The most interesting companies in HR Tech #1 - Glassdoor

Note: It's time for a new, semi-occasional series here at the blog, especially since 'Job Titles of the Future' seems to have hit a bit of a dry patch. This time I am going to stay a little closer to a topic I am at least slightly more familiar with, the landscape of HR Technology solution providers. With 'The most interesting companies' series, I aim to highlight some of the cool and well, interesting things that HR tech companies are doing, particularly in areas that you may not be familiar with. As with every semi-occasional series on the blog, it will last as long as I find it interesting to write. And one more thing, none of the posts in this series are sponsored and I am not being compensated in any way for featuring any specific company.

Onward...

For the first 'most interesting' company, I submit Glassdoor.

Sure, you know Glassdoor as the home of the most extensive and thorough data source for company reviews submitted by employees, and a go-to source for job seekers to learn more about potential employers. And of course you know about Glassdoor's well-regarded and widely publicized lists and rankings, the best known being their Top 50 Places to Work list that was released earlier this week.

But what you may not know is that beyond their position as the de-facto home on the internet for a significant portion of what constitutes most organizations 'employer brand', Glassdoor has steadily been building additional tools and capabilities for employers to participate in proactive employer brand management, candidate engagement, accompanied by recruiting insights and analytics that are making Glassdoor an increasingly important and influential HR tech provider.

And Glassdoor provides many of these advanced company analytics for free, and so far over 16,000 companies have created free employer accounts to take advantage of the data and the insights. (See images on the right for example).Click to enlarge

Traffic to Glassdoor.com is ridiculously large, and the unique, valuable, and not reproducible asset of the millions of candidate and employee data points that form the backbone of the site make for an incredibly powerful, and yes, interesting combination, and at some level, makes Glassdoor one of the few (maybe the only) threats to 500-lb recruiting solutions provider LinkedIn.

Bottom line, 'normal' people go to LinkedIn every once in a while, when want to start looking for a job and think they had better polish up their profile. But they go to Glassdoor once they actually are immersed in the process, researching companies, prepping for interviews, trying to assess if the salary offers they received are fair. That is a huge distinction and one that Glassdoor is leveraging more and more each year.

Recently, Glassdoor announced a $50M funding round and according to the press release the funding will "use the capital to expand its team, accelerate international expansion, and further invest in products for job seekers and employers on mobile and desktop."

Click to enlarge

Glassdoor is already an extremely well known and well positioned player in the recruiting and talent management space and with additional funding, new products, an increasing global footprint, and the insane amounts of data and insight that can be mined from its data on over 300,000 companies it stands to become one of the most interesting (yes, I used that word again), HR tech companies to watch in 2014.

Have a great weekend everyone!

So where are the jetpacks?

A couple of days ago I shared on Twitter the link for the 2014 HR Technology Conference call for speaking proposals page. Soon thereafter a couple of folks more or less called me out, questioning the fairly long lead time between when the speaking proposals are due and the actual dates of the conference (about 9 months all told). The objections or complaints were basically along the lines of that since the HR Tech industry is moving and innovating so quickly that having such a long interval between when speaking proposals are due in and when the conference will take place means that many new developments and innovations will go missing from the show.

While I admit that nine months seems like a long lead time, and without going in to the mundane details of the steps involved for proposal review, potential speaker interviews and re-interviews, program balancing, agenda and content development, and oh yeah, actually finalizing and promoting the agenda so that we can market and sell conference tickets, and all the time that these activities require, I'd rather take another approach to explain to the folks that think that 9 months is too long, and really anyone who has bought into the notion that the enterprise and HR technology industries are moving that quickly why they are a little off-base.

The truth is while the HR tech industry is innovating and progressing, it is generally not making quantum leaps in capability and efficacy in such narrow and discrete time frames as short as a few months. We could leave the call for proposals for HR Tech open until the day before the show and I would expect that 90% of the submissions would be largely the same types of sessions we see in January.

The larger, more established providers are working off of development roadmaps that are largely laid out at least a year out into the future, and perhaps even longer. The smaller, more innovative companies also need at least a year to get their product built, figure out just what the hell they are doing, convince a few real customers to use their product, and then get someone outside the Valley to notice them. Big client-side projects that form the basis for many of the case studies and HR executive-led sessions that we like to showcase at the show themselves often last the better part of a year, (and sometimes longer).

And even with all these incredible advances we have seen in HR tech in the last few years, (the move to the Cloud, video recruiting, social referral programs, mobile learning technology, iPad-based talent management, open web candidate sourcing, predictive workforce analytics tools, ACA compliance business intelligence, and on and on), many, many organizations and HR departments are still pushing paper, keying and re-keying the same data into multiple systems, and executing processes and transactions in much the same way as they were 10 years ago. The truth is it is still the exceptional HR organization and HR leader that wants or demands (and can secure) the very latest, most cutting-edge technology solutions for their organizations.

We have come a really, really long way in HR technology, but there is still a long, long way to go.

And for that reason, and a few others, it is a really exciting time to be in HR and in the HR Technology space. And that is also why I am really confident at next year's HR Tech Conference (the discussion about speaking proposals for Tech is what launched this little mini-rant), attendees will see the very best and latest developments, and hear presentations from their HR peers about how HR tech is helping drive their businesses. 

But make no mistake about it, this is a long game. A game that is changing for sure, but probably not as quickly as you think and perhaps not as rapidly as some folks would have you believe.

Take a close look at all the 'HR Tech 2014 Predictions' pieces you can find in the next few weeks. Then do a quick search and read a few of the same for 2013 and 2012. There will be lots of overlap. 

And that is ok. And expected. These things often take longer than we expect.

We were promised jetpacks, right?

And one last thing, mainly for a couple of folks that might care, if indeed some incredibly interesting and disruptive development in HR tech happened from out of the blue sometime between when the HR Tech Conference agenda is finalized and the actual show in October, I would find a way to make sure it was included at the event.

If the entire economy can fit on one slide, then you probably have too many slides

...and this blog post title is way, way too long.

Check the below image, spotted over the weekend on Business Insider's piece titled Here's The Entire Debate About The US Economy In One Huge Slide:

The slide presents, (simply I admit), what the financial services company sees as the key assumptions and challenges for the US economy in 2014, offers up some alternative and plausible implications of these assumptions, and then presents what it feels are the most important data visualizations (that are not too hard to look at), that support both the assumptions and the conclusions.

Think about it, they are attempting to distill a subject as large and complex as the economy of the USA down into one slide. Sure there are lots of data points and subject areas that are not and can't be covered in just one slide, and sure, the presentation gurus out there will cringe at the notion that there are way too many words in way too small a font to pass muster, but the overall effect I think is outstanding.

All the important data points, the reasoning, the charts - everything that this presenter needed to lead his/her talk about the state of the economy all laid out on one page.

I know I have gotten into a really bad presenting habit over the years of simply adding more and more slides to just about every presentation that I have done. Slides are free, right? Just add another one with a cool picture and a word or two in 64-pt font. 

But I think that approach makes you a little lazy and also can easily result in ponderous presentations that end up going everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

The tightness and the focus required to distill your content into its smallest container possible also forces you to consider what is truly important about the information and arguments you are presenting and to think much more about what you are going to say about that content, rather than spending umpteen hours scouring the stock photo sites for the 'right' images.

This has to be the next HRevolution contest - the 10 minute, one-slide presentation.

Have a great week all!

Q&A: How Mobile Consumers are Changing HR Technology

Recently I did a quick Q&A with the good folks at Cornerstone OnDemand that centered on how the consumer, really the smartphone and tablet-toting consumer, and their demands and expectations are going to drive and influence developments in the HR Tech space going forward.

In a nutshell, I had three basic takes that are shaping these trends: (you can head over the the Cornerstone OnDemand blog for the full Q&A).

Ease of use - the App-ification of our lives demands that the technologies that will be the most adopted, and therefore the most effective at work, be as easy to access, understand, and immediately derive value from as apps like Yelp, Shazam, and Instagram. No smartphone app comes with a user manual. If you can't move from installation to use to value in minutes then you are going to turn off most of your users. And that is even before we start talking about designing for the smaller screens and tap-tap-tap interfaces, rather than the 27-inch monitor you have at the office.

Mobile is the platform - The most popular social networks are increasingly mobile-only, or mobile-dominated. Facebook, Twitter - they are all about mobile now. And the fast climb of mobile-only messaging apps like WhatsApps and SnapChat tell entrepreneurs that you don't need a web interface to scale into the many millions of users. To day, almost all HR technology aimed at mobile users have just been mobile versions of existing desktop and web applications. I think that is going to change. 

Switching costs will decline - What do you do with a smartphone app that you no longer enjoy or simply ceases to add value to your life? Easy - two taps and it is gone forever and you find something to replace it. As more and more HR and workplace solutions move to the cloud and more will become mobile-only apps, over time both 'vendor lock in' and these kinds of switching costs will be reduced. The very same technology approaches that have allowed the cloud vendors to disrupt the on-premise solutions of the past makes they themselves open to the same disruption.

There is more of my insight/nonsense on these ideas over at the CSOD blog - many thanks to the Cornerstone team for asking me to share some of my thoughts.

Have a great weekend all!  

The key to success in Grand Theft Auto (and possibly at work)

Quick shot for a rainy Thursday, a lightly edited conversation between myself and 'P', the soon to be taller than me kid and sound editor for the HR Happy Hour Show:

Setting - 'P' playing Grand Theft Auto IV.  Me, doing something very important, surely.

Me - 'So are you good at this game?' (it is hard to tell, mostly it is just lots and lots of things blowing up and crashing, with some ancillary shootings, rocket launches, etc.)

P - 'Yeah, I am pretty good.'

Me - 'What would you say is the key to becoming good at this game?'

<Pause to think about it>

P - 'You can't be afraid to get your hands a little dirty'.

And scene.

It's a jungle out there my friends.

Happy Thursday.