really is. Are they Ultimate Software, UltiPro, UltimateHCM, I truly had no idea if these were all the same or different!

Ultimately (pun intended!), I found out that the main product of Ultimate Software is called UltiPro and its an enterprise level human capital management system, or in HR terms, it’s your system of record, plus some.  To give you some more perspective UltiPro runs in the same space as HR technology companies, Oracle, SAP, Workday, Ceridian and ADP.

At its core UltiPro provides you with HR, Payroll and Benefits software. All clients that use UltiPro have this core, plus they give you the ability to buy into the full enterprise for talent management, applicant tracking, compensation, time and labor, Business Intelligence/predictive analytics, payment and tax, etc.

5 things that I really liked about UltiPro:

1. Definite advantage for Canadian customers as UltiPro payroll runs both Canadian employees and U.S. employees on the same system. This is rare in the payroll world, and about 75% of Canadian companies have U.S. employees.  All of your employees in UltiPro, US and Canadian, will be housed in the same database.

2. UltiPro doesn’t seem like a cobbled together mess of technology. It was designed as one holistic system and reacts that way when you are using it. UltiPros manager and employee Self-service is one of the better ones I’ve seen in the industry.

3. The business intelligence and analytics within UltiPro is awesome. It’s built so that individuals can pull exactly what they want, in the way they want, not just pre-built reports where you get what they want you to have. I was especially impressed with their retention dashboard with retention prediction and succession management.

4. UltiPro makes HR and organizational compliance extremely easy. You can tell this was built with input from real HR pros. Need your EEOC annual report? Pull it instantly by clicking one button! UltiPro delivers over 150 different business processes, designed to be best practice right out of the box, but with your ability to change and adapt to your specific processes.

5. This might seem small but it’s a big differentiator in the HCM space, in that UltiPro does the tax side of payroll beyond most payroll systems. Each UltiPro client is indemnified, and they ensure you have the right tax forms, rates, and they’ll actually file for you as well! This is huge for SMB clients!

So, why should you use them over the other big guys in the HCM space?  Ultimate Software sells from a philosophy of ‘we’re the small, big guys’, they’re the nice guys of HCM.  If you’ve dealt with some of the big HCM players recently, you’ll understand this!

So, what size do you need to be to really be an organization that would use UltiPro? They’re primarily an enterprise level software, but do play in the SMB space more than most. So, roughly 300-1500 on the SMB side, they’re enterprise clients average around 5,000, but rise to well over 10,000.

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 – send me a note.