Category Archives: The Weekly Dose

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: My Review of The HR Technology Conference #HRTechConf

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Last week was my HR Nerd Christmas as I was attending the annual, and world’s largest, HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas. It’s one of my favorite conferences to attend, the expo is beyond words, the content has increasingly gotten really good, and they keep pushing the envelope and trying new ways to engage the audience. Hat tip to conference chair Steve Boese and the LRP crew!

What did I like this year at HR Tech? 

– The inaugural Pitchfest was a freaking homerun! 30 companies pitched their product to judges in the middle of the expo hall with giant crowds surrounding the stage. The energy was awesome. People who watched it got to find out about 30 new companies and determine which ones they might want to deep dive later.  6 Finalist emerged, with one winner! (To be fair, all 30 were winners as just making the round of 30 gives each company some great publicity) The finalists were:

Blendoor – (The overall Winner) – is a hiring technology that reduces unconscious bias by hiding data that’s not relevant and highlighting data that is. Their CEO, Stephanie Lampkin, blew everyone away!

ComplianceHR – is the first ever and only, a suite of intelligent employment applications, delivering expert legal guidance at internet speed and scale. Like your own employment attorney without the $500 per hour fees.

Jane.ai – Jane is an artificial intelligence platform that makes all of your company’s information accessible through chat. Like having your own HR robot that can answer almost everything!  (This was one of my finalists during my judging – very impressive!)

RelishCareers – a job board platform that helps grad school students and alumni get discovered by employers looking for top talent.

SwarmVision – A globally-validated Profiler to assess your innovation skills. Need to increase the amount of innovation in your company? This was really cool.

Talvista – (The overall diversity winner) -provides a view beyond the noise of unconscious bias, ensuring a skilled talent pool and workforce that is more diverse and inclusive. While Blendoor’s CEO was the best presenter, Talvista had the better technology in this space.

Many of the 30 that presented that didn’t make the final six just weren’t able to articulate what they did and why you should buy them in the 3-minute pitch and 2 minute Q&A allotted. That is super tough! Put yourself in front of anyone right now, start the clock, and tell them why they should use you, over everyone else, in three minutes!  Oh, and surround yourself with hundreds of onlookers!

– iCIMS CMO, Susan Vitale, on her panel said that out of their thousands of clients, millions of candidates, they’ve seen a 90% increase, year over year, in candidate traffic coming from Google For Jobs (GFJ). It was just one example at the conference of the impact GFJ is making across the industry that everyone is watching. For decades we’ve conditioned candidates to look for jobs, first via job boards, then via sites like Indeed, and now it will be through Google for Jobs.

– Monster.com came out of hibernation to announce a new leadership team, and some new technology, including Monster Studios, which lets you record, edit and publish video job ads from a smartphone in minutes. Loved the tech! And all the data shows video job ads get a higher response rate. Beyond that, Monster, like CareerBuilder and ZipRecruiter, has done a great job helping their clients navigate the job schema around Google for Jobs and they are seeing huge traffic increases. JobBoards didn’t die, they just re-tooled, and are still relevant in the talent attraction game. If you haven’t checked them out in the past 24 months, it’s worth some testing if you’re struggling with your traffic and Indeed is asking you to spend the double amount you did last year.

– Chatbots are everywhere, even if you’re not seeing them, yet. Some of the coolest A.I. I saw was Jane.Ai and AllyO. When A.I. first hit hte market they were extremely careful to say this tech wouldn’t eliminate the need for real humans, that marketing didn’t work, so they are now willing, to tell the truth! It does! That’s what the ROI is based on! Hello! Also, this tech, while not perfect, has exceptional potential and it keeps getting better.

– The future of the HR Tech and TA Tech stack are not a big umbrella, we do everything, enterprise systems (Workday, Oracle, SAP, etc.). The future of the tech stack is something akin to the Apple App Store. You have your base HR Tech platform, let’s say Ultimate Software, and then you go into their App store and pick the best of breed tech you want it to work with! Same with the TA Tech space. You pick an ATS like Greenhouse, then pick all of the TA tech you want it to work with, sourcing, interview, assessments, etc. But, not as it is right now with integrations and separate contracts, etc. Pick your core, foundation tech, then surround it with the best tech on the market that fits your business needs. There were a number of new startups positioning themselves in this space. We want all the advantages of using “one” system, but one system can’t give you all the best tech. For those who want the best tech, in all aspects, your world is coming!

If you’re an HR or Talent Acquisition leader today, one of your core competencies has to be around technology. It used to be that we would just allow IT or the CFO to pick what we used, but we’ve quickly moved into a world where your HR and Recruiting tech stack has a unique competitive and strategic advantage. Future HR and TA Leaders will not be sitting on the sidelines when ‘their’ tech stack is chosen.

If you haven’t been to The HR Technology Conference, or haven’t been for a few years, it’s something as a leader you must put back into your plan for next year! Way too much to learn here about how modern HR and TA practics are running!

Today on The Weekly Dose: The 2018 HR Technology Conf. #HRTechConf

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Today on The Weekly Dose I’m actually out at the Meca of HR Technology at the annual HR Technology Conference in Vegas! So, as you can imagine I’m like a geeky kid in a modern day Radio Shack seeing the latest and greatest on the HR and TA tech market.

Before we get started, can I tell you something that bugs me, and probably only me? Of course, I can because this is my blog and actually that’s all I do here is to you what I want! 😉

I have a problem with the term “HR Tech” because one big aspect of what I love about our space is all the new recruiting technology, which I usually title as “TA Tech”, when in reality all of the tech in our space: HR, recruiting, learning, payroll, benefits, compensation, engagement, rewards, recognition, performance, etc. all are under the “HR Tech” umbrella.

One of the things I’m excited about this year at HR Tech is a new event called the PitchFest! 30 “HR technology” (see paragraph above – it’s tech across the entire HR tech landscape) companies that are new to the space pitching why their product is the most viable for the part of the HR tech landscape they’re trying to support.

The winner gets a ton of free marketing exposure since this is the largest HR Technology conference in the world, plus a big cash prize as well. There are three sessions, ten in each session pitching. I’m a judge of one session and an Emcee of another session. I’ll definitely be letting you know next week, who won, and who impressed me!

Looking for a list of new HR technology to keep your eye and demo? This group of companies would be a fun one to start with based on what type of tech you’re interested in. Here’s a list of the 30 that got chosen to pitch at this event:

 

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Oleeo_ – Talent Intelligence to Unleash Your Recruiting Potential

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Today on The Weekly Dose I review the newly rebranded Applicant Tracking System, Oleeo. Oleeo is the former WCN ATS product and they have a long and successful history mostly working with European customers.

Oleeo is a global ATS designed for high volume hiring and has built-in event management which makes it an incredible ATS choice for those organizations that do a ton of campus hiring, or other types of high volume-type hiring events.

Oleeo has some great relationships within the banking and finance industry, and that speaks to how well the software works when it comes to working in industries where it’s critical to do well when competitively hiring on campus. I would foresee health systems and tech companies that do a bunch of hiring on campus would also have a high interest in looking at this ATS. Oleeo also has high-volume retail users as well that are finding success with the system.

Organizations that need to process a lot of potential candidates quickly, now have a system that helps filter the best to the top, and makes it a personal candidate experience. Oleeo delivers really well on all those factors.

What I like about Oleeo:

  • Oleeo is built for hiring events first and foremost. While most ATSs are weak at this, thus most organizations have to have a separate college hiring system, Oleeo delivers a top-notch experience for both candidates and recruiters in planning and executing career fairs.
  • Candidate self-service is a big piece of Oleeo allowing candidates to pre-register for events, schedule their interview time, etc.
  • Oleeo has a built-in CRM tool that allows recruiting teams to build out candidate campaigns by a number of criteria, track key information around these groups, and built automated actions based on the response.
  • Predictive screening technology is also built into Oleeo based on 120 different attributes Oleeo allows you to put an unlimited number of candidates through pre-hire screening, delivering the highest rated candidates immediately to your recruiters to continue on in the workflow.
  • Interview management is also another strength of Oleeo that allows you to customize an interview workflow based on if/then to automate much of the process and again allow candidates to manage some of this process on their own.

Oleeo is basically a new ATS to the U.S. market, but not new when it comes to its ability to know and understand all the complexities of global high-volume hiring, as WCN has been doing this since the mid-90’s outside the U.S.

I like Oleeo brings an enterprise level ATS feel to a marketplace that has been long dominated by an under-powered Taleo, primarily. While the CRM is still light on functionality, and SMS is only push at this time, the Oleeo team has shown it has the experience and knowledge to build out an end-to-end recruitment platform for the global market.

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Smashfly introduces Emerson!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at Smashfly’s newest addition “Emerson”. Who and what is Emerson? Emerson is an A.I. enabled recruiting assistant that is built right into the core Smashfly CRM product. Basically, Emerson guides and assists candidates across critical touchpoints in the recruiting process – from their initial visit to a company’s career site for scheduling (or re-scheduling) an interview.

Using Natural Language Processing, Emerson prompts candidates to engage and ask questions. The tech was built by Paradox (Olivia) and it’s some of the best on the market. Besides engagement, Emerson will screen candidates immediately on various critical points and fast-track those candidates who are a fit through the application process and even set up an interview if you desire.

Addressing one of the most painful and convoluted parts of the recruiting workflow, Emerson automates all aspects of interview scheduling by synching calendars and sending meeting invites, reminders and follow-ups to create an easy, stress-free experience for candidates and giving recruiters and hiring managers hours back in their weeks.

There are a ton of A.I. enabled assistants on the market, but having it built right into your recruiting CRM is a definite plus. Initial testing with Emerson has shown to extremely effective with candidates, with 90% of candidates completely a conversation by telling Emerson “Thank you!” Which speaks to how natural the experience truly is. If candidates thought it was a computer, you can best believe they wouldn’t be responding with a “thank you”!

Another piece that Smashfly has added to its arsenal is a full integration with HiringSolved, a best of breed candidate discovery sourcing engine. Combine Smashfly, with Emerson, with HiringSolved and we begin to see what a modern Recruitment Marketing Platform should look like.

One issue we’ve seen with sourcing tools, like HiringSolved, while powerful in generating profiles, it was a ton of work to connect and see who might actually be interested in your current and/or future openings. With Emerson, you can now automate most of this function, and combine all of that with the traditional power of a CRM to nurture candidates, and you can easily begin building talent pipelines for current roles and future needs.

It’s an exciting time at Smashfly. For years they were one of the top recruitment CRMs on the market but took a couple of years off without much evolution to their core product. What I see now is a very robust end-to-end recruitment marketing platform that is being built around best of breed technology.  Very cool stuff! Go get a demo, I think you’ll be very impressed with how all of this tech works together to really make a TA team’s job much easier!

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @CandidateReward – The final piece of your Candidate Experience! #CoffeeIsForClosers

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Today on The Weekly Dose I review the candidate experience technology Candidate Rewards. Candidate Rewards is a new solution from the folks at Total Rewards. Candidate Rewards is basically a platform that allows you to build personalized micro-sites for each candidate to present them their offer.

The offer letter virtually hasn’t changed in years. You have a template. You plug in the salary offer. You might attach a ‘one-pager’ of your benefits that you offer, but for 90%+ of organizations that is the process for decades! Oh wait, some of us use really nice quality paper and send some swag as well…

Quick Question – Is closing candidates important to your organization?

The reality is Generation Z by 2019 will actually make up 32% of the eligible workforce, Millennials will make up 31.5%. So over 63%+ of those, you’ll be making offers to will expect a digital experience, not an email with attachments. Candidate Rewards built a platform that easily allows Talent Acquisition or HR to plus in a few details and a full-blown personalized experience is sent to each candidate.

Candidates are no different than you or I, we all want to feel special. What would make you feel more special, an offer letter template, attached to an email, or an invitation to a full website that is tailored right to each candidate’s specific needs?

What I like about Candidate Rewards: 

– The average offer letter probably takes 2-3 minutes for a candidate to consume. The data shows that a candidate on average will spend about 15 minutes on a Candidate Rewards personalized offer site, checking out the total compensation, figuring out what benefits make the most sense and value to them, watching video content, checking out the culture, etc.

– One thing I know is that candidates who have significant others love to know ‘exactly’ what benefits you’ll be having. It’s rare that an offer letter ever really digs into that level of information. Candidates Rewards works with you benefit’s providers to upload each plan and allow candidates to select what they want, while the site will automatically adjust the Total Rewards statement to reflect those choices.

– The ability to tailor video content to each candidate is super powerful! It can immediately connect the candidate with your company, with their co-workers, with their new boss, etc. The options are endless.

– I love that this is one of those technologies that you will know precisely the impact it’s having. Currently, you are at “X”% candidate acceptance of offers. Once you implement Candidate Rewards you’ll be at “X”%+/-. Simple and straightforward to determine ROI.

I think some people will look at this and see it as an extravagance they don’t need. We are already at 90% acceptance rate. We’re fine. This technology is for those organization where unaccepted offers are really painful, and closing offers are critical! Think CPA firms, Nursing, Law firms, Technology – both IT and Engineering, MBAs, etc. Where every single offer being accepted is a huge deal to your organization and your TA team!

So often, we lose out on candidates because you make a salary offer of like $85K with some PTO, etc. The candidate’s own company will come back and show how the total compensation for what they’re making is way more. Or if you’re heavy into making campus offers this kind of technology is even more persuasive because now you’re just going against traditional offers and your total comp offers with the site looks way more enticing.

Candidate Rewards is well worth a demo. It super simple to use to implementation and adoption are a non-issue. Go check them out!

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Talentegy – it’s Google Analytics for your Talent data!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the talent experience management (TXM) technology Talentegy. Did you catch the new marketing phrase they created!? TXM? I love it. It’s just like the made-up marketing phrase Candidate Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) that have swept the world!

So, what the heck is Talentegy?

In simple terms, Talentegy is a technology that is constantly tracking and measuring the experience of those candidates, and employees, who are applying to your jobs, working within your talent and HR systems, etc. This is important because we tend to always have little things going on and we want to know about them as soon as possible.

Maybe it’s a broken link in a job description, or some part of your application process or pre-hire assessment is causing candidates to not finish, etc. Talentegy can show you where this is happening and instantly alert your team of what’s going on. It can also show you how to improve the entire experience so you get more people through the process.

The best piece is, like Google Analytics, there isn’t any integration needed and it can work with all of the major ATSs, CRMs, and talent management systems. It’s a pretty simple process of placing some tags in the pages being visited and you instantly start collecting data of what’s going on in your process in real-time (FYI – the dumbest person on your IT team can handle this, or your ATS/CRM provider can walk you through this!).

What I like about Talentegy: 

– The system will record video of the actual problem so you can see exactly what a candidate or an employee is experiencing. This is important because so often the explanation we get is difficult to decipher what is really happening. With Talentegy you get to see exactly what is happening.

– Talentegy built a ‘Slack’ like communication platform with the dashboard so you can instantly communicate both internally and externally with those who need to know. IT, HRIS, your vendors, are all on the same message flow so you can quickly diagnose the issue, decide who’s responsible, and follow up, all on one platform so nothing falls through the cracks.

– Talentegy also gives you the power to survey through popups at any point in your process. Find a friction point? Drop in a survey and find out how candidates or employees would make it better.

– Simplicity. While almost any technology you would use takes weeks, months to get up and running, Talentegy can be done almost immediately, and they’ll get you up and running for free so you can check it out! They do that because they know once you see what it can do, you’ll buy it!

Most of the technology I review is what I would call ‘Big Decision’ technology. It’s not something you’re going to demo and then just go “yeah, let’s do this!” You have to bring in other people, departments, etc. If you’re an HR or Talent Leader, Talentegy is one of those technologies that you demo and just make the immediate decision to start using, without consulting anyone!

Like most data driven technologies there is one thing you really need to make this valuable and that’s data! That means you probably have an organization of 1,000 ee’s or more, or you could be smaller but hiring a ton. Basically, you just need enough data to gain better insights. The cost isn’t really the issue, because I found Talentegy to be very cost effective for what you get.

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics are Pretty Awesome!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I review two of Microsoft’s newest entries into the HR tech space Workplace Analytics (WPA) and MyAnalytics. Both MS Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics are products that can be purchased to use with Microsoft 365.

From a high level what Microsoft does is pull in your data from all the other Microsoft 365 products you use like email, your calendar, activities you do on various other products like Skype, etc. This data is then used to unlock a bunch of stuff around cultural change and transformation.

You can imagine mining this data from your entire employee population would give you insights around how to create more capacity in new ways to work, understand what your best performers are doing to be the best, how certain teams, locations, etc. are collaborating, or not collaborating, etc.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics can then help your organization show where time is being wasted, communication breakdowns, how to increase worker focus time, reduce your amount of meetings, reduce the amount of after-hours work being done, etc.

MyAnalytics can be bought by itself as a stand-alone product for 365 users, but it works great in conjunction with Workplace! It’s the natural offshoot technology for once you have your insights from Workplace you can then help individuals with how can they better manage themselves and their calendars to be more effective and efficient in their work.

What I like about Microsoft Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics: 

– It’s 100% adoption! Your employees don’t have to do anything to gain the value of using Workplace, they just keep doing what they’re doing and the data insights automatically start coming in. Then it’s ‘just’ simple behavior changes!

– Leaders can easily see ways to increase productivity almost instantly after turning it on. Workplace gives you a dashboard that can be drilled down to the team level to show you where your team’s time is being fragmented and help get them more focus time to work better.

– It’s a dynamic tool that is fairly flexible as a BI tool allowing you to bring in other outside data like Sales metrics or employee engagement data, and give you insights on how to best work on increasing the measures that move your business.

– Workplace shows you organizational and team trends around meetings, emails, internal vs. external hours worked, meeting overviews and effectiveness, coaching opportunities, etc. It’s really unbelievable on how one tool touches every person equally in our organization and can have a real impact on moving the culture of an organization on how the leadership wants to define it.

– MyAnalytics is literally like a Fitbit tracker for your workplace. Complete privacy of the individual data. Organizations have zero access to the individual data. “Nudges” the employee to more efficient/effective behaviors based on data. Constantly gives ideas and tips to help them. Shows awesome things like what percentage of your emails were actually opened, reminds them to block time when their calendar begins to get to full with meetings in the future, etc.

When I first started to see this my first thought was “Oh no! Big brother!” but Microsoft has taken real care to ensure this is a product for a positive cultural change, not a hammer for performance management. It’s a technology to aid organizations at a high level, but also give individuals the empowerment to help control their own work lives as well.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics can work with organizations as small as a couple of hundred and still deliver great returns. MyAnalytics can work in teams as small as 3 or 4 and deliver results. It’s easy to see how you would get giant ROI at the enterprise level, but I love that this can be used for organizations of all sizes.

I’m a big advocate that HR should own culture and be the organizational performance driver at a high level. Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics give those leaders in organizations a tool that delivers real insights into how we can begin changing work for the better! Less wasted time in meetings. Less redundant email. Less of all of those things that keep us from being successful. If you’re a Microsoft 365 shop, this is a demo you need your entire leadership team to take a look at!

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Kununu_Us – Workplace Insights That Matter!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the employer review technology Kununu. Kununu is a technology that allows employees of a company to share their insights with potential applicants of what it’s like to work at that company. It also allows the company to mine that information to have a better understanding of how they can impact this experience in a more meaningful way.

So, they’re Glassdoor?

No, not exactly, Kununu goes much deeper in gathering those insights than a simple verbatim review from a past employee who hates your company!

Each person who gives a review of an employer on Kununu is asked a series of 18 different insights in which they rank the employer. This level of insight allows both applicants and employers to really dig into what the real issues are when it comes to both the candidate experience and the employee experience.

To leave a review of an employer, the person must also have an actual company email address, so you aren’t getting jaded ex-employees, but actual employees who are living in that work world right now. In this type of framework, you’re probably going to get a better balance from both sides.

What I like about Kununu:

– To consume their content you don’t need to log in and create a profile. Just go on there and start reading reviews of potential employers.

– Q&A Tab which allows users to ask a question and those employers who have claimed their Kununu profile will get an alert to go out and answer the question. This is public for all to see. If it’s inappropriate it’s immediately flagged and taken down.

– Kununu doesn’t make most of their revenue as a job board, all job ads are free to employers, which gives them a higher level of transparency when it comes to who their ultimate customer really is. Candidates coming to your profile won’t see your competition’s job ads like you see on that other review site!

– The review profiles created by Kununu reviewers are very robust and have a ton of detail. So, as a potential applicant, I get a much truer sense of what it’s actually like to work at each location.

– Offer both employee reviews and applicant reviews so you get to see what’s it’s like to work at an employer, but also what’s it’s like to go through the applicant experience. This also gives you competitive benchmarks so you can see how your experience is compared to others in your market.

The entire world of employer reviews become much more important with Google for Jobs using this type of data within their algorithm to determine how high your job postings should show up in Google’s search results. Organizations are now tasked with ensuring they pay attention to their online reputation as an employer.

Kununu is definitely a more robust alternative to the one main employer reputation site that most will believe they have. It’s also a great technology to give you real insights to not only your employee experience but also to your candidate experience. Kununu is definitely something employers should be checking out!

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Jobvite goes all in on texting candidates & @UltimateHCM upgrades HR Service Delivery!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a break from the normal tech reviews and give you some insight on some happenings in the world of HR Tech.

For those who don’t know Jobvite, they are a popular Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that actually started out as an employee referral technology before the market was truly ready to buy into that concept. So, they pivoted from employee referral tech to full-blown ATS with employee referral tech.

This past week Jobvite announced they will be one of the first corporate ATSs on the market to integrate the ability to mass text candidates and have an AI embedded tech interact with those candidates. All of this will be powered by Canvas, an SMS-enabled screening technology that I’ve reviewed on my site a while back, and called “Jobvite Text”.

This is a great move for Jobvite! Most corporate ATSs have been dragging their feet on this type of technology over worries corporate TA teams really didn’t want it. Over the past year, though, more and more organizations have been embracing texting candidates in a big way and the results have blown away reply rates of email, phone, and LinkedIn Inmails.

I suspect we’ll see many more ATS vendors build this core functionality into their systems within the next year, as many already have this on their roadmap, but have been pushing it off for other functionality they felt their clients wanted more over the ability to mass message and screen via text messaging.

Ultimate Software who has had a really strong track record of buying HR and TA technology that wasn’t core to their system and integrating it into Ultipro is at it again with the purchase of HR Service Delivery technology PeopleDoc.

PeopleDoc is a best of breed HR Service Delivery software that allows organizations to deliver world-class service delivery to employees through document management, employee knowledge centers, and employee case management. While this doesn’t sound sexy, it will give UltiPro something no other enterprise HR provider has in the market.

Ultimate is looking to move up-market in a big way and the purchase of PeopleDoc will help position themselves as a product that will deliver to large, enterprise-sized organizations. Their payroll is already top-notch, their core HR product is really good, and PeopleDoc will make best in class.

Ultimate doesn’t buy outside technology often, but when it does, it has shown to buy smart products that make their overall offering better, and they actually listen and integrate the talent from the new company into their organization.

We will see many more partnerships and acquisitions in the coming months. Some will make sense, some we’ll wonder why. I look at each of them from both sides. Does it benefit both companies, and does it make the overall product offering of the major player better, faster, than what they could do on their own?

For both Jobvite and Ultimate this happened last week.

 

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Kashable – Low Cost Loans for Employees (@GetKashable)

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the HR Tech, voluntary employee benefit and financing solution for your employees called Kashable. Kashable is basically a simple way for your employees to borrow money, where you as a company are not involved, but can still ensure they get the assistance they need!

Here’s the scenario – Timmy walks into your office. He’s got a problem. His car broke down over the weekend. He needs new brakes. He has no savings and no way to get the money. Without his car, Timmy stops coming to work.

You’ve had this conversation before, haven’t you? In fact, you probably will have it this week!

Here’s the problem. Your company and you in HR don’t want to become a bank. Loaning out money to employees, through your company, always becomes a nightmare. This is why I was so intrigued with a technology like Kashable.

Kashable gives your employees access to low-cost loans based on a percentage of their take-home pay. You as the employer, only facilitate the repayment through payroll deduction, but ultimately you are not responsible for repayment.

Having this option for employees is important! 

Here’s what way too many of our employees do in a cash crisis situation. They choose bad money options! 401K loans, high-interest credit cards, cash advance shops, or they go without something that is critical, like health insurance or a medication, etc. All of which puts them in a worse situation long term than where they started. The problem is, most of our employers have a bad or low credit and don’t have access to cheaper capital alternatives.

What I like about Kashable: 

– Gets the employer out of the loan business and puts it back where it belongs, in the hands of a financial institution that I have validated will do right by employees.

– Kashable reports directly to the credit bureaus, allowing your employees to build positive credit on these smaller amount loans that are paid back through payroll deduction.

– Kashable doesn’t allow employees to take a loan that can’t afford, so they are also teaching them responsible financing. The average amount of a weekly repayment is 5-10% of their takehome, so they don’t put themselves in a worse situation. They also only allow an employee to have one loan at a time.

– Many of your employees have a bad credit and could never get a low-cost loan, but with Kashable because they are employed by you, they will have access to this financing mechanism.

– Gives a credit option to your employees have no credit as well (high school grads, college grads, H1B workers, etc.).

Kashable has data to show that 35-40% of employees who use the service use it to pay down higher interest debt they have. So, already you’re helping to teach them to get away from the nightmare too many of our employee get caught in with high-interest credit.

I’m in love with any kind of technology that helps my employees and helps me and my organization. I’ve been in the bad situation of having to loan my employees money and how that usually ends up bad. I’ve begged my banking partners to give me an option like this, but they never would because they had to follow traditional banking rules. Kashable takes on the loan risk, and they do it because they know your employees are an actual fairly low risk.

Go check them out and do a demo – www.kashable.com

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.