Category Archives: The Weekly Dose

The Weekly Dose: @Pandologic – The Job Advertising Platform

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Today on the Weekly Dose I review the programmatic job advertising platform, Pandologic. Programmatic job advertising has been around now for a decade, but still, it hasn’t caught on as it has with our Marketing peers who have been using the technology successfully to lure customers for decades.

95% of Talent Acquisition job advertising budget is still mostly spent on traditional types of job posting products: Indeed sponsored jobs, LinkedIn job postings, ZipRecruiter, other job boards, some radio, some TV, billboards, a sexier career site no one sees, etc. 95%! 

For the most part, TA hasn’t changed how we advertise for jobs in decades. 

While there are a number of programmatic job advertising tools on the market, Pandologic has truly gone all-in on utilizing artificial intelligence to make their technology more efficient and easier to use. One of the reasons so many great TA shops haven’t yet tested using Programmatic Job Advertising is that it quite frankly seems complex. And while the science behind can be complex, Pandologic has made a simple and intuitive platform that any TA pro can easily use to get better results on their job postings.

I like to think of Pandologic as Programmatic 2.0. It’s not just about distribution (traditional programmatic – put the job everywhere at once), but the utilization of AI-driven decision-making of when and where. Precisely placing your jobs in front of the kind of job seeker you’re looking for when they’re engaged on the internet.

What do I like about Pandologic?

  • Really the only fully-automated programmatic job advertising platform. You can set it and forget it, many of the programmatic tools take some constant watching.
  • Pandologic’s AI will constantly make micro-adjustments to get the best results, including constantly testing and making small language changes to your posting to get the best results.
  • Full AI, no human in the loop. You set your campaign goals and it goes out and gets the applicants.
  • An overall reduction in job advertising spending for the same traffic you have now or increased traffic for the same spend.
  • Easily integrated with your ATS to pull in job postings.

I’m a big fan of programmatic job advertising technology. I think too many TA leaders continue to play this game trying to figure out which “site” is the best one for them, getting into long-term relationships that cost too much money and quite frankly are inefficient. At the end of the day “advertising” is about the best results for the lowest cost.

One word of caution that I constantly try and educate TA pros and leaders on. Programmatic isn’t a silver bullet for hard-to-find talent. If you need Software Engineers in a market where there are very few Software Engineers, Programmatic technology can’t magically make Software Engineers where there are no Software Engineers! But, it can help get your job advertising in front of those few, for less money.

Pandologic for the most part is an enterprise-level TA tool. More than likely they are best utilized with organizations that hire at volume, 500+ hires per year, or it also would work for organizations hiring less, if the vast majority of roles are similar in nature (I.E., we hire 200 Nurses a year, etc.) I think every enterprise and large volume TA shop should be testing Programmatic in 2021.

The Weekly Dose: @OurTilt – Leave that doesn’t suck!

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This week on the Weekly Dose I take a look at the startup employee leave technology Tilt. Tilt is reimagining Leave Management to help companies improve retention, streamline processes and reinforce corporate culture.

Let’s face it, most organizations use an Excel Spreadsheet to track company employee leave. No judgment! The vast majority of organizations have tracked leave this way since the invention of Excel! Before that, it was written files. But, now, thanks to Tilt there is a more elegant way to administer employee leave that helps all the stakeholders.

You might be thinking, “do we really have a problem tracking leave?” Maybe not, but leave is more than just HR tracking it. You also have the employee who is on leave, and the manager of the employee who is on leave, who often feel in the dark the entire process.

What I like about Tilt:

– One easy platform to streamline all of your employees leaves into one place where all parties can log in the get the information they need. Super easy to add an employee to leave, and each employee has their own access to track and get answers they need while on leave.

– Fully compliant, in every state, so a perfect solution for those organizations that are multiple states and find it hard to keep up on changing legislation. Tilt helps ensure you stay in compliance and don’t’ find yourself in legal hot water.

– Tilt guides help employees and managers through the process, lowering the amount of time and questions leave administrators have to deal with on an ongoing basis. Also, integrates auto-nudges to ensure both employees and managers do what they need to do, when they need to do!

– Direct communication from employees, managers, and leave administrators that are logged within the platform to ensure all communication is tracked and documented. Plus, great, ongoing manager education around the do’s and don’ts in having an employee on leave.

– Tilt works with every client to review and update leave policies and plans, to ensure your leave plans are built on what’s best for your organization and your culture.

I really like what Tilt is doing. Organizations big and small struggle to administer leave in a really easy way and most of the time all the company leave knowledge is usually stuck in one person’s brain. Also, administering leave is a complicated job, the more employees who have on leave, and the more states you must administer it in.

Pre-leave, leave, and post-leave, you, your employees, and your managers will have the information they need when they need it. All the while the tech helps you stay compliant, saving you time and money. Well worth a demo, especially for those companies managing leave in multiple states.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Oracle Cloud HCM delivering new products and features!

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This week on the Weekly Dose I take a look at some of the new additions from Oracle Cloud HCM. Oracle is one of the big three HCM plays (Oracle, SAP, Workday – control the vast majority of the F500 HR tech spend). I think it’s important for us to understand what the big boys are doing in HCM because often we see their products and features become the gold standard across HR.

Oracle Cloud HCM has been working to meet the growing employee expectations within our organizations that desire more personalization, personal and professional development, and control of their career journey. Increased ability to own their own development and freedom of mobility within the organization are top of mind in the HCM space.

Here is what Oracle recently released:

Personalized Employee Journeys: New tools help organizations deliver an improved and personalized employee experience:

  • Journeys: Provides a seamless, step-by-step experience for employees as they move through personal and professional situations that require complex tasks and interactions. Journeys gathers various components necessary for these multipart processes to take the confusion out of activities like re-boarding employees as they return to the office, or helping employees manage their physical and mental wellness by providing access to health resources provided by the organization.
  • Profile Video Introduction with Connections: Helps teams feel more connected when working remotely by allowing employees to add a customized 10-second video introduction to their profile page in Oracle Connections.

Increased Career Mobility: New career development products help organizations quickly meet changing needs, increase career mobility, and encourage employee growth:

  • Opportunity Marketplace: Helps employees discover opportunities to grow within their organization, learn new skills, and expand beyond their traditional role to find long-term success and satisfaction. By making it quick and easy for employees to discover short-term projects and internal job postings, Opportunity Marketplace helps organizations tap into existing talent and fill short-term needs in new ways.
  • Open Jobs for My Career: Flags new and relevant roles to make it easy for employees to apply for new roles internally. The new Open Jobs for My Career tool gives employees the support and resources needed to continue growing their careers within the organization, instead of looking elsewhere for new opportunities.

HR Best Practices on Tap: New features streamline complex HR processes and improve data accuracy:

  • Oracle Payroll Connect: Streamlines processes with key payroll partners by making data accessible in real time directly through Oracle Cloud HCM. With access to all necessary payroll information on one platform, HR leaders do not need to go back-and-forth between software to pull necessary employee payroll information, improving both efficiency and data accuracy.
  • Oracle Anytime Pay: Provides employees with the opportunity to get paid for time worked in advance of their pay cycle. This employee loyalty offering enables HR to meet new workforce demands, especially with the rise in contract workers and gig projects that have more on-demand payment requirements.
  • Updates to Experience Design Studio: Improves data accuracy for HR teams with expanded autocomplete and localization features. For example, by automatically identifying employee-specific location, the autocomplete feature in the Experience Design Studio can improve process efficiency and decrease data errors for HR when updating benefits or payroll information.

Connected People Analytics: Enhanced analytics deliver enterprise-wide visibility to enable better decision making and prioritize diversity and inclusion:

  • Diversity Dashboard with Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics: Expands the possibilities of data by providing personalized business analytics for HR decision makers. The rich set of more than 50 HR KPIs, dashboards, and reports in Oracle Analytics for Cloud HCM include a Diversity dashboard. The pre-built dashboard highlights key statistics and trends to help HR teams better analyze employee data and improve initiatives around diversity and inclusion in their workforce.

I love the focus on internal mobility and Oracle creating a marketplace for their users to deliver to their employees. We’ve seen a similar marketplace concept from Workday last year, and it’s been wildly popular with employees. I’m sure Oracle users will have a similar reaction.

D&I analytics are a must in today’s world and Oracle delivers using Fusion Analytics as the engine. This dashboard will be a daily reminder for leaders helping them drive change within their organization.

I personally have a little heartburn when we start talking about daily pay, because it breaks my heart that we live in a world where this is a needed feature within payroll, but it is, and for those who need it, Oracle delivered. The reality is, this is a feature that Oracle users asked for and our workforce desired, so daily pay is now a thing within Oracle!

Influencers or Analysts? Who has the most impact on your brand?

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The worlds of Influencers and Analysts have never collied more than they are right now in the HR industry. Most of this has to do with the popularity of Influencer Marketing that has taken off in the past decade, and like most things in HR, we are now just catching up with the marketing trend.

Traditionally, in the HR space, companies selling products, technology, and services only really cared about two things: 1. What do our clients think of us, and 2? What do the “Analysts” think of us?

What’s an Analyst? 

Every industry has them. These are basically individuals who work for organizations like Deloitte, Gartner, Forrester Research, IDC, and hundreds of boutique firms specializing in specific parts of the HR ecosystem. The individuals spend a great deal of time understanding the landscape of a specific function in HR, the technology, the processes, what works, and what doesn’t, etc. Then your organization pays its organization a great deal of money for this expert knowledge.

The hope is, using this expert Analyst knowledge will ultimately help you save time, money, and missteps because you’ve hired a firm of experts to help you make the right decisions. Many of these experts have never actually worked a day in HR, but hold MBAs and such. Some of these people are some of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and if you listened to them, they could truly help you. Some are idiots working for a big firm.

Examples of Analyst I admire: William Tincup, Madeline Laurano, Trish McFarlane, George LaRocque, Ben Eubanks, Kyle Lagunas, John Sumser, Holger Mueller, Jason Cerrato, Josh Bersin, Sarah Brennan, etc. 

This will then beg the question of well, then, what’s an Influencer? 

Influencer marketing has been around for a hundred years, but Kim Kardashian is the queen of modern-day influencers. I’m famous! You see me talking about or using this product. You buy this product. That’s really the backbone of influencer marketing. I mean Kimmy D would never steer you wrong, would she?

An Influencer is anyone in an industry that a measurable amount of people are listening to, which will influence their buying behavior. I write a blog post on some products that I’m using in my own shop. It’s super awesome! You go out, look at it, and decide to buy it and use it with your team. You’ve been influenced.

Most of the influencers in the HR industry are current or former practitioners, they’ve lived your life. Some are super smart and have the resume to back it up. Some are complete idiots. Any idiot can have a blog (I’m a great example!). Most influencers, like an analyst, have a specialty, something they’re better at than other stuff. Some influence full time, but most hold down ‘real’ jobs to pay the bills. So, they probably don’t have the time to deep dive into the industry, as you’ll see with analysts.

Examples of Influencers I admire: Kris Dunn, Dawn Burke, Carmen Hudson, Robin Schooling, Jason Lauritsen, Laurie Ruettimann, Jennifer McClure, Sharlyn Lauby, Steve Browne, Sabrina Baker, Joey Price, Mary Faulkner, Jessica Miller Merrell, Janine Truitt-Dennis, etc. (there’s really too many to name!)

Many of these people are HR Famous! They have worked hard to create an audience who for the most part listens to what they have to say.

You also have people that fall into this strange middle ground of Influencer-Analysts types that have no name. Maybe they started out as an influencer, then became an Analyst, or maybe they were an Analyst who became popular and started influencing. Examples in this camp are folks like: Josh Bersin, Jason Averbook, Sarah Brennen, Trish McFarlane, Ben Eubanks, etc.

(BTW – All of these people you should connect to! )

So, who has the most impact on your Brand? Influencers or Analysts? 

This is not an easy question to answer because like almost anything it depends on a lot! We all know of a certain product we love and regardless of the influence or what some expert is telling us, we will just buy it because we love it!

We also have an untold number of products and services we buy because someone we trust told us about it, and because we trust them, we go buy it.

If you’re a large enterprise-level product or service, basically selling to companies that have more than 5,000 employees, you better make nice with the Analyst community! They tend to have the ear of more enterprise buyers then you’ll typically see from influencers. I doubt very highly the CHRO of Google is reading this blog! (but I know the CPO of GM is!)

What I see is companies selling to enterprises usually work with both Analysts and Influencers. They want to ensure their message is heard across the buying community, so they don’t miss out on a potential buyer, and they have the money to do both.

Companies selling to under 5,000 employees and it starts to get a little harder to determine the impact of Analysts. I mean how many HR and Talent shops in Small to Medium-sized businesses have the money to pay for Analysts Research? Not many! If you run an HR shop of a 1500 person company, you do not have $50,000 to hear what the best ATS is! The ATS you buy won’t even cost $50K!

Behind the scenes, most analysts understand their biggest impact on the enterprise buyer, and because that’s where the money is, that’s exactly where they want to be! If you have buyers across small, medium, large, and enterprise markets, it then becomes a more difficult decision on how you use Influencer marketing.

The real answer to the question above is you engage with the analyst and influencers that have the most positive impact on selling your product. Unfortunately, most organizations have little or no idea if either side is having an impact on selling their stuff.

Who has the juice? 

I call someone who has ‘real’ influence as having the “juice”. If you have the ‘juice’ you have the ability to influence real buying decisions on a regular basis. Laurie Ruettimann tells you to go out and buy this new great HR product, and that organization will see a measurable sales increase directly tied to the links in her posts. She’s got juice!

I wrote about an HR Tech company a few months ago after a demo and a month later they sent me a bottle of gin because they landed a six-figure deal directly from my mentioning them in a post. That’s gin and juice! 😉

Most people who call themselves influencers in the HR space have little or no juice. Usually, because they just don’t have a large enough, sustained audience who is listening. They might be 100% correct in their recommendations and insight, but not enough people are listening to move the buying needle.

I love what the folks are doing over at Advos because they are actually showing organizations who have the juice and who doesn’t. I can tell you I have the juice and say I’m the #1 Influencer in the HR marketplace, but the reality is, anyone can say that! HRMarketer is actually giving data behind those words to let people know where the real juice is.

The truth around all of the analyst vs. influencer chatter is that you’ll find people in both groups who can help you and people in both groups who are complete idiots and have no value. The best thing to do is build a relationship with both, find out who moves your needle and aligns with the messaging you’re trying to get out, and then measure. Eventually, you’ll find the right mix that will work for your organization.

The Weekly Dose: @Workday Ups its Game in Belonging and Diversity!

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Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at Workday’s recent announcement about their new product offerings around Diversity and Inclusion. If 2020 has done anything, it’s brought the conversation of diversity and inclusion to the forefront like never before in organizations. Many HR tech companies have been working on products in this space for a while, but few will have the impact of Workday’s new VIBE Central and VIBE Index.

One of the largest issues faced by organizations in moving the needle around having employees feel a sense of belonging, as well as broader D&I issues, is those front-line leaders and above never truly felt like they had the data to help them make the right decisions. So, we mostly just tried to make change by gut feel and subjective data that was constantly changing.

Workday’s VIBE (Value, Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity) Central brings all diversity- and inclusion-related data into one centralized place in Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), enabling organizations to set goals and then monitor progress against those goals. Businesses can assess, measure, benchmark, and manage diversity and inclusion by the dimensions of their choice, such as race/ethnicity and gender. For example, VIBE Central could surface that 10 percent of women in the organization have been promoted in the last three years; in addition, benchmark data could show that promotions for women are well below the median of 50th percentile, which may be 20 percent, for peer companies in the same industry.

Organizations can benefit from the ability to assess talent management, talent development, and employee experience for key factors including:

  • Hiring. Organizations can better understand if hiring practices are balanced or if one group is over- or under-represented.
  • Promotions. Business leaders can look at metrics to determine if their promotion process is inclusive and then view a succession report to gauge if they are planning in an equitable way.
  • Leadership. Companies can look at leadership/management levels and succession planning to compare planning to the actual diversity of management and to see if diversity drops off from one management level to the next—which may indicate a need for more targeted development.
  • Attrition. If hiring and promotion practices are helping to increase diversity overall but there’s a high rate of voluntary attrition for that diverse talent, HR leaders may need to focus on belonging and inclusion.

VIBE Index (being released to Workday customer in Q1 2021) empowers HR leaders to set a B&D strategy and create a tailored plan aimed at driving positive outcomes. It will measure the relative performance and outcomes of an organization’s efforts across talent acquisition, talent development, leadership development, employee experience, and workplace culture to deliver a heat map that identifies the highest opportunity for positive change, as well as a VIBE Index score for overall workplace equity.

VIBE Index will allow organizations and leaders to have real-time diversity data, to ensure that progress is being made to the plans and goals. For too long organizational leaders have been making strategic D&I decisions with dated and insufficient data, many times that wasn’t even their own. VIBE Index changes this completely. Your own plan. Your own goals. Your own data. Belonging and D&I isn’t the same for all, it’s very specific to your organization and your culture, and your strategy and data should reflect that.

Workday is drinking its own Kool-aid, as well. Workday’s Chief Diversity Officer, Carin Taylor, announced a bunch of initiatives that Workday will be taking on including:

  • Increase overall representation of Black and Latinx employees in the U.S. by 30% by 2023.
  • Double the number of Black and Latinx leaders in the U.S. by 2023.
  • Invest 25,000 hours in training over the next year to help ensure all people leaders can attract, recruit, hire, and advance employees of all backgrounds.
  • Help ensure less than a 3% difference in belonging for all Workmates across all demographics (as measured by the Great Place to Work questions that power the belonging outcome of our VIBE IndexTM).
  • Infuse VIBE into how we think about and act on our Workday core values.
  • Invest 150,000 hours in career development programs and education that increase visibility and opportunity for Black and Latinx talent over the next year.
  • Donate $10 million, as previously announced, to social justice initiatives over the next year.
  • Create opportunities for Workmates to contribute 250,000 hours toward mentoring and skills-based volunteering in communities around the globe by 2023.
  • Accelerate Opportunity Onramps hiring to fill 20% of our early to mid-career full-time roles by 2023.

No small plan! I love it when organizations put it in black and white. Yes, there is some risk you don’t meet all of your goals, but it’s how real change happens!

The Weekly Dose: An Updated @Workday Recruiting Roadmap!

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Today on the Weekly Dose I dive into largest and arguably fastest-growing recruiting technology on the planet, Workday Recruiting! Workday Recruiting currently has over 2350 clients, all of which would be considered enterprise, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 are currently using Workday for recruiting.

Let that sink in a bit. A decade ago, no one was using Workday to recruit talent, and now over 50% of the largest organizations on the planet are using it! You have to be impressed by those numbers and growth of Workday Recruiting.

Workday Recruiting has taken its share of criticism over the years coming out of the date and trying to deliver an enterprise recruiting solution at scale. It’s not easy. Ask Oracle and SAP, no one would consider their recruiting offerings to be world-class. It’s a tough game at scale.

I got a chance to sit down with the Workday Recruiting product team last week to look at where they’ve been and where they are going, and it looks like they are on the right track:

– Workday internal mobility functionality is a clear differentiator amongst its competitors, connecting the entire experience across the platform for both the employee, the recruiting team, and the hiring managers. Also, the ability to post “gigs” internally to staff that might have capacity is great and the design is very modern and user friendly for employees. The internal mobility tech also gives employees a suspected career path based on all of their own data and the data of those before them in similar situations.

– The ability to adjust each hiring process by position was a critical need and now your recruiting team can easily make custom applies on the fly per position, even with the ability to apply to a job with one click if necessary.

– Candidate experience and a candidate home dashboard make it easy for candidates to track where they are in the process and also machine learning push other potential matches they might fit for, as well as assisting them in applying and suggesting things that might increase their chances at getting hired.

– The Recruiting Dashboard has been completely redesigned and now allows each recruiter to build their own custom dashboard by simple drag and drop. Also, adding in the ability to offer and process at scale, which was a must-have for enterprise organizations. Recruiting analytics and reporting continue to evolve as well, and Workday Recruiting has some of the most eye-catching metrics dashboards out there.

– Workday has been slower than most in building out partnerships of add-on recruiting technologies, but that was by design, partly to ensure what they were offering clients in terms of partnerships where products they could fully stand behind (and actually invest in those they feel most strongly about). Workday has two forms of partnership: Venture partners (Jobcase, Mya, Beamery, and Pymetrics) which are technologies Workday has a vested interest in success, and their ecosystem, which are partners that are vetted by the Workday Recruiting team. The four current Workday Venture partners are some of the strongest recruiting technologies in the game right now.

– The roadmap is full of features that current Workday Recruiting clients are looking forward to including: Candidate matching scores, built-in interview scheduling assistance, external candidate referral automation and tracking, and database candidate rediscovery technology.

Workday Recruiting is a large enterprise HCM recruiting module. They won’t apologize for that because large, enterprise organizations need hiring technology that can handle the scope and scale of hiring at massive volumes, that is super secure, and has the ability to hire globally. Workday Recruiting can do all of that, and it’s doing it well based on the large number of clients awaiting implementation.

What can Workday Recruiting do better? I think they have the ability to truly help organizations around D&I hiring. They have the data and the ability to connect the dots for senior executives on what’s going on with their diversity hiring. They do some of this now, but it’s mostly tracking and reporting anonymous data. And will soon be producing the ability for organizations to make candidate records anonymous to hiring managers, but this is clearly something I suspect we’ll see additional roadmap items on in the near future.

I think Workday Recruiting’s strength definitely lies in their ability to pull in learnings from their giant client base and they have extremely active user groups that are jointly developed by both Workday and their clients, providing non-stop product feedback on desires and enhancements. The trick being the balance of delivering features and functions at scale for the good of all, compared to what they believe they want/need individually.

Workday Recruiting has been the one company in the recruiting technology space that folks have loved to hate on over the past few years, but I think they are doing the right stuff and developing the technology that their clients need, without listening to the outside noise.

The Weekly Dose: @VaultPlatform – Workplace Misconduct Reporting Tech

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Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at a timely technology in a world of #MeToo #BLM #Covid-19! Vault Platform helps organizations resolve workplace misconduct including that related to Me Too, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, and all other workplace issues with a safe speak-up app for reporting incidents.

Let’s be clear to start, this isn’t your parent’s workplace 1-800 hotline, where you called some third-party company that would listen to your story, filter it, and then pass it along to HR, who then call you in. Vault is a technology, mobile-first, platform that allows employees to report any type of workplace harassment, fraud, corruption, racism, etc., and document their experience. Then, when they feel the time is right, they can actually send this forward to be responded to.

Each time an employee reports it is dated and time-stamped and the employee has access to their actual record the entire time. Once an employee decides to move forward it gets sent to the appropriate parties within the organization to resolve the issue.

What I like about Vault:

– “Go Together” – when talking about things like sexual harassment and racism, many times an employee does not feel comfortable reporting on their own, but they also don’t trust others when they say they’ll also report. Vault’s “Go Together” allows an employee to report, but only move it forward once another employee reports the same or similar behavior, so they are not making these accusations on their own. It’s really a brilliant idea!

– Vault dashboard works as a case management dashboard so HR, legal, D&I, etc. can check and track that reports are being resolved and how they are being resolved. It allows executives to instant insight access to the real problems that are going on in their organization, unfiltered, right from their employees.

– It allows employees to communicate in a way that is most comfortable to them, mobile messaging, not a phone call talking to a stranger.

– Employees can record for as long as they want without reporting and always have access to their own words, an organization can not delete or edit the employee’s own records. Many times something happens to an employee but they aren’t sure if it’s actually harassment, but as they see a pattern of behavior begin to happen, it becomes clear. Keeping these records makes it easy for the employee to give proof of how long and how much this is happening.

Right now every single organization on the planet is concerned with the experiences their employees are having. Me Too, BLM, COVID, etc. have shown us that our employees are having very drastic differences in their experiences, and we need to give our employees access and the ability to share these with us quickly and easily if we want to truly make changes and improve their experiences.

I first saw Vault at the HR Technology Conference right after Me Too and I liked it. With the additional social and health issues today, it’s even a more relevant technology. Vault Platform happens to be the perfect workplace technology at the perfect time. I highly recommend you take a look and a demo.

The Weekly Dose: @Imperative – Peer to Peer Coaching for Leaders!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I review the peer to peer coaching technology platform Imperative. Imperative is a leadership development platform that uses the power of peers to support each other as they manage remote employees and accelerated change in the workplace.

Two things we all need right now? Help with developing remote employees, especially our leaders, and we all have a bit of change we are facing! Imperative is a technology designed to evaluate your leadership style and connect you with another peer in your organization so you can do peer to peer coaching.

Through a video-based coaching platform, leaders meet in rotating pairs for scripted peer-to-peer coaching conversations that are dynamically designed to adapt as their needs change. I actually used my peer, Kris Dunn, to demo the technology with me, so we got a firsthand view of how well Imperative works.

What I love about Imperative:

  • First, you take a personal leadership inventory that gives you your leadership style and insights. This data is used to assist your peer coach in asking questions and digging in further. The platform also reminds you of your style and tendencies as you are coaching.
  • Kris and I both found the assessment accurate in how we would normally describe our normal leadership behaviors. Plus, we’ve both gone through many kinds of these assessments in our careers, and Imperative was right on the money in discovering what type of leaders we are.
  • The process of peer to peer coaching can be awkward, but Kris and I got on the platform and within minutes were actually moving through the process, and even though we are very close and work together often, we were prompted with questions where we actually learned new things about each other!
  • The technology keeps you on tasks and has each person actually taking notes so each person has something at the end, and gives you information for your next session to follow up on. There is definitely a feel to the coaching around pushing for higher performance and outcomes on both a personal and professional level.
  • I never felt self-conscious about what I was asking or being asked. That is by design, as it can be difficult first starting as a peer coach and the last thing you want to do is make people feel uncomfortable with the process.

Kris and I both did this from our homes and no issues with the technology at all. So, this is simple to use peer to peer coaching tool for your leaders who are working at home, or in different locations altogether on a normal basis.

We are in a new world of trying to figure out how do we develop our employees, and it’s critical right now we continue to develop our leaders. Peer to peer coaching is a great way to do this with an added benefit of it really teaches your leaders how to coach their own teams as well! Imperative is well worth the demo, and if you can just ask them to take a test drive with yourself and another peer!

 

The Weekly Dose: @Fountain_Inc – Hourly Recruiting Reimagined

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the hourly recruiting technology, Fountain. Fountain is a technology designed to make high volume hourly hiring more efficient, easier, with higher quality.

The reality is most HCM-based Applicant Tracking Systems are not designed for high volume hourly. They are designed mostly to process requisitions for a salaried workforce. Candidates who will sit at a desktop and be willing to jump through hoops and take a bunch of time following each step.

Hourly workers, the vast majority who will only access the internet via their mobile device, will not jump through a bunch of hoops and have the patients to follow a long process. Thus, most organizations that have a high volume hourly hiring component tend to find a workaround to their ATS or go out and find technology, like Fountain, that can fix their hourly hiring inefficiencies while still getting the data they need into their HCM for onboarding and payroll.

What I like about Fountain:

  • A mobile-based hiring process that makes it super easy and quick for an hourly candidate to apply and show interest. We don’t want a system that eliminates or discourages candidates to apply, we want them all to apply, and then let the technology screen and sort the best ones for us, which is what Fountain does.
  • Built-in programmatic like functionality that allows you the TA team to boost specific jobs that aren’t having the candidate flow they need to meet your recruiting plan goals.
  • Candidate communication via email and SMS, ability to communicate with groups of candidates at once through the entire process right from the platform.
  • Fountain can automatically begin video screening candidates as they match certain criteria you need for each position, reducing time to fill dramatically.
  • Simple Collaboration between applicant and hiring managers as many organizations with multi-locations have on-the-ground managers who do their own hourly hiring. So, great for franchise-type environments as well.
  • Fully integrates with your HRIS and Payroll for easy onboarding of hourly hires all within the same recruiting process flow.

Why do I need a system just for hiring hourly workers? 

That’s the big question, right? Quite frankly, you wouldn’t if the ATS you had was designed to actually be a benefit to you for high volume hourly hiring, but most are not. While they will say they are mobile-optimized, they are not built mobile-first. They were not built to have someone apply in a minute or less, verse twenty to thirty minutes.

Hourly workers have shown they are unwilling to “register” with your ATS before applying, and then click from screen to screen in what seems to be an endless maze of a process. They want to pick up their phone, show you they are interested, and almost instantly see if you have an interest or not. If you don’t have that, they’ll go apply to someone else that will. Speed, in mass-volume hourly hiring, is critical!

I recently witnessed an hourly worker apply, get screened, and have an offer of employment in 18 minutes! This hourly candidate had a job in 18 minutes! Why do you need a stand-alone hourly hiring platform? Because your competition is getting the best talent before you even see them.

Fountain is definitely worth a demo. It’s amazing to see how fast a recruiting process can work when you have the right technology in place. It’s all about getting high quality, fast, and Fountain delivers.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @CornerstoneInc Acquires @SabaSoftware

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This week on the Weekly Dose I’ll give you some reaction to yesterday’s announcement of Cornerstone acquiring Saba Software.

The acquisition actually makes sense at a major level. You have two competitors beating the crap out of each other for customers, both doing basically the same thing. Cornerstone has been considered the best software in the learning space, and Saba, also in learning, was right on their tails, but also had a better offering when it comes to talent management and performance, because of Saba’s acquisition of Halogen a few years back.

On the analyst call, Cornerstone’s CEO Adam Miller talked about the combined company of over 7,000 clients, 75 million users, and over $800M in combined revenue, making the new combined company, staying with the Cornerstone brand, the largest “specialty” HR technology platform on the market.

Why does this matter to you? 

– In a world where big ERP systems are taking over HR technology (Oracle, SAP, Workday) there is a need for technology for organizations that actually need some higher-level ability when it comes to learning, reskilling, performance, and talent management. The enterprise ERP HCM systems are actually fairly good at core HR and payroll, but fairly vanilla when it comes to things like learning, performance, and recruiting.

– What happens to the 3 major pieces of Saba Software (Original Saba, Halogen, and Lumesse/ SabaTalentLink)? My take from Adam’s comments yesterday was that he saw a major advantage by combining what Cornerstone and Saba had on the learning side to make it the world’s largest and leading skills engine on the planet. Also, the performance side of Saba (Halogen) was most likely a bit better than what Cornerstone has already. Lumesse is most likely dead in the water, as when Adam was asked the question, the comment was basically, we already have a strong recruiting product in North America and Lumesse is basically a UK recruiting product we’ll maintain, but we won’t be selling.

– To be fair, I haven’t seen Cornerstone’s recruiting product, but I have seen Lumesse/Saba TalentLink, and from the analysts I speak with that have seen both, Lumesse/Saba TalentLink is the superior product (best of breed talent acquisition platform), and no one would call Cornerstone’s recruiting product best of breed in any fashion, so I’m a bit perplexed at why Adam would throw it away so easily. One analyst I spoke with actually thought one of the major reasons Cornerstone bought Saba was for Lumesse! Lumesse is a proven global recruiting platform and Saba was looking to push it heavily into the US in 2020 and 2021, but those plans looked to be shelved at this point based on Miller’s comments. If I was to rank SabaTalentLink as a stand-alone, best of breed ATS right now, it would be in my top five with the likes of Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, etc.

– One of the major pieces of the acquisition is the acquisition of Saba’s R&D engineering teams. In an environment where it’s near impossible to recruit great engineering talent already, we’ve seen this move in the playbook many times over the past decade where one company acquires another and a major reason has to do with your ability to grow your engineering team quickly through acquisition. Although, at $1.4B, that’s a hefty price to pay for R&D talent.

– Saba’s CEO, Phil Saunders, will come on as Cornerstone’s new COO. Phil has shown his ability to run a lean ship and produces great margin and profits, and Adam and the Cornerstone team will be looking for those insights from him in his new role.

Strategically, this acquisition makes sense for both sides. Moving forward both would continue to feel the pressure of the ERP’s coming after their clients, and the main tactic to combat that is flat out becoming ten times better than anything they can offer. In a world where organizations are being forced to reskill, develop, and drive performance, the organizations that have this as their main people priority will choose Cornerstone to help them reach these goals.