Two HR Technology Solutions - One Theme

HR Technology has become a deep and richly varied discipline.  It encompasses so many diverse technologies and processes, that trying to keep 'current' is definitely a challenge.

Last week was a busy one, and I thought it would be interesting to give a quick overview of two of the  technologies and solutions I was discussing and trying to learn more about.

Collaborative Technology

Neighborhood America - I had a great call and demonstration of the Community Platform ELAvate from Neighborhood America, a company based in Florida that provides solutions for both external, customer oriented communities, and internal, employer-oriented communities. The market for community platforms is a crowded one, with companies such as Jive, Telligent, Tomoye (my current vendor partner for my next class), and several others.

The ELAvate solution offers all the features that are becoming 'must-haves' in this market, things like rich user profiles, discussion forums, blogs, content rating and tagging, and many others. Increasingly, organizations are looking to these platform solutions in their quest to improve employee collaboration and communication, and to harness internally some of the energy and momentum that has shifted to popular external networking sites. Where Neighborhood America stands out from their competitors in this space is with their new Reveal module, an idea generation, review, and rating component that allows customers or employees to propose, comment, and vote on ideas. These idea generators are very popular in the consumer space, (Dell and Starbucks are two notable examples), and can be an effective way to harness the creativity and innovation of an organization.

I was very impressed with Neighborhood America, and want to thank Ron Duquette and Lori Burke for taking the time to show me the platform.

Recruiting/ATS

Avature - I was fortunate to get a demonstration of the Avature Recruiting CRM product from the nice folks there.  The Recruiting CRM product essentially applies classic customer relationship management concepts, (campaigns, sourcing, pipelines, and relationship building) to an organization's candidate population. This solution is a significant departure from traditional applicant tracking systems that are primarily used to create and post job requisitions, and collect specific applications for those positions.  Traditional ATS are often designed with the functional step by step process in the forefront, and not designed around the candidate and building and managing a relationship with said candidate.

The features that I saw were very impressive, things like mining social networks like LinkedIn, easy import of contacts from various source systems, and multiple candidate communication channels including integrated SMS messaging.  It was immediately clear that the Avature Recruiting CRM can't really be compared to 'traditional' ATS, as the Avature solution mostly enhances and augments the functions of the ATS.  Certainly organizations that find themselves in highly complex, competitive, and high volume recruiting situations would likely be wise to take a look at Avature. Thanks very much to Mike Johnson at Avature for the demonstration and to Susan Byrnes for arranging the introduction.

Theme

While these technology solutions support completely different business processes (employee collaboration versus candidate relationship management), they do possess a common theme.  That is, fostering connections between people for the ultimate benefit of the organization. In the case of Neighborhood America, the platform aims to enhance creativity and innovation by facilitating employees connecting to each other.  For Avature, the goal is to connect prospects and candidates to the organization for mutual benefit. 

Systems that facilitate connections and relationships, rather than simply automate transactional business processes are, I think, the most interesting developments in HR Technologies, and definitely one that I plan on researching further and incorporating into the HR Technology class.

New Series - HR Tech for the small business

The relentlessly bad economic news continued this morning, just a few snippets:

Caterpillar to lay off 20,000

Home Depot axes 7,000

Sprint to hang up on 8,000

Seemingly no end in sight, major corporations shedding workers like my dog sheds in the summer.

Seems like this could be a bad time for folks in my space, HR Technology to be thinking, writing, and talking about new technology and advocating to folks to convince their organizations to invest in new technology.Flickr - cobalt123

But actually very strong arguments can be made that times of crisis are EXACTLY when organizations need to ensure that their HR Technology can support their strategy, yes, even if the strategy is 'let go of thousands of people and hope we survive'.

But I'm not going to try to 're-make' that argument here, I am going in a bit of a different direction.  I am going to kick off a new series of posts specifically focusing on HR Technology solutions for the small business.  I don't know if the small business space is any more healthy than the giants who are hemorrhaging jobs, but since some of the solutions and technologies I am going to highlight are dirt cheap (some even free), I figure they all have a better chance of remaining relevant to the typical small organization than big, expensive, or out of reach talent management or collaboration platforms.

I have not decided how many or which technologies to write about yet, (and actually last week's post about Rypple could be viewed as really the first in this series), but I will write a few technology solution profiles, and let comments and feedback determine how far I go with this.

So, that's my plan, devote some time and energy bringing to light some tools and solutions that are inexpensive, accessible, easy to implement, and possibly beneficial to the small (or medium-sized) organization.

Any suggestions, links to vendors or solutions I should research and write about are really appreciated.

Why have an HR Technology Course?

So why is there an HR Technology Course in our Human Resource Development program?

FlickR - Pete Reed

Here is why:

1. All the essential HR processes, Payroll, record-keeping, Benefits Administration, compliance reporting are all deeply rooted in technology.  And understanding of these concepts, and the important vendors and solutions in these areas is necessary for any HR leader.

2. Increasingly, the strategic HR functions known as 'Talent Management' rely on modern, sophisticated technologies to support business strategy and deliver real business value. From recruiting, performance management, succession planning, training and development, and compensation planning, organizations are more and more looking to technology, and those HR leaders that can harness it, to lead important strategic initiatives. 

3. HR can and should take the lead in efforts to increase employee productivity, enable more effective collaboration,  and increase the sense of community in the organization. Content management, collaboration tools, social networking are just some of the scores of technologies available to the HR leader in this space.  How to begin to understand these technologies and their application is a key aspect of the course.

The HR leader must have a better grasp of technology beyond e-mail, IM and Outlook calendars.

HR and Technology are from now on an inseparable pair.

And that is why we have an HR Technology course.

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HR Technology Conference

The 11th annual HR Technology Conference is underway in Chicago.

Sadly, as I am right in the middle of the Fall Academic Quarter I am not able to attend this year.

There are scores of product announcements made each year at HR Technology, but I thought I would point out two of the most interesting announcements from this year's conference:

Cornerstone OnDemand  

Cornerstone OnDemand is adding a new social networking platform to its integrated talent management suite of software and services. Cornerstone Connect helps organizations reach both internal and external audiences via Web 2.0 features ranging from communities of practice, blogs, wikis and user profiles, to rating/sharing content, knowledge management (including alumni), podcasts, RSS feeds and more. Using Cornerstone Connect, organizations can improve employee performance, foster connections, cultivate informal learning, and engage customers and partners to drive innovation and lower support costs.

Softscape

Softscape will introduce the new science of Talent Management – Softscape TalentGenetics™. This latest innovation from Softscape provides a new level of talent visualization never seen before to capture and share employee knowledge. The platform also offers embedded social-networking and expanded functions for social knowledge sharing.

What I find interesting about these, is the emphasis on the integration of Web 2.0 features into 'classic' Talent Management platforms.  These vendors are among the very early adopters of this approach, to try and merge these features like social networking, tagging, RSS etc. into traditional, typically dull applications.

This integration of Web 2.0 features into existing HRMS applications is a growing trend, and one that I think more vendors will try to get in on in the coming 12-18 months.

I am looking forward to seeing the results of these product launches, and hope to get to demo them in my HR Tech class very soon.

Downturn dilemma

Stock market cratering, employees on edge with 401(k) values plummeting, layoff rumors buzzing, not a great time here in corporate America.  While I am not smart enough to predict how all this will shake out, I do know one thing, your organization may need to start postponing planned or needed technology projects in order to cut costs and ride out the storm.

What can you as an HR Technologist do in the interim?  Because in the current environment your employees are more nervous that ever, your need to help your company execute the strategy is more critical than before, and you may have had your project funding and/or resources yanked from under your nose.

In a strange way, the downturn may actuallly help you kick-start some experimentation and pilot projects using technologies that are simple to implement, do not require a significant investment, and don't 'trap' you into a long-term situation that you worry you won't be able to afford.

Some ideas:

1. Kick-start a Yammer trial with the HR department

2. Organize and seed a simple wiki to share internal infomation in your department (everyone's e-mail inbox is maxed out already) - check out PbWiki or Socialtext, both offer free versions totally acceptable for a trial deployment

3. Get a read on your Employment image in the Web 2.0 world.  Search for your company name followed by 'Jobs' or 'Careers' on Google, FlickR, YouTube, Facebook and other popular site where your target candidate pool congregates.  What are you seeing in the results?  Do you need to upload a simple 2 minute recruiting video to YouTube?  You probably already have something like this on your corporate website, it will take you 5 minutes to get it on YouTube and cost you nothing.

4. Get on Twitter. Use Twitter Search to see who and what is being talked about your brand, industry, region. Consider if an active presence on Twitter makes sense for your brand. Save the Twitter search(es) you need as RSS feeds in your feed reader.

And here is another point to consider, whether your focus is tying to build better community and collaboration among your employees, or to gain insight to the external community of customers, prospects, potential applicants, either way those folks are already out there in Web 2.0, talking about you, commenting, tagging, and influencing your organization. 

So, maybe you no longer have the funds for the ERP upgrade, or the new Applicant Tracking System, but there are lots of other HR Technology avenues to pursue in the meantime.

What else can you be doing to make sure when the downturn shifts back to an upturn you are smarter and more prepared that before?

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photo credit - FlickR Simon Willison