Quality of Hire is dependent on both the source of Talent and quantifying the fit of an individual to a role and company.  Quality of Hire bubbles up every few years as a hot issue in the Human Capital Management (HCM) space, but it’s such a complex and costly issue to address that it generally gets overpowered by things that address more short-term business issues.  You’ve probably heard the old saying, “Quality. Speed. Low Costs. Pick any two, but you can’t get all three together.”  We generally don’t like to hire slowly, or to commit to higher costs.  The deck seems stacked against Quality of Hire, doesn’t it?

I think HR Pros and Hiring Managers would love a more simple approach to Quality of Hire than the market has given us so far.

So many of the Sourcing tools we use for candidates result in volumes of resumes or profiles that need to be scoured and filtered.  Once you get through that process, in most cases you are then making your first impression to the candidate via email, tweet, or message on a Social Network.  Is casting my net for candidates on the entire Open Web with great algorithms really my best way to find quality talent?

Once a candidate is seriously considered in the hiring process we’ve developed assessments and tests to help understand fit and the candidate’s strengths.  I would never argue that these processes can’t work – I’ve seen them work first hand, but they are cumbersome and tend to be more helpful as an indicator of how best to manage and collaborate well together – not really a vehicle for a hiring decision.  We all believe that top talent knows top talent, so we clamor around referrals as the premium source, and litmus test, for quality.

Could there be an even better source for talent than referrals?  Is there a way to engage that talent that helps me make more effective hiring decisions?  Could there be a way to get assessment level perspective on a candidate before the hiring decision is made?

Enter SkillSurvey.

SkillSurvey has been pioneering the automation of reference checking for years, however they don’t just automate the process to get you more completion rates – their solution promises to move beyond reference checking and into what they call “reference assessment”.  They’ve introduced scientifically-validated behavioral assessments in the reference-checking process, giving Hiring Managers and HR a 360°-view of a candidate’s fit for a given position.  They have smartly and creatively introduced assessments during the reference process.  This promises to impact Quality of Hire, Turnover, and efficiency metrics.

Their innovation doesn’t end with the process.  They have also entered into the world of sourcing, by helping their customers build a database of, what SkillSurvey considers, the highest quality Talent Pool – Individuals that have been references for your candidates and have opted in to learn more about you.  It’s compelling.  I can tell you from my own experience in 3rd Party Search and via my relationships with folks in that role, references are considered an even higher quality source of talent than referrals.   SkillSurvey is rumored to be working on taking this Opt-In database into the Social Recruiting world – providing an Employer Branding experience and true cultivation of relationships with this source of talent.

SkillSurvey addresses several opportunities or business challenges for companies of almost any size:

Shorten Your Time Time To Hire.  Anyone that has been involved in the hiring process will commiserate with you about several of the steps that slow your time to hire, or time to fill.  Reference checking is one of those.  The phone tag and email tag can go on for unacceptable lengths of time.  Automating the process boosts efficiency and effectiveness.

Synchronizes Reference Process With Core Business Metrics.  Using a standardized process, SkillSurvey can synchronize the reference data collected with key metrics for your business.  Perhaps the biggest example of this is where they have synced reference surveys with the Patient Satisfaction Standards (HCAHPS) used in Healthcare.  This gives Hiring Managers and HR Pros a view to how a prospective new hire will impact key ratings around Patient Satisfaction.  You could see the same approach be helpful in various hiring disciplines.

Puts A Focus on Quality.  Whether it’s the 360° assessment data considered during the hiring process, or whether it’s cultivating your most valuable source of talent, applying a measurable focus to Quality  leads to a proactive hiring environment aligned on values and culture.

The modules break down like this:

Pre-Hire360®:  Behavioral web-based reference checks that assess a candidate’s behaviors, skills and developmental needs with their managers, peers, business partners, and clients.

Passive Candidate Compiler™:  A powerful opt-in searchable database of prospective candidates who are eager to learn about future job openings at your company.

If you are a company of almost any size and interested in a more simple, but effective way of  improving your Quality of Hire, or you are interested in cultivating a Talent Pool of, what may arguably be, your highest Quality prospective candidates, or both, you should be taking a look at SkillSurvey.

Disclosure:  This post is NOT a result of any sponsorship or paid relationship.

One of the most interesting trends to unveil itself through this year’s #hrwins process has been the number of HR Technology companies that are now getting real traction for their solutions at companies with under 5,000 employees – or what is traditionally called the Small and Medium Business segment (SMB).  For the sake of this post we’ll consider the SMB to be companies with up to 5,000 employees.

This trend isn’t a surprise.  For many years HR Tech vendors have tried to get real traction in the SMB.  The interesting thing is that it’s now more realistic for HR Tech across several categories to penetrate the SMB succesfully.

I expect some new HR Tech leaders to emerge in the SMB over the next 18 to 24 months.

The opportunity is huge in the mid market given the amount of employment in the segement, as well as the sheer number of possible customers.  The US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2011 data shows 61.39% of employment in firms with under 1,000 employees.  The available data from the US Census Bureau shows 5.9 Million Businesses with under 5,000 employees (see breakdown in chart below).

In the past there were generally two things standing in the way of HR Tech gaining traction in the SMB: 1) SMB firms and HR decision makers within them were difficult to find and quantify.  A large part of the SMB has no Head of HR.  In this segment HR is a function that is either part of an Operations or Finance department, OR spread out across all of the company’s management team.  SMB firms are also generally off of the traditional HR Tech marketing radar.  They don’t attend industry events in large numbers.  They also don’t show up with any consistency in large databases like D&B/Hoovers or OneSource.  2) HR Technology was difficult to adopt in the SMB.  Outside of, what used to be, the necessary evil of time and payroll systems there was no wide scale adoption of HR Technology across the segment.

The emergence of the Cloud as a cost-effective platform for the SMB, Social Networks, Social Media, and Social technology trends, Mobile, and the consumerization/gamification of applications across all segments have 1) made the SMB more visible to HR Tech Vendors and 2) Made the HR Technology more adoptable in the segment.

We’re seeing products across almost every segment become more feasible for the SMB to adopt:  Talent Management, Talent Acquisition, Workforce Management, Payroll, Time and Attendance, Assessment, Recruitment Marketing, Performance, Rewards and Recognition, HR Analytics, Engagement and Collaboration, etc…  We’re not only seeing feasibility, though.  We’re seeing real traction.

It seems that the vendors we spoke to that already have a product or service for the Enterprise segment (over 5,000 Employees) are continuing efforts there, but moving downstream into the SMB.  While most new vendors are focusing on Firms with under 5,000 Employees and leaving the extremely long sales cycles and battles with Platform Players in the Enterprise segment for another time.

Other than the Job Board category, where the SMB can work more transactionally, the HR Tech vendors that have classically supported the SMB look cumbersome and difficult to use in comparison to the new crop of tech entering the market.  When you talk to HR Pros in the SMB, there is a real sentiment of “settling” for HR Technology that was available at the time.

What are the challenges in the SMB for HR Tech?  Do you have a story about implementing HR Tech in a firm with under 5,000 employees (from the vendor or the HR Pro side)?  I would love to hear from you.

Enter Modern Survey, and their “Heat” platform.

Modern Survey Heat is a solution that combines HR Data, surveys, customer data, benchmarks and  other data from enterprise systems with the promise of better management strategies, responsiveness, and action.  The solution is delivered in an interface that is as useful for the CEO as it is the line manager or HR Director.

Whether looking at performance Enterprise-wide or at a department/location level, the system gives you the current “weather results” of your performance and leverages trend data to give you a forecast, complete with suggested go-forward actions.  Results may be “sunny” today with sales up and location productivity high, but looking into next quarter your bottom line may be making your forecast slightly cloudy based on an increasing cost-per-hire and key positions being left open as you continue to grow, delivering a results/productivity hit to your team.   If you had that kind of “organizational weather forecast” and could drill down to see core business metrics by staff, location, product, etc. , and then look to see if your High Performers are engaged in the right area… Well, how much more effective would those management meetings be?

The Heat Platform is targeted for use by companies with between 1,000 and 5,000 employees.  Modern Survey has been providing solutions to companies across various industries for more than 13 years.  Their solutions have been focused on Effectiveness, Engagement, Performance, Feedback, and Intelligence (research).  Heat doesn’t require the adoption of any of Modern Survey’s existing products or survey instruments.  It is truly independent, built to take metrics and other input from disparate systems and simplify the connection to results.  Heat was developed to be Mobile – giving business leaders access anywhere on any device, Predictive – to better retain and engage both Employees and Customers, and Social – and by social, Modern Survey means driving meaningful interaction between everyone in the Enterprise via tech or any other means.

Heat addresses several opportunities or business challenges for companies with between 1,000 and 5,000 Employees:

Empowers Mid-Market and Small Enterprise to turn “nimble” into an even bigger competitive advantage.  Companies with under 5,000 Employees rely on their ability to be nimble to beat their larger competition.  But, in today’s economy the big guys are getting more local and homogenizing markets quickly.  Heat combines core business metrics, customer data, and human factors in your enterprise with the promise of being nimble proactively, and not just responding to business issues in hind-sight.

Helps Line Managers See Past the KPI.  Your Key Performance Indicators can all be cooking along.  Results are up – Profits following.  Then BOOM  – key performers leave and the two weeks notice they gave you just doesn’t do much for you.  The stress this can put on a Department or Team can be lessened or avoided if line managers have visibility into their teams that goes beyond the KPI and starts to identify risk within a team, even when on the surface everything is fine.

Connects Employees to Results Every Day.  Whether the forecast is “sunny” or “cloudy”, Heat promises to guide the Manager to the right actions, which almost always involves communication and feedback for the staff.  Whether it’s announcing and celebrating success, or an opportunity for coaching that may help everyone do better, Heat doesn’t allow the Line Manager or Division Head to forget the critical feedback the team needs to stay on point or get more engaged.

Heat integrates HR, Customer, and Business Metrics in an elegant, easy to use interface.  Modern Survey, or other vendor, applications capturing metrics related to Results, Onboarding, Engagement, Performance, Leadership Feedback, Retention, and Intelligence are harnessed and then delivered to the Enterprise on any computing platform or mobile device.

Companies with between 1,000 and 5,000 Employees that are looking to compete and win externally while creating a thriving work environment and culture internally should take a look at Modern Survey’s Heat Platform.

Disclosure:  This post is NOT a result of any sponsorship or paid relationship.

As the conversation has evolved, so has the way that HR applies branding, marketing, and sales to Recruitment and Sourcing. Technology follows along (think of CRM), and in some cases leads (think Social, Mobile, or Big Data). When it comes to technology, you can generally watch the corporate market – see the trends evolve there – then watch HR test them and fit them into our paradigm. This is an excellent way to quickly evolve your marketing effort. In marketing we like to test different approaches, compare results, learn and adapt, rinse and repeat. As technology emerges so quickly, HR is offered an increasing number of options to consider when it comes to Recruiting and Sourcing Talent. It’s more required than ever to have a technology platform that can quickly adapt to new trends, test, measure, and incorporate success into your Recruitment Marketing “mix”.

Enter SmashFly Technologies.

Smashfly provides a Recruitment Marketing Platform that distributes your jobs to traditional job boards and the social and open web; Measures your recruiting performance with real-time metrics; helps build your talent networks; bolsters your Employer Brand; helps optimize your SEO; and assists you in sourcing candidates. All from one platform. It’s a powerful Marketing Platform, and it takes into account that HR Professionals are not Marketing Pros – the interface is clean and intuitive. For a suite of products that offers so much in a single platform, the complexity is all “behind the interface”.

Smashfly was built for companies with more than 1,000 employees. It’s affordable for its target audience, and is scalable to, and used by, companies at the 1,000 employee entry point, global enterprises, and everything in between. Because the suite can be implemented in modules, Smashfly offers a large degree of flexibility and long-term upside for companies that need to address an urgent need/opportunity in one or two aspects of their Recruitment Marketing and then move into more strategic opportunities over time.

Smashfly addresses several opportunities or challenges for the Enterprise:

• They promise to keep you ahead of “the technology curve”. Smashfly is nimble and quick to develop and/or integrate new technologies/trends/approaches into their platform. They believe that customers are better off with a Recruitment Marketing Platform that rapidly expands to meet new needs and opportunities, and not an expanding list of Point Solution Vendors. There is a lot to be said for this, and when you combine this approach with their near perfect customer retention rate and their responsiveness it is a strong differentiator for them.
• Duplication of effort is minimized. This is a bigger deal than we would all like it to be. The reality of HR Technology in Recruitment and Sourcing is that many companies have to duplicate their efforts across a series of point solutions that all contribute to different parts of the process. Think about how many times a recruiter has to enter a job description. Smashfly seamlessly integrates with your Talent Management or ATS system and lets you focus on getting the job done – the real job.
• Move away from a “next call or email mentality” and toward more strategic campaigns. With the bulk of your sourcing managed from one platform – you have the metrics to decide where to spend your next advertising dollar, and the view to whether you have candidates in your Talent Network that fit your upcoming needs. The promise is that you will stop having to recreate the wheel with every new Requisition by applying brute force or the old “post and pray”.

The modules break down like this:

• Recruitment Ad Distribution: Send jobs to top global and/or niche job boards, social networking sites, PPC/SEM, print ads, and the open web.
• CRM: Extend your Talent Network database and build relationships. Automated contact data entry, email and SMS campaign management, web sourcing, and integration to your existing Talent Network via ATS/TM integration.
• Career Marketing Sites: SEO – ready content, Mobile Job Pages, and Dynamic Landing/Branding Pages that promise to enhance your engagement and conversion rates.
• Recruitment Marketing Metrics: Dashboards, Core Metrics, and Pipeline Analytics that promise more visibility into what’s working and what to do next.

If you’re a company with more than 1,000 employees and looking to consolidate Recruitment Marketing onto one platform, Smashfly is a company with products you should be looking at.

Disclosure: 14 years ago I worked closely with the CEO/Founder of Smashfly. I ran Global Sales for HireSystems/BrassRing for several years and he was the principal Architect and Development Manager of the product at that time (1998 – 2002). This post is NOT the result of any sponsorship or paid relationship.

;

;

;

;

Performance Management.  If you’re like me, you thought just about everything that could currently be done in terms of tech in this category has been. Well, what about Performance Management for the SMB?  It’s generally accepted that the SMB doesn’t adopt cumbersome, process oriented software.  Classically, even the most usable performance management software is built to automate just that.  So, if you were going to offer Performance Management software to the true SMB, it would have to be incredibly elegant and easy to use.  It would have to require no training, and really demonstrate, all on it’s own, that it adds value to the day-to-day and not a process-oriented annual review cycle.  This means it’s not just valuable for the Employer, but for the Employee, also.

Enter Small Improvements.

Small Improvements is for those that believe in Agile HR.  For those that believe that HR is the business of getting work done.  It’s also for small companies that don’t yet have HR.  It has a focus on goals and objectives in the now or for the year.  It encourages collaboration, communication, and recognition.  It’s social and engaging software.  It’s complexity is behind the scenes.  The user experience is incredibly satisfying to anyone that thinks business software should be as intuitive as the social sites we all use.

Small Improvements is used by companies with less than 10 employees/users (for free!) and by companies with up to 2,000 employees/users for $4 to $6 per user per month.  They offer a 16% discount if you pay up front.  Non-profits get a 50% discount.  This is a software package that is delivering on the promise of SaaS/Cloud Computing democratizing technology.  Easy to use, powerful, and yet cost-effective because of both the technology and the subscription-based pricing model.

Small Improvements addresses several opportunities or business challenges for companies with up to 2,000 Employees:

Improved Performance Review Completion Rates:  Small Improvements focuses on continuous improvements rather than metrics.  Users are collaborating and communicating all along, as they reach goals and objectives, ongoing.  It is incredibly engaging to users based on its design and the way it has incorporated gamification with it’s icons and badges.

Performance Appraisals We Can All Understand:   An email driven process that tells you what to do and when.  And a rating system that doesn’t involve the classic 1 to 5, but a graphical approach where you drag the dot on the chart to best represent how you did your job and how you expanded your role.  Answer a few questions, and done.

Improve Collaboration and Productivity:  Users set and share objectives and due dates, and then the system prompts with due dates, captures feedback, and gamifies successfully reaching goals.  Users focus on reaching goals and getting work done, and the feedback and attainment contributes to the bigger performance review process.

The components of Small Improvements look like this:

Performance Reviews:  Small Improvements believes in continuous feedback and objectives communication which should be rolled up into more official performance reviews. The result is easier, more meaningful and frequent performance reviews that encourage actual performance improvements.

360° Feedback:   A simple and social way to collect feedback from peers, coworkers, managers, and even clients.  The feedback loop is always open, not just at review time.

Goal and Objective Management:  Short term Performance Objectives or long-term Career Goals.   Shared or Private.  Small Improvements gives an easy view to where you are against your goals, and reminds you as due dates approach.

Reporting and Tracking: 2D performance charts that are easy to understand and filter up or down the organization.  Calibrate and compare to understand how the entire company is doing in one easy view.

If you are a company with up to 2,000 employees in need of a way to collaborate more effectively,  measure performance more efficiently, and get the entire company aligned on the right goals and objectives, you should take a look at Small Improvements.

Disclosure:  This post is NOT a result of any sponsorship or paid relationship.

Culture.  The HR Technology market is filled with vendors attempting to quantify it for Employers via cumbersome survey instruments.  Once quantified, the idea is that it can then be leveraged to match employees that fit best, and the result is an employee will be more engaged, more productive, and stay with you longer.

No one with any experience in the field argues that the right survey instruments don’t help in this regard.  It’s just that they are cumbersome and can be difficult to administer and get full completion rates, because of it.  Especially in small to mid-size companies, or in any size company during the recruiting phase of the Talent Lifecycle.  Introducing these survey instruments to measure cultural fit during the process of applying for a job would be incredibly helpful, but also almost guarantee higher candidate abandonment rates during the process.

Enter thegoodjobs.com

The Good Jobs believes Employers can more simply define their culture in ways that turn it into a competitive brand advantage in the quest for talent.  They’ve created a new type of solution, a brand platform, to help both Employers and Candidates find who they are best aligned with when it comes to the programs, activities, and amenitiesthat bring a company’s values, employment brand and culture to life.

It’s a lofty goal to be the vendor that helps Employers truly make Culture a Competitive Advantage.  The Good Jobs are being smart about it.  Their platform doesn’t replace any existing tools like job boards, recruitment marketing, talent sourcing, CRM, etc.  The Good Jobs actually helps companies enhance those marketing channels by utilizing a simple “common culture language”.  The platform is also incredibly affordable.  The Good Jobs is for companies of any size, from the SMB to the largest Global Corporations.

The Good Jobs address several opportunities or business challenges for Employers and in turn, Candidates:

Simplified Employer Brand Message:  Have you gone to an employer’s career site and tried to find information about Fun, Perks, Career Development, Flextime, Ecological Initiatives, Career Development, Corporate Responsibility, etc.?  Good luck with that.  Even the employers that have spent a lot of time on their Employer Brand, seem to focus on their Job Marketing Message and their Candidate Experience through the application process – leaving “cultural fit and alignment” for later.  Marketing and Candidate Experience are critical – but, embedding Culture and Corporate Values up front during the Marketing and Candidate Experience processes creates what I’ll call Employer Differentiation.

Consistent Messaging Via all of your Recruiting Channels:  Are all of your candidates having the same experience with your Employer Brand, no matter where they interact with it?  Is it the same on your career site, job postings, job boards, LinkedIn, Facebook pages, collateral, emails, etc.?  The Good Jobs brand platform promises to standardize your message across all of these channels.  We all say that Recruiting is Marketing and Sales.  Well, consistency of message is one of the biggest challenges in any Marketing and Sales process.  I can’t imagine anywhere that this is more important than when finding people to join your team.

Helps Your Employer Brand Go Viral:  Last week I learned of a company that gives a $300 monthly stipend to Employees that drive a Hybrid and put a car magnet with the company logo on it.  I’ve told 5 people about that company.  I’ll tell more.  I know a lot of people that align with the kind of values that program represents.  That is the kind of impact a brand platform promises to have on issues that mean the most when it comes to Employee fit, engagement, and cultural alignment.

The components  of The Good Jobs platform look like this:

A Culture Directory:  thegoodjobs.com is not a job board, although they will host jobs for free there – or link to an Employers jobs posted elsewhere.  Their site will act as a “Culture Directory” where candidates will find companies they are aligned with in different industries, locations, or with different job types available.

The Good Jobs Badges™:  They’ve gamified the view to an Employer’s culture.  It’s a simplified interface to a very thorough process of definition and validation of Cultural and Value Alignment.  What looks like a simple badge represents something much more to those aligned with it, and The Good Jobs has thought through the definition and process to assure that the badges stand for something more than the pixels that make them up.

Career Microsites:  Sites that stand alone, or support, promotion of an Employer’s engagement and retention programs, activities, and amenities.

If you are a company of any size, trying to make your Company’s unique Culture and Values stand out to prospective candidates, you should take a look at The Good Jobs.  If you’re a job board, job distribution vendor, or tech vendor involved in marketing jobs to candidates you should put The Good Jobs on your partner list.

Disclosure:  This post is NOT a result of any sponsorship or paid relationship.

Mobile.  It’s more than a trend.  When you look at the statistics on Mobile adoption and usage it’s staggering.  It looks like mobile is the future.  When you look globally, even more so.

You’ve probably heard many of the stats about mobile becoming the computing platform of the future.  It gets summed up nicely in a study commissioned by Qualcomm  which stated, “With more than 6 billion connections worldwide and US$1.3 trillion in annual revenue, 1. mobile telephony has become the largest information and communication technology (ICT) in history. Mobile connects four times as many people as landline telephony because of its better reach, convenience, and functionality and its lower costs.  2.  Mobile telephony also surpasses the landline Internet by more than 3.5 billion users, 3. while driving economic growth and important societal benefits, as documented in the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2008–2009: Mobility in a Networked World and other research.”  Comscore, the internet research firm, forecasts that mobile will eclipse desktop by 2014.  Gartner agrees.

Will mobile devices be where we interact with candidates and employees in the future?  We don’t make those predictions here, but it seems to be the direction in which we’re headed.

Enter iMomentous

While the world has been looking at developing and implementing Mobile Apps to address the equivalent of point solutions in the HR Tech landscape, iMomentous built a Platform

The iMomentous platform gives Companies of all sizes (SMB and Enterprises) a scalable central point to manage their Brand and their Candidate and Employee experiences.

iMomentous addresses several opportunities or business challenges for the Enterprise:

App Creep:  With Companies extending mobile apps for everything, the ability to manage the user and candidate/employee experience across these apps could offer a level of complexity and duplication of effort that runs costs far above any value added by an extending list of apps to manage.  iMomentous centralizes administration and offers Customers an incredibly easy to use, and powerful, interface to do so.

Reaching People Where and When They Work and Live:  Lets face it, the most complete contact lists, calendars, social activity, and task streams take place on our mobile devices.  It’s amazing how much of our lives are resident on our phones and tablets.  By moving to a mobile interface, as one of the opportunities for employees/candidates to interact, you have more odds of engaging them.

Opportunity for Increased Referral Rates:    I’ve probably forgotten more referrals that I thought about making when a colleague is standing in front of me, than I have actually ever made over my career.  If I had my phone contact list integrated into a core referral engine, it would be the other way around.  I’m just too lazy, and/or too busy, to get from my phone to my desktop sometimes.  I don’t think I’m unique.

The Apps being driven from the iMomentous platform look like this:

Career Connect – Fully Functional Career Portals.  These are fully branded, fully featured job portals.  For SMB firms without an ATS/TM system some simple CRM capabilities are also available.

Employee Connect – Powerful Employee Engagement:   OnBoarding, Learning & Development, and Field Connectivity solutions reaching Employees in the palm of their hand, anywhere – any time.  A mobile Employee Engagement App was something I was highly skeptical of, but then incredibly and pleasantly surprised.

iMomentous is also extending their reach via forthcoming integrations with other systems that are in our universe of Talent Management.  Look for them to emerge with, and through, other solutions in the near future.

If you are a company of any size looking at Mobile for any aspect of the Talent Management lifecycle, iMomentous is a company with solutions that you need to see.

Disclosure:  This post is NOT a result of any sponsorship or paid relationship.

In companies with more than 1,000 employees implementing Social Recruiting technology can be a challenge.  The legacy Talent Management and HR Systems have never been strong for sourcing Talent and the rapid growth of Social Recruiting has painfully amplified this weakness over the last few years.

Enter Talent Technology Corporation (TTC) and their Talemetry Suite of Sourcing and Talent Generation technology.

Talent Technology has long been focused on filling the gaps existing within the Enterprise HR Tech vendors.  With existing integrations to the Enterprise suites, and strong long-term relationships with their product teams, the emergence of the Social Web represented an incredible opportunity for TTC.  An opportunity they jumped on.

If you are a Company with more than 1,000 Employees and you are using a Talent Management Suite or ATS, along with the core capabilities of any Sourcing technology, strong integration at all of the right points is a deal breaking requirement.

While the Talemetry products stand alone, they are integration experts when it comes to providing talent related technology to the Enterprise.  Integration, while incredibly important, is not why TTC’s Talemetry Suite is on the HR Companies To Watch list.  The features, and elegance, found in the Talemetry Suite – for both Companies and Candidates, are.

The Talemetry Suite addresses several opportunities or business challenges for the Enterprise:

• We were impressed with the way Talemetry consolidates the process for Recruiters to find candidates, and candidates to engage and apply to corporations.  The User experience and the candidate experience are greatly improved with their intuitive, yet feature rich interface.
• A deep understanding of Enterprise level recruitment means that Talemetry brings new, current recruitment trends to the table with an eye on issues like Compliance and Reporting.
• We can’t stress enough how much the integrations and existing relationships with Enterprise Talent Management Systems strengthen the user experience and entire Talemetry suite.

The modules break down like this:

Talent Networks and Sourcing – Search your ATS, Social Networks, the Open Web, and job boards ALL AT ONCE.  Use semantic search to find the best fit.  Invite top Talent to join your Talent Network via CRM and a rich Candidate Experience

Recruitment Marketing – Targeted, Branded, career sites; FaceBook, LinkedIn, and Twitter job marketing; FaceBook page development; Job Board Distribution

Candidate Engagement – Candidates apply using profiles they maintain on Google+ , LinkedIn, etc., as well as with a resume; Candidates and Recruiters can format profiles in a way that makes sense for them, Integrated employment-screening, and compliant views of candidate public information.
If you are a company with more than 1,000 employees, and are thinking about implementing a comprehensive Talent Sourcing, Marketing, and Engagement platform the  Talemetry Suite is an HR Technology Product you need to see.

Disclosure:   10 years ago I was General Manager of the HireDesk division of TalentTechnology.  The HireDesk product is still in production, but is not part of the Talemetry suite.  This post is NOT the result of any sponsorship or paid relationship.

The results of the 2012 #hrwins program are in.   The first ever complete look at truly innovative HR Technology products across all categories.

The program spanned 9 months, and consisted of comprehensive HR Technology briefings, where more than 120 vendors were evaluated on their solution’s innovation, the value their technology delivers to the Human Resources profession, and the overall viability of their products.  Vendors in virtually all segments of Human Resources Technology were evaluated.  This year’s #hrwins concludes with 20 HR Technology Vendors receiving the distinction of “HR Companies To Watch”.

When HR Technology vendors innovate they create an opportunity for HR, and the business of getting work done, to proceed to a much more desirable level.  When HR Technology vendors innovate, HR wins, hence #hrwins was born.

I’m happy to report that Innovation in HR Technology is alive and well.  All of the vendors we’ve seen are providing value to the marketplace at some level.   I would love to recognize every single one.   All that participated deserve a huge thank you.  The winners truly stood out from the pack.

As we begin to report on each vendor, it’s clear to me that, more than ever before, HR has opportunities to leverage technology to take the business of getting work done to a place where it’s impacting business results in a direct and indisputable way.  My goal is to help HR sift through the noise in the tech market to discover where the most relevant innovations are happening for them.

Each of the 20 vendors receiving this distinction will have a report here on larocqueinc.com outlining the innovation they are delivering to help HR win.  These vendor reports will start next week.  We are continuing to publish #hrwins Trend Reports ongoing, which are not vendor specific, outlining the technology and solution trends found through the #hrwins program.  All of the #hrwins reports are published free of charge.  If you want to be sure not to miss one, we have #hrwins Alerts available.

The 2012 #hrwins HR Companies to watch, listed in alphabetical order, are:

Bullhorn – The Bullhorn Reach product has transcended the third-party staffing segment Bullhorn is normally recognized for, and has become a borderline industry standard for marketing of jobs via social media, as well as comprehensive social network monitoring.   100,000 users should be enough for HR to take notice.

Ceridian Dayforce  – The Ceridian Dayforce platform has delivered what would normally be found in a disparate list of HR technology solutions, but in one platform with a single interface.  This provides an incredible improvement for HR Pros at companies of all sizes.  The kind of innovation that helps HR focus on their workforce and not chasing changes to Employee Records through multiple interfaces.

Ebsta – Ebsta transcends the corporate sales and third-party staffing verticals and is a tool HR should become familiar with.   A CRM-based Talent Sourcing Tool that seamlessly integrates data and context across all of the systems a Recruiter uses on a constant basis.

Gild – Gild finds technical talent, aggregates their social data, and rates the quality of their work.  Gild scores can be integrated into a customer’s ATS/TM system.  They also provide event based “quizzes”, delivered across a mobile platform, gamifying the sourcing of talent.

HireVue – HireVue started with online interviewing has taken it to a new level… a Digital Interviewing Platform.  Truly adding value to hiring decisions with more than just the benefits of video.  With the introduction of mobile solutions, and their recent acquisition of the CodeEval product, look for HireVue to continue to innovate even more value into hiring decisions.

iMomentous – While most have been distracted building mobile interfaces, or stand alone apps, in front of their Talent Acquisition and Talent Management processes, iMomentous has been developing and delivering a scalable mobile platform that promises amazing results via an easy to implement and use interface.  Elegant, and fully featured solutions span Talent Acquisition, Talent Referral Engines, and Employee Collaboration and Engagement.

Jobscience – A Social Talent Acquisition and Talent Management solution built on the robust Salesforce platform.  Jobscience is also making moves in Candidate/Individual Social Identity Control and Mobile Interviewing. Jobscience has quietly become one of the most successful products built on Salesforce.com for the Mid and Enterprise markets.

LinkedIn – Clearly an innovator of Social Networks.  Recent innovations provide LinkedIn customers in HR with opportunities to target passive candidates via Big Data.  They also continue to innovate in ways that help customers strengthen their Employer Brand and increase conversions.

Lumesse – Lumesse has moved market leading Talent Management Products to a single platform, while introducing innovation via Agile Learning.   The Enterprise is able to keep up with the need for rapid content development for Learning and Development.  Whether it’s needed for highly structured courses or rapid situational response content delivery.

Modern Survey – The Modern Survey “Heat” Platform blends HR, Customer, and Business Performance data, then wraps it with Analytics that provide the entire Enterprise an easy to use, easy to understand, constant monitor of existing results and a predictive view to the future.

RiseSmart – RiseSmart has innovated in the age old Outplacement Industry with a blend of Employee-centric technology and service that is both efficient for the Corporation and Useful and Impactful for the Employees In Transition.  RiseSmart has incorporated major HR Tech and Service Trends into a complete solution.

SilkRoad – SilkRoad’s Point Product merges Talent Management and Social Collaboration.  Like a “FlipBoard for HR”, it’s easy, intuitive, and fun interface is an incredible leap forward in usability for HR Systems.

SkillSurvey –  SkillSurvey has long innovated in the world of Automated Reference Checking, and has parlayed that experience into Innovations in Talent Sourcing, driving results in building Talent Networks with a focus on quality and conversions, not quantity.

Small Improvements – Visual Performance Management with gamification elements that make the process easy enough for businesses with up to 2,000 employees.

Smashfly Technologies  – A fully featured, SaaS based Recruitment Marketing Platform, complete with Social, Mobile, CRM, and Analytics.  Seemingly the only platform independent end to end Recruitment Marketing Platform.  Rapid and continuous innovation has continued to push this product out in front.

SwoopTalent – Swoop Talent has innovated in the aggregation of candidate social data, but also in the area of Talent Community Development and Employer Branding.  One of the few vendors in their category that provide solutions that cover both the Internal and External Talent Pools.

Talemetry (Talent Technology Corp) – Talemetry Talent Generation suite is long on innovation.  A single search to your internal databases, the social graph, and open web.  A Powerful Symantec engine for ranking and relevance.  Recruitment Marketing and Branding, with Social job distribution.  Streamlined Candidate apply, candidate profile creation, and assessments that improve the Candidate experience.  Seamless integration to Enterprise level Talent Management Systems.

Talent Analytics – An Analytics platform that combines People Data and Business Performance data, then delivers it back at incredibly useful points of time or process.   Users are equipped to make better business decisions and be more effective in their collaboration and work with each other.

TalentBin – The first Social Data Aggregator to move beyond the IT vertical and into other segments.  By indexing the US Patent Database, Customers in other highly technical verticals have a view to Prospective Talent that wasn’t available before.

TheGoodJobs.com – TheGoodJobs is an Employer Branding Platform that connects Candidates to Companies based upon alignment of core values and culture.  While skills are searched and matched, “fit” drives engagement and retention.  The alignment is gamified via icons and badges.  TheGoodJobs looks to become the market standard in cultural alignment.

Congratulations to all of the 2012 #hrwins HR Companies To Watch!

We’ll dwell on this for a while, but we’re already looking forward to 2013, more HR Technology innovation, and a new #hrwins!

Looking at more than 120 technology vendors in a short time frame provides an interesting perspective.  There are a lot of vendors working with their blinders on, developing solutions across several categories, that they compartmentalized into the classic HR Tech segments (talent acquisition, learning, performance, etc.).  What these vendors seemingly don’t realize is that they are all chipping around the idea of an emerging segment, Work Management.

Work Management is a fairly new trend.  I first blogged about it this time last year.  Work Management solutions promise to Engage non-HR users across the Enterprise to manage their work, connect with their peers and managers, gain internal and external knowledge, etc.   Input and output from these systems would encompass collaboration, performance, project management, talent management, HR Analytics, compensation, and more.

Implemented properly, the enterprise (all staff) would engage with these systems because the system actually helps you get work done and do your job better.  The data harnessed from these systems would be more powerful than anything we’ve seen in HR Tech before.  Making direct ties to business performance and giving businesses something they struggle with constantly:  predictability of results.

There is a HUGE opportunity for Human Resources to be the leader of this change in the enterprise.   It would be huge for this space to start to deliver on the decades-old vision of empowering the workforce.  If HR doesn’t do it, some other function will and HR will be left integrating into it, instead of driving the change.

Several of the #hrwins 2012 HR Companies To Watch provide solutions that drive value in their own right while contributing to the concept of Work Management.   We’ll be sure to highlight that as we announce the winners in the coming weeks.

What do you think?  Is this HR’s big opportunity?  Can HR drive a change like this?