Category Archives: HR Technology

T3 – The Resumator

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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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.

This week I looked at The Resumator!  The Resumator is a fairly new company that started in 2009, and is growing like a weed.  They are an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) play, based out of Pittsburgh, PA, with an office in San Francisco.

Yep, I did it.  I started off with an ATS.  Stop! Don’t go, hear me out, this isn’t your momma’s ATS!

I decided to look into The Resumator for a couple of reasons:

1. They specialize in servicing the SMB (small medium business) market – 100-1000 employee companies. I love this space, because I think the HR and Talent Pros in these shops work harder than anyone else!

2. They’re hugely successful. Which tells me, unlike the other 1,739 ATS vendors, they know something everyone else doesn’t.  3,000 plus paid clients, tens of thousands of users, that’s not easy in the SMB ATS space.

I don’t need to go into a ton about what they do.  They’re an ATS, I get it, you get it. Most everyone uses an ATS and most people hate their ATS.  Why? Well, in one simple word it’s customization. You want it, because you think your shop is special.  It’s not, but you force your ATS vendor to customize to you, which causes all kinds of issues with the system. You shouldn’t have done that. That’s why you’re unsatisfied.

The Resumator has one of the more ‘clean’ user interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX) I’ve seen.  The UI is what you might think of as the ‘design’ of the system. You’ll hear techie types use “UI” and “UX” a ton, don’t get intimidated.  Think Pottery Barn versus Walmart.  You want Pottery Barn design in your home, but you have a Walmart budget.  The Resumator gives you a Pottery Barn ATS UI, for your Walmart budget.

This comes back to their size.  Most ATS have poor UI, thus giving you a poor experience, because they don’t have enough users to justify doing really cool stuff that you see in systems for enterprise buyers.  They have scale.  They use that scale to give you features you don’t usually see in SMB ATS products.  One of the cool ones I loved was what they call “Jobnosis“. It basically rates your Job Descriptions and Titles, automatically, versus all the other data from everyone that uses their systems. It then gives you the likelihood you’ll actually find the talent you want, and gives you suggestions to make it better.  That is really cool.

5 things that impressed me about The Resumator:

1. They leverage the data from 30,000 daily applicants to educate their SMB clients on what is working in real time. Not giving you ‘best practices’ from three years ago. 2 Million+ hires since launching the product.

2. Their email integration is tight and seamless. This isn’t the case for so many of the ATS products for the SMB space.

3. They’re focused on how your hires perform, after the fact, to help you hire more of the better ones. Again, goes back to their ability to leverage ‘big’ data.

4. Super customer focus. Over 30+ new releases in 2014 alone to improve the UX/UI based on customer feedback on making the product better and faster.

5.  Very solid recruiting tools are encompassed into the main product, no extra price, for both passive and active candidate sourcing.

 I’ve purchased 7 different ATS’s in my 20 years of HR and Talent Acquisition.  I have to say that The Resumator also has one of the less painful pricing models I’ve ever seen, that doesn’t penalize for growth!  You pay one monthly fee, as many users as you want, no matter how big your organization.

I keep coming back to the word ‘clean’.  The ATS market is junked up with ‘clunky’ products and systems.  The Resumator wasn’t one of these.  They were ‘clean’ in UI, UX and pricing. Full integration with one of my favorite SMB HR System’s of Record in BambooHR as well!  Like Bamboo, these guys really get the SMB space at a different level than most companies.

Next week’s T3 Company will be BlackbookHR’s newest award winning product RNA that was just launched this month at the HR Technology Conference.

Employee-Zero

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All this Ebola talk and Patient-Zero stuff has got me all fired up to be an investigator!  I can’t even imagine the nightmare it must be to try and track back all this illness to the first person.  But, it’s also the coolest thing that they can actually do that!

What if we could trace back to ‘Employee-Zero’?

You know, that one hire, that one employee, that turned it all around for your organization.  I’ve worked at some really successful companies, and I’ve worked at some companies that were successful and then on a downward trend.  I like to think that my hire didn’t put us on a downward trend, but let’s face it, no one really did any due diligence to find out for sure!

You see organizational leadership do this all the time for bad hires and bad results.  I have to say, usually, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) take the brunt of this.  “Well, we were great before they hired that new CMO, then sales went into the tank and we haven’t been the same since!”  CMOs become Employee-Zero more than any other single employee! They get way too much blame for bad results, and way too much credit for good results!

You almost never hear about Employee-Zero when it comes to good results!  “Yeah, you know when we really took off, it’s when we hired Tim!”  Bad results equal a bad individual hire.  Good results equal a team of good employees and good hires.  Like how that goes!?  We like to place blame on a few, but give credit to many. Welcome to modern day leadership theory.

We measure almost everything in in HR and Talent Acquisition, you would think one of the new shiny data analytics companies would come up with some secret sauce on how to figure out which one of your employees is Employee-Zero.  Why would it be important?  If we could figure out why that one employee, or why certain employees early on made us successful, or put us on the path to success, don’t we really finally solve the hiring equation?

It’s a bit altruistic I know.  The reality is we would be looking at historical data, the times have changed, the conditions have changed, there is no real way of us replicating that exact scenario again to get the same magical results.   Regardless, I think it would be cool to know, I’m a HR geek that way.  Talk about analyzing your hiring!  I’m sure it’s just a matter of time, many organizations obviously have the data, we just need some data scientist to believe it matters.

What do you think?  Do you know who your Employee-Zero is?

T3 – Talent Techie Tuesday

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I’ve decided I need a new series.  My last series – Rap Lyrics That Shaped My Leadership Style – was hugely popular and on a weekly basis still gets way more reads than it should!

I’m calling it T3 (Talent Techie Tuesday).

My goal is to demo and review the coolest Talent Acquisition and Sourcing technology that is out there, and let you all know what I think.  My goal is to do this for a year, 52 straight weeks.  There are thousands of companies in our space, most you have never heard about, or have no idea what they do.  Some are super inexpensive to use, and have huge ROI.  I want to uncover these companies, and show you what they can do.

As a reader you can expect my normal level of content.  That means I’ll be giving you my real take on what I think of the solution and how you can use it.  You can also expect some snark, and grammatical errors – I refuse to not follow my brand!

As a provider of one of these solutions, you can expect me to be fair and really look for the positive ways end users can best leverage your product/service/solution.  If you want to be a part of this, hit me with an email at timsackett@comcast.net.  I’ll schedule you for a one hour demo/Q&A and then I’ll throw it up the next week on my site.   I won’t be accepting any compensation for these reviews, and you, as a vendor, won’t have any editorial say on what I write.

My friend Steve Boese used to own this space at his HR Technology blog. Then he took on the task of running the HR Technology Conference, and the role has made it harder for him to write about individual companies in the HR and Talent space.  I use to love reading his product reviews, and he introduced me to so many great companies. I’m hoping I can carry on the torch.

I love recruiting technology.   In my view all the great innovation is being done in this space, and it’s moving so fast!  I hope I can show you some really cool tools that will change you recruiting and sourcing life!

Stay tuned.

ACA Complaince – HR, You’re In Trouble!

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I wanted to title this – “The most boring post ever!” But you guys know I couldn’t write a boring post!

Going through my debrief of HR Tech and I had a meeting with ADP regarding health care reform compliance.  Yes. It was as boring as it sounds!  But there’s a catch, this is stuff that the real HR folks are really concerned about, especially small and medium sized HR shops (50 – 999 employees).  Let’s face it, we don’t have the staff or budget to really feel 100% confident we know what we really need to be doing!  It’s something that can make us look like fools to our executives.  So, I wanted to pass along some stuff I think might help.

ADP has data coming out of their ears! They surveyed our executives in the SMB space and here’s what they are saying:

  1. 69% are concerned with the cost of health coverage and other benefits
  2. 54% are concerned with health care reform legislation

I’ll bet you that 54% is really 100%, but the other 46% believe you (HR Pro) have it under control, and most of us probably don’t!

ACA is confusing, and it seems like a moving target.  Most vendors will tell you they can help, but when you really look into the folks who are giving them the information to give you, they’re really no different than you or I.  What I really liked about my meeting with ADP is they have the resources to throw some really, really smart people at this, and they have the size and influence to probably get insight directly from those writing the legislation.  With great size, comes great access!

ADP has launched a new solution called ADP Health Compliance.  ADP Health Compliance combines Software as a Service (SaaS) with rigorous managed services staffed by ACA experts who can help to enable compliance while managing all of the complex regulatory requirements: Eligibility, Affordability and Regulatory Management.  And you don’t even need to be an ADP client to sign up to use this solution!

“The ACA has transformed the practice of workforce management into a fluctuating system of checks and balances, and one missed step can be the difference between compliance and significant financial penalties,” said Saliterman.  “ADP Health Compliance’s managed service feature is truly unique and can provide large employers with the expertise that only a leader in tax and compliance can deliver.”

“In our restaurants, the vast majority of our employees are variable hour workers whose time will change shift to shift, week to week.  We need to constantly monitor employees hours—12 months a year—to determine who is required to be offered  health coverage benefits and whether or not that coverage is affordable, which can be a heavy lift,” said Bruce Clark, Chief Financial Officer of Hooters Management Corporation, an early adopter of ADP Health Compliance.  “Restaurant operators are good at running restaurants, but that doesn’t mean that they’re good at complicated compliance tasks.  Our plan is to keep doing what we do and do that great, and we’ll leave ACA administration to our expert partner…“

Yeah, ACA isn’t sexy.  It’s not employee engagement platforms, and digital interviewing and big data.  ACA compliance is where HR Pros earn their chops, it’s real-life HR, and it’s something we can’t afford to get wrong.  ADP isn’t paying me.  I think they have a product a lot of you could actually use, and it protects your organization.  Check it out. It’s probably worth your time to take a look and see where you might be at risk!

The Big Data Conundrum #hrtechconf

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I’m at the HR Technology Conference this week and one of the big themes for the last couple of years has been ‘Big Data’.  Every product has it, and every sale rep is selling it.  The problem is most HR pros really don’t understand Big Data.  Let’s face it, most of the people selling Big Data don’t really understand Big Data!

This started to get really popular about two to three years ago in the HR space.

At first it started out with just this need to deliver Big Data to the end HR user.  There wasn’t a ton of thought put into it.  It was just, like, hey, here’s a bunch of really cool data about your organization, have fun!

That caused a bunch of issues because there was this assumption that the HR pros and executives getting this data, understood it, first, and could actually know what inferences to make from it, second.  Most could do neither.

At the 2014 HR Tech conference the HR vendors are finally starting to get this.

The good vendors are no longer just giving you more data.  They are packaging data in a way that says this is the data, and this is what it means to your organization.  The best are now taking it one step further and telling you what are the next steps for your organization based on your data set.

This last step is very important.  True Big Data is not numbers of people and demographics.  True Big Data is really complex scientific numbers that the normal person can’t comprehend.  It’s Matrix stuff! It’s data around the science about how and what we do, and from the science what is probably going to happen next.

The problem is we all think we can take a look at data and know what it means.  We think we know what we need to do next.  The science actually will usually tell you your dead wrong, but we’re Pros and we’ve been doing this for a long time, so we think we are ‘smarter’ than the science.  We aren’t.  What we are is biased.  Science and Big Data aren’t really biased to any one angle.

From my time at this year’s show, let me recommend one thing: listen to and follow what the science is telling you.  You’ll will move yourself and the organization forward faster than you ever thought.  Also, make sure you pick a vendor who has data scientist that have the ability of breaking down the science for you, and can than tell you what those next steps need to be.

Way too many have scientist that can tell you what the data means, but get very weak when it comes to what to do next an organizational setting.  That is critical to success!

 

Are Your Managers Really Doing their One-on-Ones?

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I’m at the HR Tech Conference this week, so plan on some short and quick posts about cool stuff I’m seeing.  Today, I got to demo Halogen’s new, and Top Award winner for 2014, 1:1 Exchange.  It’s a module within their performance management suite that makes manager and employee one-on-one meetings a breeze!

Here’s the deal.  Your managers aren’t doing their one-on-one meetings.  You know it, they know it.  You have worked endlessly to get your organization to understand how important these communications are to better performance, higher retention and higher employee satisfaction, but still, they aren’t consistent enough in your environment.

Don’t get depressed. Everyone is having the same issue.  That’s what I love about Halogen’s 1:1 Exchange. It’s practical and it works. At HR Tech, that is actually kind of rare!  You get a lot of cool stuff, that really doesn’t have practical application in real world day-to-day HR and management.

1:1 Exchange actually builds your managers full one-on-one agendas, tracks everything, gives them great kickoff questions to drive conversation, ties back to your department and organizational goals, and schedules followups. It pretty much idiot proofed one-on-ones for your managers! That’s a good thing! Many of them need this, desperately!

Something so simple, but so powerful.  We talk to we’re blue in the face about the importance of one-on-ones, and this system makes sure you as a leader, HR and executive have the ability to not only check to ensure they are happening, but you can spot check the quality of message that is being delivered.  While some managers might see this as micromanaging, I look at it as a great way to know which of your managers need additional help in getting better at these meetings.  This isn’t about punishment, this is about helping our managers get better at leading people!

Halogen already has one the best performance management systems on the market, and by adding 1:1 Exchange, they might have just lapped the field.  Check them out!

 

 

Top HR Products for 2014!

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I like new technology, which is why I’m headed out to the HR Technology Conference this week.  HR tech has continues to transform how we deliver HR and Talent solutions to our organizations.  I’m always amazed at the new stuff that comes out each year.  Human Resource Executive named their 2014 award winners for Top HR Products last week, and the awards are given out at the HR Technology Conference.  I’ll be checking all of these out for sure, but here is a preview of the award winners:

Appcast.io – www.appcast.io

A recruiting marketing platform that helps organizations fill their hard-to-fill requisitions by marketing it to 6,000 career and consumer sites on a pay-per-applicant basis.

Entelo Diversity – www.entelo.com

Entelo claims to have a program that will help you hire black people! Or women, veterans, Hispanics, etc. Basically, you can stop trying to search job boards using words like “Black” and “Spanish”.

Halogen 1:1 Exchange – www.halogensoftware.com

Halogen takes performance management to the next level with Halogen 1:1 Exchange.  This is a one-on-one meeting-management tool that works with other Halogen TalentSpace modules and is designed to spur greater communication, collaboration and coaching. The module tracks the frequency of these one-on-one meetings to provide employers with evidence these discussions are occurring. It also correlates the impact they are having on performance ratings, engagement scores and turnover.

Health E(fx) – www.healthefx.us

Health E(fx) is a stand-alone solution designed to help employers avoid penalties while optimizing their benefits strategies, decisions and costs within the Affordable Care Act environment.

HireVue Insights – www.hirevue.com

I’ve seen this one live and it’s awesome, can’t say enough about it! Basically, it analyzes your digital interviews to automatically give you the best candidates based on 15,000+ attributes. All your candidates.  Have 1000 apply, and you know you’ll only really look at the first 25 you applied, even though number 999 might be your best? Insights solves this! Plus, tells you which hiring managers are your best at selection!

IBM Social Learning – www.ibm.com

IBM Social Learning, powered by IBM Kenexa learning solutions and IBM social-collaboration and analytics tools, is designed to help people engage with one another, contribute expertise and learn from others using interactive media in near real-time.

Match-Click – www.match-click.com

Match-Click is a video-driven recruiting platform designed to let employers give job candidates a preview of their new corporate environment and potential supervisor and co-workers, through short, 20-second video clips featuring hiring managers and would-be colleagues describing the position and the organization.

QUEsocial – www.quesocial.com

Another one I’m really interested in seeing live! QUEsocial blends employer branding and social recruiting into a social talent-acquisition Software-as-a-Service technology platform. The idea is to enable recruiters and — by extension, employers — to “amplify and extend” the employer brand through individual recruiter and sourcing networks.

RecruitiFi – www.recruitifi.com

RecruitiFi is intended to offer organizations a new way to source talent by letting them select and post jobs to 250 expert recruiters from its membership pool of approximately 2,000.

Skillrater.com – www.skillrater.com

Skillrater.com is a cloud-based performance-feedback tool that incorporates social networking and collaboration.

There will be hundreds of other companies as well. I’ll make sure to give you a run down on some companies and technology that you haven’t ever heard of, yet, when I return.  The coolest part of HR Tech is finding a company that is nothing today, but will be industry leading in 3 to 5 years.  Last year I saw Blackbook HR and their Sense product and they are blowing up – such a great piece of technology to help us with one of HR’s biggest issues – Turnover!

Who will it be this year? I can’t wait to find out.

The 6 Things You Need To Know To Be Great At HR

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The one great thing I love about going to HR and Talent conferences is that you always get reminded about what really good HR should look like.  It doesn’t mean that your shop will be there, but it gives you something to shoot for.  I’ll admit, sometimes it can be frustrating listening to some HR Pro from a great brand tell you how they ‘built’ their great employment brand through all their hard work and brilliant ideas.  All the while, not mentioning anything about “oh, yeah, and we already had this great brand that marketing spends $100 million a year to keep great!”

Regardless, seeing great HR always reminds me that great HR is obtainable for everyone.  Great HR has nothing to do with size or resources.  It has a lot of do with an HR team, even a team of one, deciding little by little we’re going to make this great!

I think there are six things you need to know to make your HR department great:

1. Know how to ‘sell’ your HR vision to the organization and your executives.  The best HR Pros I know are great storytellers, and in turn great at selling their visions.  If you don’t have a clear vision of what you want your HR shop to look like, how do you expect others to get on board and help you get there.  Sit down, away from work, and write out exactly what you want your HR shop to look like.  Write it long-hand. Write in bullet points. Just start.  It will come.

2. Buy two pairs of shoes: one of your employees and one of your hiring managers. Try them on constantly.  These are your customers, your clients.  You need to feel their joys and pains, and truly live them.  Knowing their struggles will make you design better HR programs to support them.  Support them, not you.

3. Working hard is number 1.  Working smart is number 1A.  Technology can do every single transaction in HR.  Don’t allow tasks and administrative things be why you can’t do great HR.  Get technology to do all of this busy work so you can focus on real HR deliverables.

4. Break something in your organization that everyone hates and replace it with something everyone loves.  This is usually a process of something you’ve always done, and people are telling you it still has to be done that way. Until it doesn’t, and you break it.  By the way, this doesn’t have to be something in HR.  Our leaders and our employees have so many things that frustrate them in our environments.  Just find one and get rid of it.

5. Sometimes the path of least resistance is the best solution. HR people love to fight battles for the simple act of fighting the battle. “NO! It has to be done this way!” “We will NOT allow any workarounds!”   Great HR finds the path of least resistance.  The path of greatest adoption.  The path which makes our people feel the most comfortable, even if it isn’t the path we really, really want to take.

6. Stop being an asshole. You’re in HR, you’re not a Nazi.  Just be nice.  We’re supposed to be the one group in our organization that understands.  Understands people are going to have bad days and probably say things they don’t mean.  Understands that we all will have pressures, some greater than others, but all pressure nonetheless. Understands that work is about 25% of our life, and many times that other 75% creates complete havoc in our world!

Great HR has nothing to do with HR.  Great HR has a lot to do with being a great leader, even when that might not be your position in the organization.

Recruiters! Conferences Don’t Care About You!

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I’m down at ERE’s Fall Conference in Chicago this week.  It’s a conference designed for Talent Acquistion leaders (FYI – they don’t like to be called ‘Recruiters’).  It’s really cool the folks at ERE do a great job putting together great content and work to push the role of Talent Acquisition forward in organizations around the world.

HR Tech also does a great job for HR folks looking for HR Tech.  So does Sourcecon, for people wanting to be better sourcers.  So does TLNT’s Transform for HR leaders. Heck, even SHRM National has some great content.

Besides ERE, though, where does a TA leader or Recruiter go to keep up on their industry. To get better. To challenge and measure themselves and their organizations to get better?  No where, that’s where.

ERE does a fall and spring national conference.  If you don’t have the budget for a national conference, usually $1-2,000 to attend, plus travel which usually doubles the cost, you’re screwed when it comes to getting really good recruiting content.

SHRM has both local and state opportunities for HR Pros to get further development and expand their knowledge base.  Do you have a local recruiting organization or a state recruiting organization that will offer this to you?  Most likely No, unless you live in D.C. (RecruitDC) or Minnesota (Hello Paul!).

It’s crazy when you really stop and think about it.  Almost no where are we really leveraging the minds and the dollars to bring these people together at a state or local level.

I’m in Michigan.  I know right now I could put two days of content together, leverage some awesome Recruiting talent from around the world to come in and speak, and get 250-500 Recruiting/Talent Acquisition Pros from Michigan to attend at $400-500 each.  That’s anywhere from $100-250K just in conference fees, not including probably another $100-200K in sponsors. So, some company isn’t interested in $400-500K!?

Southeast Michigan is begging for technical talent. Organizations would spend the money to spend their TA teams to something like this.  All across the country many areas are hurting for talent and willing to invest (a little) to get their recruiting teams better.  But, most are not willing to have those same teams travel across the country at the price tag of $3,000 each for the same content.

Build it and they will come…just don’t build it too far away!

I see this work on the HR front.  Monthly local SHRM meetings will get 50-100 participants at $50 per meeting for lunch and one hour of content! State conferences give you a day and half of content for $500-750, and most of that is vendors trying to sell you crap.

It just seems insane to me that someone who actually does conference planning for living can’t figure out how to leverage the largest 25 metro areas and put together a calendar of ‘local’ level recruiting conferences.

Like I said, ERE does a good job nationally, their just leaving about 90% of the money that is available out there locally on the table.

What Kind of Mentor Are You?

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I got asked to be a mentor for someone recently.  It’s not the first time I’ve been asked, but I found myself wondering what ‘Tim Sackett’ as a mentor should look like.  Maybe it’s where I’m at in my career, but I found myself wondering what is it that I could really give someone coming up in our industry.

I would assume anyone asking for a mentor doesn’t really want me to show them how to recruit.  They’ve probably got that down pretty well, at least the basics.  The advanced stuff is probably best taught by some folks much better than me (Glen Cathey, Jim Stroud, Amybeth Quinn,  Paul DeBettignies, etc.).

Maybe I could offer up some help on the employment branding/marketing side on HR and Talent Acquisition.  I’ve had to do that for the last 20 years, I probably know just enough to better than most, but not as good as folks like Laurie Ruettimann, William Tincup, Maren Hogan, Lance Haun and Matt Charney.

I’m just dangerous enough with HR Tech that I could probably help out in that area for sure.  I’ve bought and implemented systems and tools at every stop in my career.  I know the game, but I certainly don’t know it as well at Steve Boese, William Tincup (again), John Sumser, etc.

It could be my mentee could use me for just straight HR generalist knowledge base.  If I know anything, I know a little about almost anything in HR from my stops in my career.  While I love talent acquisition, I really consider myself more of an HR pro.  Probably not as good as Kris Dunn,  Dawn Burke, Robin Schooling, Jessica Miller-Merrell, etc.

Compensation and Benefits, maybe that’s should be my ticket?  Um, no, probably not.  I probably know the least about this area as a whole and Ann Bares is my go to person for all things compensation.

There’s got to be something I’m the best at, worthy of being a mentor.  What about employee engagement?  From small companies to organizations with tens of thousands I’ve had employee engagement as a major measurable, I could do some damage here.   But, again, not as well as someone like Paul Hebert.

Talent acquisition as a function might be something I’m most comfortable with.  In my career, I’ve been constantly pulled into TA no matter what organization I’ve been in.  It’s been the one constant in my career, start in HR, and end up in Talent Acquisition.   Moving an organization from old school, post and pray, to one that hunts for talent is right up my alley. I don’t really know anyone I would recommend over myself on this.

As a mentor I think the most valuable thing I can give someone is the network I’ve built over the years.  It’s something I discovered a long time ago. I’m probably not going to be the best at any one thing, but I can know people who are.  Having the ability to know you need to surround yourself with people who are better than you, especially in areas you’re weak, is the key to having success in any stop you have in your career.

As a mentor I’m probably going to find out what you’re bad at, then introduce you to people who are really good at those things.  You don’t need to the best at everything when you surround yourself with the people who are the best at everything!