What if there was a Yelp for HR Software?
SteveI'm a little late on this since some of the big tech news sites like TechCrunch and CIO.com covered this back in February, but over the weekend I finally got around to checking out a site called G2Crowd, and the simplest way to describe it is as a 'Yelp for Enterprise Software.'
By now we are all familiar and possibly reliant on the crowdsourced reviews and ratings paradigm popularized by sites like Yelp for restaurants and bars, TripAdvisor for travel destinations, and certainly Amazon.com for books, music, heck just about everything. There continues to be tremendous popularity and value for sites to gather, interpret, and categorized real live customer experiences with products and services for just about anything that can be purchased. But while consumers and users love these sites, as they generally provide neutral, unbiased, and sometimes massive amounts of information about the quality and value of a product/service, many suppliers have come to fear and loathe these sites, as one or two poor reviews can sometimes cause serious damage to a business' reputation and sales.
But for whatever reason despite there existing a 'Yelp' equivalent for seemingly just about everything, there really isn't a large, successful manifestation of the crowdsourced review and ratings site for Enterprise Software. That is the gap that G@Crowd is trying to fill, providing a platform and frameworks for enterprise customers and users of technologies like CRM, ERP, Accounting, and yes HR Technology as well, to enter product reviews and ratings just as people do for the local BBQ joint on Yelp.
The process to create a software product review on G2Crowd is familiar to anyone who has used Yelp or TripAdvisor, but with one important difference - G2Crowd requires the reviewer to log in with their LinkedIn credentials, which serves a few important ends. One, (with limited exceptions), reviewers identities are not anonymous; two, G2Crowd 'knows' based on the LinkedIn profile, at what company and in what role the reviewer was working in at the time of the review; and three, G2Works can police phony reviews left by people working for or against any of the software companies themselves.
The idea is simple really, a set of unbiased ratings and reviews of enterprise software solutions like Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, etc., that can be aggregated, (over time, and if enough scale is achieved), produce a valuable and previously unavailable resource for organizations that are evaluating software for themselves. In addition to the individual product reviews, G2Crowd has started to create, based on the review data, their own version of the 'analyst grid', positioning competing firms in a given market segment in comparison to each other, the most famous of which is the Gartner Magic Quadrant. But rather than a Magic Quadrant that represents, in the end, the opinions of one or a few analysts, the G2Crowd grid would reflect the collective experience and opinion of potentially thousands of users. In theory not necessarily a 'better' way to compare vendors, but certainly a different one, and one that if G2Crowd can continue to keep the reviews clean, would potentially be more important, (and accessible), than what the traditional analyst firms create.
Will G2Crowd catch on with enough users and customers to generate the kind of scale it needs to be a truly valuable resource to the enterprise software buyer?
Hard to say. It is a new site, and there seems to be some decent traction and volume on the CRM market. If you spend some time checking out the HR software reviews you will see they are a little thin.
But how about this? How about if everyone who reads this blog and is a current user of one of the big HR software solutions heads over to G2Crowd this week and drops a product review?
That might be a way to get this kind of endeavor a little more attention for the HR market, and perhaps also show how all of you as users of these solutions really do have the power to influence the market.
What do you think - would a site like G2Crowd be helpful to you and your organization?
Reader Comments (8)
Nice post,
Would be really interesting to see this take off, and help users a quick and 'un-adulterated' way of reviewing software.
openhr.wordpress.com
Interesting! I wonder how well this would work. I feel like companies with tens of thousands of employees might have an unfair influence on their software's reviews--would the reviews from companies with a few hundred employees get buried? Those employees might have a very different perspective.
Thanks for the comments - I hope this or something like this becomes a viable source of information of buyers of enterprise software. I think scale is the most significant barrier right now - can you get enough users/customers to participate. Maybe one day suppliers of software will even encourage their customers to participate, if they are confident enough that they are doing a good job with product and service.
Hi, I checked out the site a few weeks back. In answer to the question regarding supplier employees rigging the reviews, you have to use your LinkedIn account to log in and so this should reduce the amount of fake reviews as you can see that they work for the supplier (in most cases).
It is a great idea for a site and I feel that suppliers should encourage their clients to participate :)
Thanks
Thanks Barry - I do think the LinkedIn authentication is important. It mostly will eliminate what is Yelp's main problem - 'fake' reviews from people who have never actually patronized the establishment.
I did suggest something similar for our site, but the vendor response was not great.
I see at least two problems:
the reviews are only really valid for current users - gripes on previous releases would be out of date and
- the biggest - buyers often blame the software vendor when their own procurement process or selection criteria are deeply flawed. If a guy bought a car expecting Aston Martin performance and ended up with a family hatchback he'd be moaning all the way till the car was up for replacement.
Another popular fall-down is where the software is implemented, but not used correctly. Again, it's convenient, and often politically expedient, to blame the vendor.
I know it sounds an easy thing to do, but there have to be solid criteria...and..dare I say it..are HR people eminently qualified to pass objective judgement on HR software that they may have erroneously purchased?
Steve:
Know this comment is a bit overdue, but thanks for the quick take on G2 Crowd early on. We now have nearly 15K reviews in several hundred categories, including in the HR space. In fact, we've had so many reviews that we've been able to put several reports on HR software, including on HRMS, recruiting software and most recently, performance management.
We've grown a lot in a year; you should check out the category as it exists today: https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/hr
Wow! At last I got a web site from where I be able to in fact take valuable facts concerning my study and knowledge.