On Monday, May 13 just over 100 Executives from the HR Service and Technology space got together in San Francisco for the inaugural InfluenceHR Symposium.

I created the event based on continued questions from many of the Executives that ended up being in the room.  They were asking for access to real actionable content about understanding the HR Buyer and how best to market to them.  They wanted more than just content, though.  They wanted a conversation with their contemporaries.

There was a lot of excitement and momentum leading up to the event.  I was thrilled with the result.

Most of the presenters mirrored those in the audience – CEOs (more than half of the attendees) and Customer Facing and/or Strategy-Driving Executives (the other half).  Some of the biggest brands in the space were represented – several even sending teams.  Emerging, early stage startups were there, and EVERY size vendor in between.  There was a broad cross section of industry segments represented in the room, also.

Most importantly, InfluenceHR was the conversation we had hoped for.  An open, honest conversation about existing and new strategies.  About what’s working and what isn’t.  About what actually helps the buyer.  About how we can do a better job understanding the buyer, and in turn communicating with them.

I was humbled by the talent in the room.  Honored that they were there.  Every single person at InfluenceHR , speakers and attendees alike, contributed to make the day an incredible learning experience.

Once again, based on the interest of all involved, we’re going to keep the conversation going.  This October in New York City.

We’ll have a fresh agenda, taking into account the feedback from those that were in San Francisco.

We have speakers with exciting topics already lining up.  We’re days away from formalizing and announcing the location and firm date.

This time we’ll have a selected panel of HR Buyers in the room to give some direct perspective.

We’re also keeping the conversations going between now and October.  Those in attendance in San Francisco will receive an InfluenceHR membership, where they get exclusive access even further exclusive content and analysis about marketing to the HR Buyer. Exclusive opportunities to continue the conversations we started at InfluenceHR with selected speakers, other attendees, HR Buyers, and new experts we are inviting into the conversation.

The energy around InfluenceHR has been amazing.  It’s a true testament to those that attended and their desire to help HR win.  Take a look at the Storify we created from the Twitter stream around the show.  It will give you a good sense of what it’s all about.

See you this October in New York!

Startups can make a big name for themselves if they have the right product, the right strategy, and the right people. Just look at Gild, an innovative recruiting technology provider that helps match companies with in-demand tech talent.

Co-founder and CEO Sheeroy Desai will be speaking at InfluenceHR on May 13, providing a behind-the-scenes look at how to achieve rapid growth in a competitive market.

That’s right. You can hear directly from the source how a startup can see dramatic success in a fast-moving and demanding industry.

Sheeroy’s session, “From 0-60 mph in 30 Seconds — An Inside Look at Gild’s Rapid Growth in HR Technology,” will address how a clear vision, a quality product, and a solid strategy allowed Gild to increase its customer base by 900 percent and recently close an $8 million Series A round of funding led by Baseline Ventures.

Sheeroy will share how Gild overcame myriad challenges, including a relatively small target market and the requirement for hiring teams — its target market — to modify traditional behaviors. Attendees will hear about Gild’s hiring strategy, Gild’s iterative product strategy, discontinuous innovation, and how understanding “customer experience” can inform the company’s strategy.

InfluenceHR is going to show that marketing isn’t just about what a company communicates or advertises, but how that business is developed. It’s also going to show that the people are just as critical to the success of a marketing strategy as the message that is at its core.

Join us for InfluenceHR on May 13. Click here to register if you haven’t already added this one-day event to your calendar.

When we say that InfluenceHR is going to spend one day unveiling the secrets of HCM marketing, we know you’re expecting actionable advice that can reshape your strategy. The Starr Conspiracy is making those secrets yours for the taking.

With more than 10 years of expertise in the HCM industry, The Starr Conspiracy is underwriting InfluenceHR in an effort to change the way you think about marketing. No redacted reports. No games. Just truth.

Bret Starr, founder, president, and partner of The Starr Conspiracy, has a keynote session lined up that tells you exactly the kinds of secrets you want to hear — “Inside the Honeycomb: An Expansive Model for B2B Marketing.”

After more than a decade of research and field-testing, Starr is ready to publicly unveil the Honeycomb model. It’s a new, expansive philosophy of marketing that eschews the obsolete dogmas of post-bubble B2B marketing strategies.

In his presentation, Starr will introduce the concept of “Drive” as the single unifying element of all business and marketing strategies. He will demonstrate how Drive must be the starting point for all message, brand, and promotion strategies. Finally, Starr will make the case that all prospect, customer, and employee communication initiatives draw their power from a company’s Drive.

The days of the monolithic brand strategy are over, as are the days of demand-generation-dominated promotion strategies.

With The Starr Conspiracy, attendees get more than a sponsor — they get insight and genuine passion around changing the nature of B2B marketing. Those are secrets that an underwriter can share. Those are secrets that can help you change the destiny of marketing.

If you haven’t registered for InfluenceHR yet, it’s time to commit. See you there!

This week we announced the 2013 #hrwins.  #hrwins is the first ever complete look at truly innovative HR Technology products across all categories.  Last year one of the vendors I evaluated called it a “Celebration of Innovation”.  I think that’s fitting.  Everything we do here is rooted in the belief that when HR Technology vendors innovate and market and sell their products properly, HR wins.  It’s good to recognize and celebrate that kind of winning!

#hrwins analyzes HR technology via comprehensive briefings, where hundreds of vendors are evaluated on their solution’s innovation, the value their technology delivers to the Human Resources profession, and the overall viability of the products. Vendors in virtually all segments of HR Technology will be evaluated.  It’s an exhaustive, and exhausting, process.  Innovation is not limited to the bits and bytes of a solution, or a solution’s trendiness.  We look for new, innovative, ways of addressing real HR challenges through the implementation of technology.

This year’s #hrwins really started in October of 2012 after the 2012 #hrwins Companies To Watch were published.  Vendor briefings are a constant.

We’ve changed the format slightly, so that we can cover more ground.  This year we will look at even more Technology segments and, in that way, provide more value for those in HR that are evaluating technology.

This year’s #hrwins will conclude in October 2013 with 10 HR Technology Vendors receiving the distinction of “2013 HR Companies To Watch”. Additional vendors will be highlighted across the major HR Technology segments later in the year via the popular #hrwins Trend Reports, and an e-book that will be released at the overall conclusion of #hrwins.

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.”

This year we are announcing 10 companies to watch and providing a broader view to vendors innovating across all categories.   The goal is to highlight the vendors that are delivering new and innovative value to HR, so that HR practitioners can create a short-list of innovators by category when they have buying decisions to make.”

Each of the 10 vendors receiving this distinction will have a report outlining the innovation they are delivering to help HR win. LAROCQUE is also publishing the popular #hrwins Trend Reports, which are not vendor specific, outlining the technology and solution trends found through the #hrwins program. #hr wins Trend Reports are scheduled to start in late May 2013. All of the #hrwins reports are published free of charge at http://www.larocqueinc.com

HR Technology vendors wishing to include their products in the 2013 #hrwins are encouraged to contact LAROCQUE by filling out a Vendor Briefing request form found at http://www.larocqueinc.com/vendor-briefings 

There are no fees for vendors to participate in the program.  LAROCQUE does not disclose a list of vendors that were evaluated, and do not make the 10 Most Innovative, or get mentioned in Trend Reports.  We are happy to provide participating vendors with feedback on their participation in the process.

Companies have never had more opportunities to target the right audience than today. Marketing doesn’t have to be a shotgun approach, hoping your message hits someone who will listen. Instead, you can target with laser focus to market to the right people.

That’s what ReTargeter helps people do. I’m happy to say that ReTargeter, a full-service advertising solution company, is going to be part of the team of experts unveiling marketing secrets at InfluenceHR on May 13 in San Francisco.

In order for companies to see the value of targeting their approach, they need to understand the digital landscape and see results from real companies already doing this. ReTargeter founder and CEO Arjun Dev Arora will share his secrets in the session “What’s Possible: Finally Finding the Elusive HR Buyer in a Digital World.” Dev Arora will speak to his digital advertising company’s experience with the HR market while also discussing the history of display advertising and digital media as a whole.

In this session, attendees will learn not only about the history of digital marketing but also about its future. This includes how offline activity can be connected to online campaigns, how to leverage the power of targeted advertising to reach only the right people, and how companies are shifting their digital strategy toward new media.

I’m really glad that we can bring ReTargeter to the sponsor team for InfluenceHR. They’re experts themselves, not just another company going through the motions.

If you haven’t registered for InfluenceHR yet, get your head in the game. There isn’t another marketing conference like this, and you need to see how one day is going to change how your company goes to market.

Before the panel started I was given an impromptu briefing by SmartRecruiters Founder and CEO, Jerome Ternyck. Like most briefings, I was brought up to speed on their growth and progress as a company since last we met. I also received the standard glimpse to some new Third Party Agency Management capabilities being announced today.

SmartRecruiters’ progress, and these new capabilities, are anything but standard.

I’ve been following SmartRecruiters since 2010. They launched as a free ATS, and did a great job releasing an initially functional product and marketing it well. Leaping into the market with thousands of users and a great deal of buzz, they caught my attention. With Jerome’s background and understanding of Talent Management and HR Technology, it was clear that the product would continue to improve. What was less clear, at the time, was whether there was a sustainable and scalable business that would deliver on more than just the promise of being free. Based on what I see now, the answer is clearly a resounding “Yes”.

SmartRecruiters remains free to their customers. Since launching in 2010 they have amassed more than 35,000 of them. Here’s an interesting data point – SmartRecruiters is doing a LOT of migrations of their customers’ data from other ATSes. Customers that were paying for systems before are now moving to the SmartRecruiters free platform. We’re not just talking about the SMB, either. Firms with more than 10,000 employees have left Enterprise-level implementations of their ATSes and Talent Management Systems and moved to this free platform, leaving behind the customizations and depth that comes along with an Enterprise solution.

Why?

In my opinion, there are two primary reasons:

1. SmartRecruiters free pricing model has allowed their customers to shift a significant spend on license fees into other services (Background Checks, Skills and Competency Assessments, Job Posting/Advertising, etc.). Today’s announcement of a marketplace to manage and control Third Party Agency Spend is just another example of SmartRecruiters execution on that strategy. But, its not just about diverting dollars to services that help you hire better – ITS ABOUT CONTROL. COST CONTROL and QUALITY CONTROL. It’s not about control of process just for process’ sake. SmartRecruiters is committed to a simple-to-use interface that is driven by user and candidate experience. CUSTOMER experience.

They have refused to implement the kind of process-driven workflow hierarchy that renders other systems cumbersome and unusable. This allows SmartRecruiters’ customers to achieve something most Talent Management system customers could never think of: Engaging the Line Managers to use the system – and they actually use it. With everyone using the system, and all of the hiring spend, including Agency fees, being managed via the system the visibility and real-time measurement of effectiveness of any source, any campaign, and any spend is at a level not normally achieved by those paying for their systems.

2. There is a movement afoot in the world of Enterprise Software that is taking interface design to its simplest level. Trading off the kind of process for process’ sake workflow referenced above for usability and portability. Its early, and its hard to tell whether its a trend or becoming our new reality, but one thing is certain – the world is moving to a more customer-driven, and in our world also candidate-driven, design model. I wrote about it here. SmartRecruiters is one of the first ATSes I’ve seen that incorporates this approach.

So, what about this new Agency Management Release?

SmartRecruiters customer can now:

• View terms for all recruiters, and negotiate and contract directly online
  with the benefit of the marketplace transparency.
• submit a job to the marketplace and let recruiters bid for that business
• manage all their 3rd party recruiters from one platform
• invite their preferred suppliers or discover new ones that have been vetted by their peers
• see the best performing recruiters ranked based on areas of expertise, key
  success metrics, such as CV to interview rate, average time to source, and hiring
  percentage, as well as, customer reviews.

These features are a huge win for SmartRecruiters’ customers. Third party recruiters are often viewed as “only as good as their last placement”. A significant amount of time and energy goes into discovering the current “best” recruiters, and then establishing working contract terms with them. SmartRecruiters has addressed these issues, and created a marketplace with transparency to performance and cost. The best recruiters will just get better in this environment, and SmartRecruiters customers in need of third-party agency help are closer to passive, harder to find, quality talent with just a few clicks.

If I were managing Talent Acquisition, or Recruiting for ANY size firm I would be taking a close look at the SmartRecruiters platform.

If I were a legacy Talent Management or ATS vendor, I’d be taking SmartRecruiters very seriously as a current and future competitor.

Disclosure: THIS IS NOT A SPONSORED POST

I’m so excited about the KeyNote presentation we’ve secured for InfluenceHR.

Mark Organ is the person credited with creating marketing automation.  He was the founding CEO of Eloqua and disrupted the B2B market, putting the technology and the concepts we all manage to today on the map.  He has agreed to talk to us about the next Disruptive Technology and approach in B2B marketing, and in turn our HCM space:  Advocacy Marketing.

B2B Advocacy Marketing has begun to deliver massive increases in referral leads, reference calls, social media participation and more for those that are doing it.  I really believe it’s where B2B marketing is going in this social/digital age.

HCM Vendors that listen to Mark, and adopt strategies in Advocacy Marketing won’t just sell more stuff.  They’ll also help HR and the HR buyer.  THIS is why I’m so excited about it.  Selling more stuff isn’t that hard – selling more stuff to the right people, and making a difference while you’re doing it – that’s pretty cool.

One of the driving principles behind creating InfluenceHR is this:  When Human Capital Management Vendors get it right, HR WINS.  The wins are obvious when a vendor gets their product or service right – value gets added or Return on Investment achieved.   But, selling a good product to the wrong people, or with the wrong expectations, is a waste of everyone’s time.

When HCM Vendors get their marketing and their go-to-market right – HR WINS even more.   Imagine as a marketer not just messaging to people who care about what you have to offer, but empowering them – enabling them with your brand… creating an Army of Advocates that are IN THE MARKET, ON THE GROUND, talking to their peers about what they like about you.  No one’s time is wasted in that scenario.

Imagine the credibility your brand would have in HR if it was introduced more by actual HR people than by sales people, mass emails, or display ads. Imagine the feedback channel to product development you would get from an engaged audience of customers, advocates, and prospective users that all truly care about what you’re doing.

Another driving principle behind InfluenceHR is over-delivering on our promise via our agenda.  We’ve promised you one day that will turn marketing to the HR buyer on its head.  Mark’s keynote alone does that, but we didn’t stop there.  I’m excited to tell you more about our other speakers and our agenda in upcoming posts.

If you haven’t registered for InfluenceHR yet, do it now… The Early-Bird discount expires on March 15.  You’ll make your CFO happy.

One of the trends that emerged through the 120+ #hrwins briefings was the emergence of so many video interviewing solutions.  Three years ago there were 2 or 3 vendors to speak of.  Today there are at least 10 firms providing video interviewing capabilities to the marketplace.  New ones are still popping up on our radar.

The emergence of video as a relevant tool in the hiring process started as a cost saving measure.  The ability to interact with someone, live or recorded, and make an initial screening assessment before incurring the time, or travel cost, for an in person interview is compelling.  The market has evolved to offer the ability drive more standardized interviews and assessments.  Impacting the quality of the hires made, not just the efficiency of the process.

Video is everywhere on the web.  Candidates are more comfortable talking to their web-cams.  People are more accepting of lesser quality video experiences.  Bandwidth continues to increase.  The quality of the video capturing tools is increasing.  Video, live or otherwise, is realistic on mobile devices and tablets.  The market, on the surface, seems ripe for a rush of new video vendors.  However, providing a tool that doesn’t do much more than replace Skype, Google, Webex, or GoToMeeting seems like recipe for a short-lived run as a vendor.  There has to be more value provided than just the administration of the video interview.

Video as the fundamental cornerstone of a complete hiring process is interesting.  Look for the vendors that succeed in this market to take a bigger picture look at Talent Management and the Hiring Process, and then offer extensions of the video technology that really impact quality of hire.

Elsewhere, you can expect video to be embedded in most ATS or Talent Management systems in the next year or two.  Stand alone video interview administrators will see prices plummet as their value proposition gets harder and harder to establish in contrast to free video conferencing services, embedded solutions, or those video platforms that are going well beyond pure video interview admin/capture.

]]> http://www.larocqueinc.com/2012/12/21/hrwins-trend-report-are-new-video-interviewing-tech-firms-a-day-late-and-a-dollar-short/feed/ 2 http://www.larocqueinc.com/2012/11/09/2012-hrwins-hr-companies-to-watch-vendor-report-ceridian-dayforce/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=2012-hrwins-hr-companies-to-watch-vendor-report-ceridian-dayforce http://www.larocqueinc.com/2012/11/09/2012-hrwins-hr-companies-to-watch-vendor-report-ceridian-dayforce/#comments Sat, 10 Nov 2012 02:17:13 +0000 glarocque http://www.larocqueinc.com/?p=729

When I started #hrwins I hoped to find someone impacting core HR processes for the Mid-Market.  That’s where most of the employment is in the US.  HR Technology helping with true day-to-day challenges is innovation that really matters.  We like to get all excited about the shiny new trends – Social, Mobile, Big Data, etc., and these have a great impact in a lot of different and cool ways.  But, what about the HR and Ops managers in middle-sized companies burning days at a time for every payroll cycle trying to make sure that change files are uploaded properly, and batch payroll uploads went through and reflect those changes?  What if you could give time spent on issues like that back to HR?

Our HR Technology market was created decades ago, starting with payroll.  Follow the money, right?  Legacy payroll systems today, in large part, are unchanged from what they were 20 years ago.  They are also disconnected from the core HR technologies that have emerged in the last few decades.  What HR is left with is a huge interface and integration problem.  As a result, employee records are housed in multiple systems.  It’s not uncommon for the data impacting payroll – Time, Attendance, Benefits, Tax Data, etc. – to be housed in a separate system for each.  This makes payroll time headache time for HR, and those headaches get transferred to the employees when the technology doesn’t get it right.  Which happens more than we like.

This isn’t the most exciting problem to solve, but solving it may be one of the biggest impacts HR Technology could have for HR and Employers.  If you solve this, think of what opportunities get created in Workforce and Talent Management.

Enter Ceridian Dayforce.

Dayforce represents a bold move on Ceridian’s part to take Human Capital Management for the mid-market, in one wholesale shift, to the cloud.  More than that, it represents the opportunity for middle-sized businesses to have one Employee Record and conduct all core HR processes via one interface with no integration issues to struggle with.  Dayforce is targeted for customers with up to 10,000 employees, but they have customers of all sizes – including several larger firms.  Ceridian’s revenue is between $1 and $2 Billion, so moving everything to the cloud and a new system is incredibly bold – and it’s working.  They’re not rushing existing customers to go there, but they have impressive traction with new business and a strong queue of existing customers raising their hand to make the move.

Ceridian Dayforce addresses several opportunities or business challenges for companies in the Mid-Market:

Minimizes and eliminates duplication of effort at the start.  Dayforce starts making HR more efficient before it goes live – during implementation.  There is so much repetition in the HR processes that are currently housed across multiple systems for most employers.  The implementation process for Dayforce is projected to take up to 40% less time, as compared to implementing other “suites” of solutions offered in the market. I think that’s conservative.  It’s not surprising that it’s more efficient to implement one system vs. 2 or 3.

Moves HR to One Employee Record.  This is big.  Having one core Employee record minimizes errors, duplication of effort, and increases employee satisfaction with HR in areas like payroll and benefits.  It also gives management more real-time view to key HR analytics that aren’t dependent on integration.

Makes your Workforce Management Platform More Strategic.  In the use case I was shown, we moved employees around on a shift based schedule and watched the projected sales revenue change by location, based on the changes we made.  The data we were integrating was Point of Sale (POS) and financial data from the POS system.  THAT is the kind of integration HR should be thinking about – those that make the HR system more strategic and useful to the line functions.

Dayforce breaks down like this:

Workforce Management:  Market leading time and attendance, scheduling, and management.

Payments: Paycards, transaction history, alerts… all mobile and all web.

HR Self-Service:   Intuitive end-user information management, complete with messaging and approval workflows.

Payroll: “From punch to pay”, offering incredible flexibility with preview and edit capabilities.

Benefits:  Fully featured from Setup to Enrollment to rich analytics.

If you are a company of any size and interested in a Workforce Management Solution that will help you compete, not just cut paychecks, you should be taking a long look at Ceridian Dayforce.

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

As I went through the #hrwins process this year, looking at more than 120 HR Tech Vendors, the lack of differentiation within and even across segments was incredible to me.   It’s still a huge challenge in our space.  Vendors need to get better at differentiation, but what the market needs is HONEST DIFFERENTIATION.  Let me tell you why….

If you can plainly articulate who you are, what your product does, the value of it, and how it fits into the marketplace -  HR will be able to better understand you and your product, and then spend less time making you jump through hoops just to understand what it is that you do.

Forget the jargon, or fitting your product within the latest trend.  Stop speaking buzzword – and start speaking the language your customers do.

If you make yourself clearly understood up front – you will then get the opportunity to make yourself different from other solutions.

It was common for me to listen to a vendor discuss their product for 10 minutes, and then have to ask, “But what do you do?”.

Get your initial pitch to what I call the “street level” so that anyone hearing it could understand it.  Be plain about what it is that you do.  Respect the time the customer has given you.  You’ll find that your honesty and understanding of their “language” may give you just the differentiation you are looking for.

When HR Tech vendors do a good job at honest differentiation, #hrwins.

In the mean time, here is a context sensitive, cloud-based media file that’s been compressed for performance… or, if you prefer – a YouTube video about Truth In Advertising I thought was related and sort of funny.  Dudley Moore makes me laugh just looking at him.