Category Archives: T3

T3 – HarQen

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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.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

This week on T3 I had the chance to demo two recruiting efficiency tools by Harqen.  Harqen has both their flagship product, Voice Advantage, which is a digital interview platform for both voice and video (Yes, I asked them to change the name!), and their newest product called Hot Sheet that I’m really excited about.

First, Harqen does things a bit differently than most Recruiting technology companies.  They have a great leadership team that has been in the talent acquisition game for a long time, so before you can demo, you have to have some business outcomes conversations.  The last thing they want to do is waste your time, and their time, if their products aren’t really what you need.  This is a must, because while we all want the new, cool tech to help us out, so many of us are just not ready for this change from a business processing state.

Harqen’s Voice Advantage is like many of the digital interview platforms that are out there, with the advantage that they don’t just assume you only want video. They also offer a voice/phone screen option, which is still the standard in many industries and professions. The platform is also mobile optimized and allows you do taped live interviews as well. Clean dashboard and UI, it’s simple and easy to use.

Harqen’s Hot Sheet is a real game changer. The one thing none of us in Recruiting and Talent Acquisition do well, is mine our own internal databases. You put a candidate in there two years ago and haven’t touched them since. You interviewed a gal last year, she was second choice by a hair, but you’ve never reached back out.  Hot Sheet is a process that Harqen takes your internal candidate data and reaches back out to your database. These potential candidates then can respond via the interview platform and your recruiters have interested potential candidates ready to go when they come in the next day.  One of the best parts of Hot Sheet, is you only pay for the candidates that actually show interest!

5 Things I really liked about Harqen:

1. One of the best management teams in the planet selling recruiting technology.  These people have actually recruited and know the pain recruiters feel, which shows up in the products they’ve created. They listen to you, and even if you don’t end up working with them, they’ll give you great advice on what you should be doing.

2. The key to their Hot Sheet product is the Harqen team putting some great marketing touches and creating a campaign when reaching out to your internal database. This isn’t just a mass email campaign, this is a recruitment marketing campaign to re-engage one of the most valuable resources you have in your shop.

3. You only send the people you want Harqen to go after with Hot Sheet, so it’s not some spammy program killing your database. You use as much, or as little as you want.  You can also shut it off at any point. Since you only pay for those that respond, this is one of the economical pieces of recruiting technology on the market.

 4. Harqen’s VoiceAdvantage digital interview product is one of the more flexible interview tools on the market. Video, audio, screen, live, etc. But you can also use for performance management, onboarding, etc. Harqen’s team is smart enough to show you how to fully integrate and utilize the tech for other things than just interviewing.

5.  I can’t say it enough, when you work with Harqen, you aren’t just buying recruitment technology, you’re buying Recruitment Consulting at no additional cost. Others will tell you they do this, but it’s only to make the sale. Harqen does this, at certain points, to talk you out of the sale, so they don’t have to work with bad companies that won’t utilize their products in a way they actually work! This is a rarity in the industry.

Check them out. The Hot Sheet is something that almost any shop should be using. It’s something my own shop will begin using soon, and I’ll update everyone on how it is working.  It’s just too good of an idea not to do, and a very inexpensive cost.

T3 – Talemetry

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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.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

This week on T3 I reviewed the recruitment marketing and automation software Talemetry. Talemetry works with your ats & includes CRM, job posting, talent networks, employee referrals, mobile automation, career site landing pages, etc.  Basically, they do everything your ATS doesn’t do, but you wished it did!

Talemetry works with your applicant tracking system enabling you to reach candidates quickly using all recruitment marketing and sourcing channels and activities on a single powerful technology platform. Improve candidate experiences, optimize recruiter efficiency, control costs, and measure what works.   Ultimately, they are delivering a full suite of products to help you manage the candidate relationship like you want to, but never were able to.

Talemetry, like many of the major recruitment CRM and recruitment marketing automation tools are for enterprise level type talent acquisition shops. Basically, if you have 2,000 employees and above, this is a product that can transform how you recruit for your organization.

5 Things I really liked about Talemetry

1.  Perfect tool for Talent Acquisition leaders who are managing multiple locations that are using multiple ATSs and you are struggling to get all this data under one roof.  The depth of analytics within Talemetry allows you to really optimize your recruitment operations.

2. Two integration with your ATS.  Talemetry isn’t just pulling information out of your ATS, it also is putting information back in.  For those using Oracle and Taleo, this is important. The last thing you want, using an enterprise level ATS, is using a recruitment marketing tool that is just a work-around.

3. Talemetry helps your team source on a number of levels socially, job boards, etc., but also leverages your own internal ATS database to source as well.  The most underutilized sourcing tool we all have is our own database, and Talemetry doesn’t allow you to forget this!

4. Recruitment performance metrics. You don’t expect this from a recruitment marketing/automation type of software, but Talemetry delivers great individual Recruiter metrics.  Another powerful tool for leaders managing multiple locations and recruiting team spread all over.

5. Auto broadcasting your jobs out is expected.  Auto broadcasting your jobs out based on rules, like title, location, etc. is pretty cool.  Talemetry allows you to build in specific rules of what and where you broadcast your jobs out to.

CRM recruitment marketing automation type softwares, like Talemetry, are the future of talent acquisition.  Everyone has an ATS, the organizations using advance recruitment marketing tools are going to win the war for talent in the future.

Talemetry is definitely worth checking out especially if you already an Oracle/Peoplesoft and Taleo ATS users, which is a sweet spot for them.  But, they can integrate with any ATS, really, so don’t hold up if you aren’t using one of those.

 

T3 – BrandAmper #HRTech

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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.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

This week I have the pleasure of reviewing one of the hottest companies in HR Technology, and one that was named 2014 HR Technology Conference Awesome New Startup, Brand Amper by Ajax Workforce Marketing. Brand Amper is the genius behind two of the smartest people in HR Tech, Jason Seiden and Lisa Cervenka.  I’ve known Jason for years, and I personally consider him one of the brightest people I know, thus he makes really cool stuff for HR and Talent Pros! Lisa is the marketing genius behind the brand, and really helped to bring Brand Amper to life.

Brand Amper, at its core, is a branding solution specifically designed to meet the demands of managing and building a brand on social platforms like LinkedIn, where the “voice of the employee” trumps the voice of the company.  By helping employees use the company’s employer brand to look their best on social media, Brand Amper helps companies (1) make their brands stronger and more consistent, (2) identify keyword trends to improve social and career site content, (3) engage employee advocates in sharing authentic content about why people should join—and stay at—the company, (4) improve transparency and accuracy on review sites like Glassdoor, and (5) understand how employees represent the brand in real-time.

Employment branding has exploded onto the HR scene in such a huge way that almost no HR or Talent Pro doesn’t have this on their radar as a major issue/project they’re constantly involved in, in today’s work environment.  The one major problem we all face is how do we share ‘our’ brand, when our employees are going out and sharing something completely different. Brand Amper turns this upside down, and solves the issue from the opposite angle!

5 Things I really like about Brand Amper: 

1. Brand Amper solves your dilemma about “what is our employment brand, really”, issue.  It gives you exactly what your true employment brand is, and helps you to shape it on where you want to take it.

2. Brand Amper helps employees draft their employment story by walking them through some simple steps. Not creative? Doesn’t matter, Brand Amper can help the least creative person in the world come up with their story.

3.  The platform makes it really easy for employees to go out and share their story, making these stories some of the most powerful recruitment marketing you can buy. Except you didn’t have to buy it!

4. Connects with both LinkedIn and Glassdoor to make it super easy to help manage your employment brand on these two giant networks of potential candidates.

5. The entire process, while not designed to be an outcome, will raise your employee engagement.  Jason doesn’t sell this aspect, yet, because he wants the data from current clients to prove this, but I’ll say it, because it’s going to happen.  Employees love to share the good things about their job and their companies. I call this the “Grandma Effect”.  Employees want their grandmas to be proud of the job and company they work for.  Pride, raises engagement.  I’m not a genius, I just have worked in HR for 20 years.

I want to call out another T3 review I did on QueSocial (first time I’ve done this), but if I’m using Brand Amper, I’m following it up by using QueSocial. If I’m already using QueSocial, I think I would strengthen that investment by going back and starting to use Brand Amper!  If I own Brand Amper and Que Social, I’m figuring out a way to blend these two products together – because they would work great together!

Check out Brand Amper your employment brand needs this!

 

T3 – LeoForce #HRTech

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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.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

This week on T3 I demo’d the recruiting robotics software LeoForce.  LeoForce is basically an ATS add on that takes your sourcing function to the next level.  While most ATS softwares start when you have identified someone as a candidate, LeoForce starts when you start sourcing and integrates with your ATS to make sure you have end to end coverage of your process.

Besides the ATS integration and functionality, LeoForce’s claim to fame is it’s recruiting robot Arya.  Arya uses behavior pattern recognition to identify patterns from your best recruiters/sourcers, automates those behaviors, and repeat success, significantly boosting your ability to mutiply hires. Arya also automates portions of your recruiting process, from initial qualification and applicant collaboration, to finding qualified, interest candidates.

LeoForce also has a VMS tool which is a crawler app that will constantly update your VMS jobs and statuses, and move it into your ATS. This tool also communicates to recruiters with alerts on new jobs and status changes.

5 Things I really like about LeoForce: 

1. Job Booster – In LeoForce you can create and post jobs with virtually one click to your own career site,  job boards, social sites, etc. It takes the task of posting and broadcasting your open positions down to almost nothing.

2. Applicant Collaboration – Maybe the most powerful feature is how LeoForce communicates with potential candidates via email in a way that seems very personalized and non-robotic, automatically.  This automation allows recruiters and sourcers to do other things, while the system does much of your pre-qualifying and screening. In the end the recruiting team is getting warm candidates to work with, not cold candidates.

3. Machine Learning – the system learns what your successes are, and continues to learn over time, to get better.  It’s not a brand new search every time you begin a search. It’s not starting over, it’s continuing to build on prior successes.  Another huge time saver, that moves your process along faster.

4. LeoForce makes your ATS what you wished it was when you bought it. That’s really the crux of the issue. Our ATSs just don’t have the sourcing and recruiting capabilities we need for 2015.  The integration is seamless, pulling your jobs automatically from your ATS, giving you enhance search capabilities of your database and social recruiting functionality you probably never had.

5. It’s Inexpensive!  I love the fact it only cost $100 per user per month. In my world $1200 a year is super cheap as compared to the tools you just handed a recruiter/sourcer that is using LeoForce.

Most companies fall into this trap. Our ATS just isn’t good enough for what we need in recruiting automation.  Then we make the decision we better start looking at a new ATS that can do this.  At a minimum that is a $100,000 to $150,000 spend over five years for small and medium sized business. Upwards of millions for enterprise organizations.

LeoForce is something you need to look at and demo if you believe your ATS just doesn’t have the recruiting capabilities you need, before you scrap your ATS for good.  Or, if you’re just in the market for great recruiting automation, this is a tool you need to see. Check them out, it will be worth your time.

T3 – @OrgVue #HRTech

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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.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

Today on T3 I get the pleasure of reviewing OrgVue a London based tech firm and management consultancy, that built one of the most awesome HR specific Business Intelligence tools I’ve ever seen!  OrgVue is an integrated software platform bringing Org Design, HR Analytics and WOrgVue logoorkforce Planning together in a single product. Gartner named them the ‘Cool’ product of 2014, and ‘Cool’ is an understatement!

Think about this way, you have many systems in your organization that have employee data, and even in a suite environment, rarely does everything come together nicely.  It’s messy. OrgVue takes all this messy data and brings back to you clean answers.  One thing every HR shop gets tasked to do is developing Org Charts. OrgVue takes Org Charts into the next millenium.  It does, intuitively, what we always wished Org Charts could do. Click on a person and gives you all their data, performance, roles they’ve been, etc.

From a workforce planning perspective it does real-time workforce modeling.  Lose your head of design? What impact will that have downstream? OrgVue can show you in a few clicks. Want to re-org? OrgVue can show you cost savings of the new org before you even make the move through it’s modeling tool.  OrgVue takes the HR Business Partner model to a whole new level.

5 Things I Really Like About OrgVue: 

1. OrgVue gives an organization one source of true data maintained through seamless integration of multiple systems and locations. Want to compare hiring analytics between Michigan and Texas, just a few clicks. North America and Europe, a few more clicks. It’s crazy powerful!

2. OrgVue constantly is intaking and cleaning data in real-time.  This means the charts and reports you pass along to decision makers are accurate and not dated.

3. So many of our executives are visual learners. OrgVue understands this and brings your HR data to life visually. Also, executives are known for asking for ‘one-more-thing’, “Can I just see this data sliced a bit differently”. It’s the vain of HR pros around the world. Not with OrgVue.

4. The organizational modeling and scenario planning tool is unlike anything I’ve seen from any other vendor, ever. In fact, I’ll say that OrgVue probably could take the jobs of some highly paid consultants that you pay to do this now!

5. Everything you create and see in OrgVue is turned easily with a click into Excel, PowerPoint and PDFs.  Why fight it?! Big orgs want their paper, spreadsheets and slides, so give it to them, when they need it.

I say this too often, but I was completely blown away by this product.  I would invest in this company, that’s how blown away I was!

But, let me be clear, OrgVue is for a sophisticated HR buyer.  This is a big shop, Fortune 1000 type product.  Regardless, I would encourage every HR executive you must demo this product. Even if you aren’t in the market, treat this a personal development, the OrgVue folks will teach you some stuff on this demo.  You will never look at your data the same way again!

T3 – NAS Recruitment Innovation #HRTech

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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.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

I’ve known NAS Recruitment Innovation is a company I’ve known and worked with for over ten years.  It’s definitely a company I wanted to highlight on T3.  I’ve written this before but in my mind there are two kinds of technology companies: 1. Born out of a technology solution; 2. Born out of a problem and adapted to the technology of the day.  NAS, in my estimation, is in the later types of companies.

NAS was started as advertising, marketing, creative type company 60 years ago, specifically to help ‘personnel’ executives with something that hadn’t even been termed yet, but we know it today as “employment branding.”  Today, they rival the best recruitment marketing firms out there from both a creative perspective and a technology perspective.

NAS’s main technology solution is called ACTIVATE and it’s a candidate attraction platform. With a powerful SEO engine at its core, ACTIVATE pushes branded job positions from your ATS to your career site. But ACTIVATE is more than SEO. ACTIVATE integrates decades of strategic recruitment expertise and industry-leading analysis to optimize your candidate sourcing platform and improve the overall effectiveness of your recruitment marketing program. In simple terms, ACTIVATE increases your candidate pull. NAS turns your career site into a candidate attraction site.

5 Things I really like about NAS – ACTIVATE

1. NAS’s people get corporate recruitment at a much higher level than most technology recruiting companies.  It’s not just about the technology, you have to understand recruitment and candidates.  You need people on your side in Talent Acquisition and HR that are creative and NAS does this as good as anyone!

2. The ACTIVATE platform increases your candidate experience through better design and without you having to do any heavy lifting.  NAS gets how and why candidate search for jobs and uses this knowledge to deliver a great search and apply experience for candidates.

3. You don’t care about mobile, but your candidates do and the ACTIVATE platform will optimize this for you.  A great example is recruiting Nurses. Nurses aren’t at a desktop all day, they’re constantly on the move. But they engage their mobile devices all day long. If you aren’t mobile optimized and delivering a great mobile experience, you’re missing out in a big way!

4. ACTIVATE delivers you real-time metrics from your career site.  Big or small, this is a must have in today’s highly competitive talent market.  If you don’t know what’s working, or what’s not working, you’re just flying blind. No talent acquisition leader wants to be in this position.

5. CRM functionality with custom branded email campaigns.  Recruiting and CRM isn’t new, but it’s still something way too many shops are utilizing. If you do utilize a CRM you want to make sure it’s connected with the rest of your data, and the ACTIVATE platform does this with your ATS.

I’ve used NAS so in my mind they cater a little better to the talent acquisition pro who might not as technologically savvy as they would want to be.  They definitely don’t try and shove tech down your throat, but will ease you into it and show you how you can make great strides with it in your department.

NAS recruiting innovation has the technology and know how to help your talent acquisition team take your entire organization to the next level. Check them out, I’ve personally used them in the past and they made my life easy. I don’t know if I can give a company higher praise than that!

T3 – Jibe #HRTech

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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.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

This week on T3 I reviewed the mobile recruiting and analytics solution Jibe.   The one thing everyone knows in talent acquisition in 2015 is that candidates no longer just apply via their desktop computer.  Candidates now apply to your jobs using a many different devices, smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks, etc.  Organizations can no longer ignore mobile as being one of their largest potential candidate drivers.  This is Jibe’s sweet spot!

Jibe is mobile native. This means they weren’t first a desktop software that developers made fit to the small screen.  Jibe developed their solution specifically for the small screen.  Jibe dramatically improves the candidate experience to candidates on your mobile experience.  Jibe works with your current ATS to give candidates a best in class apply process via mobile.

Statistics show that anywhere from 50-80% of candidates will begin their job search process with you via mobile, but only 10-15% will actually complete that process via mobile. That’s a huge miss. You are forcing those candidates to another platform to finish, and when you do that most drop off.

Jibe also has a great recruiting analytics backend called Jibe Insights.  Jibe basically takes your ATS data and fuses it with their apply data and can show you where in your process you’re falling down.  The analytics behind source performance, and how Jibe can segment this down, is one of the best I’ve seen.   Jibe also has a CRM module that has exceptional application for field and campus recruiting with one click mobile connect onsite at career fairs and other offsite locations.

5 Things I Really Like About Jibe:

1. Jibe doesn’t do what most of your ATS vendors will do and basically make your site a mini-site for mobile. It gives your candidates an industry leading mobile online experience, they believe is all you.  From an employment branding perspective this is huge. You might not actually be the most technology advanced HR shop, but Jibe allows you to hide that fact!

2. Most ATS systems have analytics but they are really weak on the apply process side, which ends up being where most of your TA budget is spent. Jibe connects your ATS data with the apply data and specifically shows you what is giving you the best ROI and what isn’t.

3. Recruiting is a process, and it’s meant to be improved. Jibe uses supply chain type process models to help you improve your processes. Most corporate TA folks don’t think in the supply chain type mode, so it truly helps make you better at getting candidates into your pipeline.

4. Jibe’s Candidate Connect CRM has great application for field and campus recruiting.  This process was just so easy, I was amazed. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spend on campus, only to go back and spend more hours trying to get those candidates into our system, or having most fall off when they don’t complete the process. One click and their in, right now, on campus, no waiting. That’s cool!

5. Jibe started on the social recruiting side as well, back when we just called it social media. Their ‘Get Referred’ product uses your employees professional networks to increase your referrals, and put your employee referral program on steroids.

If you take anything away from this review, it better be mobile is important.  Look around you, everyone is using a device, and it’s usually not a desktop computer.  We as Talent Acquisition pros need to embrace mobile and make sure candidates can find us and apply, easily via these channels. If you don’t, you’re going to be left behind.

 

 

T3 – Avature

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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.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

This week I’m excited to review the recruiting technology platform Avature.  I have to tell you I had at least five people send me private messages, from my network, requesting I review Avature once I started doing these T3 reviews.  As always, my tribe was right, I love recruiting and technology, so Avature was a perfect fit.

Most people who have heard of Avature probably think of them in one of two ways: CRM and/or ATS (Applicant Tracking System).  CRM is a marketing acronym for Customer Relationship Management.  It’s basically a fancy name for a system that automatically keeps in contact with people. Candidates are people, so CRM became a perfect fit for talent acquisition.  The reality is, though, Avature actually started out as a RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) company and platform, by the founder of HotJobs (remember them!?).   So, Avature was in the recruiting business before deciding to become a recruiting technology company.

What Avature is best known for is their CRM product and it’s extremely powerful.  The use of CRM in recruiting is life changing for talent acquisition. The Avature system can get a candidate to apply in under a minute. It can automatically send out communications to possible candidates, but also skip that one candidate you are already working with, so you don’t look like a fool when the person you are about to make an offer to suddenly receives a “please apply” email from you.  You can import lists and spreadsheets, and the system will automatically create records.

Throughout the entire process everything is always tied to one candidate record.  Every time stamped communication. Who sent it. Who spoke to them. Where they came from. Where they are in the process.  It is fully integrated with your Outlook, but all of those communications still show up within the one candidate record as well. Source external databases (CareerBuilder, Monster, Dice, etc.) from Avature as well, and one click the person into your database.

Avature also has a great ATS, and they are finding most of their CRM clients are migrating to their ATS as legacy contracts fall off.  If you demo Avature, you’ll see why. The CRM is so ridiculously powerful, you can’t help but want to keep it all together within the ATS, but they integrate with Taleo, Kenexa, SuccessFactors, etc.

5 Things I Really Like About Avature:

1. Configuration within the CRM is amazing, intuitive and couldn’t be easier.  This is where their background of actually being a recruiting company, first, shows up.  The system is designed and thinks like a recruiter thinks. No one client of Avature uses the system exactly the same.

2. Application process that can easily be designed based on position. How many of you only have one application process? Most of you! But what about the job that has hundreds of applicants versus the job that you get no applicants?  Those should be different, right? One you need a lot of filters to get to the right candidate. The other you want no barriers of entry in hopes of getting a candidate!

3. Avature can re-engage applicants that fall off in your process.  Many times those drop off rates are 60-70% of those looking at your jobs.  Most of us don’t even know those numbers! Avature will tell you this, plus it’s designed to go out and get those people to come back.

4. Truly global company. They have non-US clients who don’t even have employees in the US.  Multiple data centers globally. Being used in 100 different countries.

5. Because of their history in recruitment, the entire process is designed around candidate experience. Company started in 2008 and 7 original developers are still with the company in 2015!  They designed the product not to be a suite of products, but one platform, thus one record throughout.   What does a candidate expect when they come to apply to your organization? What do they expect from the communications you send out? Etc.

I joke with the folks from Avature that they are one step away from eliminating recruiters altogether! They then shared a story of how Starbucks, an Avature client, actually has hired baristas without any personal contact from a recruiter within the Avature platform!

Just as CRM was the future of marketing a decade ago. Products like Avature are the future of high performing talent acquisition shops today.  Check them out. At the very least you better do some research into CRM technology for your talent acquisition function.

T3 – QueSocial

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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.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

This week on T3 I’m reviewing QueSocial.  QueSocial is a social talent acquisition tool that was awarded Top Product of the Year in 2014 by HR Executive Magazine.  What do they do?  They solve a major problem most companies have when it comes to social recruitment, a system that allows your recruiters and employee brand ambassadors to share approved content easily and seamlessly.

So, what’s the big deal?  Here’s what really happens in most talent acquisition shops.  Someone decides they want to have a social recruitment strategy.  This involves engaging potential passive candidates in an ongoing manner. The only way to achieve success in this model is to have a content strategy that frequently touches these candidates.  That sounds easily, but in reality it is very difficult to maintain, and most organizations fail at doing this.  QueSocial takes care of this.

QueSocial is a platform that delivers your content to your recruitment team and other employee brand ambassadors (think hiring managers, your really active social employees, etc.) in a way that in one touch they can share it on their social streams.  This is social recruitment on steroids delivered in a way that makes is super easy for the users to share content with their tribes.  QueSocial also delivers metrics on your shared content to show you what’s working and what isn’t, which is another very powerful part of their platform.

5 Things I really like about QueSocial:

1. QueSocial is the only system I’ve seen that helps make recruiters better at converting social media into real business results. It’s taking something most executives see as subjective, and converting it to objective.

2. Extends your employer brand footprint exponentially into your employee social networks.  That’s the real power! How do you seamlessly leverage your employee’s networks to engage more candidates?

3. The QueSocial analytics engine can show you exactly who is using the system and how, but also what content are your employees and  candidates connecting with, so you can get really strategic with your content strategy as well.  Gone are the days of just throwing crap at the wall to see what might stick.

4. A system like QueSocial actually drives higher employee engagement.  The reality is your employees want to share stuff about where they work and why it’s great, but we don’t make it easy for them to do this.  QueSocial idiot-proofs this system and makes it super easy – one click easy.

5. There is a gamification element to QueSocial as well that will provide motivation and incentives to drive the social activity you want from your employees in getting the results you want.  This is key in starting and continuing a great strategy.

QueSocial already has some very big enterprise level clients who have shown the system can do what it says.  Plus, these clients have shown that for the most part the administrators of the platform are only spending 15-30 minutes per day in uploading and pushing content out to everyone else.  QueSocial is primarily an enterprise level tool and fairly inexpensive for what you get.  Definitely worth checking out if you have, or will be adding, a social recruitment strategy to your mix.

T3 – 7 Things HR/Talent Technology has Taught Me

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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.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

I’m not going to review a specific company the Tuesday between Christmas and New Years, because traffic is usually very light, and I don’t want to do that to some of the great tools I’ve been reviewing.   I do want to share some overall bullet points of my initial impressions of my T3 series and some of my overall opinions of HR Tech.  This might be a bit disjointed, but I’ve got some nuggets that I wanted to get out:

1. Every HR Technology company believes they are now a “Data Analytics” company.  They aren’t. This is marketing.  If one of them changes next year and decides to be a “Cupcake Bakery” and you love it.  All HR Technology companies will become “Cupcake Bakeries”.   This is a function of so many of the HR Technology companies are young, new startups. Marketing is usually an afterthought, and they call some Bro or Chick they knew from school.  Bad marketing just follows the crowd. It’s easy.

2. There are two types of HR Technology companies: 1. Technology companies that saw a problem with something in the HR/Talent space and designed technology to solve it. 2. HR/Talent companies that know of HR/Talent issues and either tried to buy the technology or are fumbling around on their own trying to design technology to fit their solution.  You can tell which is which, very quickly.  I’m not saying one is better than another.  I’ve seen some great Tech, from folks who have no idea what they’re talking about. I’ve also seen some great HR/Talent companies that get it 100%, but they have no idea how to make it work on the technology side.  I think there is a place in our industry for an eHarmony type broker of great tech companies and great HR/Talent companies.

3. Great HR Technology does not need to cost a lot.  Many companies are virtually giving away their solution to gain users, and build their brand.  Never in the history of HR and Talent has technology been more affordable.  If you are paying a lot for something you are not happy with, you need to change.

4. Changing HR/Talent technology is not 1990’s painful anymore.  HR and Talent Pros hate changing technology because they believe it’s a nightmare to change.  This is no longer the case for most of the HR vendors in the tech space.  Big, expensive HR technology does not want you to know this.

5. Before signing a contract to buy a HR/Talent solution, talk with those folks running the company.  What you’ll find is some of these companies are run by folks who are so passionate about what they are solving it’s almost unbelievable.  You’ll also find some folks who are trying to solve a problem, but also are try to ‘just’ sell their company. I’m a capitalist, I’m all for you selling your company and making a bucket of money.  But I like to buy technology from someone who is so passionate, they wouldn’t want to sell their business because it’s a part of them.  Either way, you’ll learn a lot by having these conversations. Both parties are super smart, usually.

6. Buying HR/Talent technology is still mostly a relationship based sale.  In the end, Mr. and Mrs. HR and Talent Acquisition need to feel like you truly care about helping them with their problems, and you get their daily struggle.  Some companies completely bomb at this.

7. Many HR/Talent technology companies bomb demos because they don’t truly understand how a ‘normal’ HR or Talent pro will use their product on a daily basis.  Thus, the demo, should demonstrate this experience.  Many times I, someone who loves HR and Talent technology, will leave a demo feeling overwhelmed by what I just saw.  If I’m feeling that way, imagine how Mike and Mary in Fargo are feeling.

The T3 series is teaching so much, I love it.  I hope you are liking it as well, and getting to know some of the great HR and Talent technology that is available to you in the marketplace. I encourage everyone to do demos.  I rarely ever feel pressured to buy anything, especially if you let them know up front you are really just looking for the future.  So many of the vendors do great demos and really teach you things during the process.  In a way, doing demos is great personal development for your career.