Innovation and disruption are words that are used so often these days it is sometimes difficult to spot technologies that are genuinely innovative and genuinely disruptive. This seems to be a particular problem in the HR and Recruiting space.
Last week I was one of the several thousand attendees at the HR Tech conference in Chicago trying to find clues about where our industry is heading. In this special HR Tech episode of the show you’ll hear from a number of people I met on my quest to discover HR innovation nirvana.
My guests are:
Gareth Jones from Chemistry Labs
Bill Boorman from Recruiting Daily
Kirstie Kelly from Launchpad
Robert Newry from Artic Shores
David Green from IBM
Al Ademsen from The Talent Strategy Institute
Chris Broderick from B .near Global
Manish Goel from Trustsphere
Neil Morrison from Penguin Random House
We discuss everything from People Analytics to fake Artificial Intelligence and attempt to make some sense of the diverse Hr technology landscape.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Chemistry Labs. The Chemistry Group is an award winning organization that specializes in measuring potential and predicting performance in human beings. They do this for some of the largest organizations in the world, helping them deliver their business strategy and dramatically shift business performance to ensure they continually bring innovation to their clients. Chemistry have recently formed their own lab which will focus on exploring new ways to measure potential and predict performance performance through data science. For more information please visit www.thechemistrygroup.com. that’s www.thechemistrygroup.Com. there’s been more of scientific discovery, more.
Matt Alder [00:00:58]:
Foreign hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 69 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Innovation and disruption are words that are used so often these days. It’s sometimes difficult to spot technologies and approaches that are genuinely innovative and genuinely disrupt. I think this is a particular problem in the HR tech and recruiting space. Last week I was one of the several thousand attendees at the HR Tech conference in Chicago trying to find clues as to where our industry is going. In this special HR Tech episode of the show, you’ll hear from a number of people that I met in my quest to discover HR innovation. Nervana first up are some thoughts from the traveling British contingent who are at the show. You’ll hear first from Gareth Jones from Chemistry Labs, who did brilliantly in the show’s Next Big Thing in HR competition. You’ll also hear from Bill Boorman, Kirstie Kelly and Robert Neary. So I’m currently standing on the Expo floor at HR Tech and it’s absolutely massive. There must be about 400 companies exhibiting here. Lots of people, very little chairs. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a good place if you want to get your daily, your daily steps up. Hi, Gareth, how are you finding the event?
Gareth Jones [00:02:25]:
Yeah, it’s great so far. Excellent. Yeah, very busy. Great for us at the moment. So. Yeah, yeah.
Matt Alder [00:02:29]:
So you guys were up for the next big thing in HR Tech yesterday. How did you get on?
Gareth Jones [00:02:34]:
We were indeed the next big thing and we did really well. For us, we came third, which we were really, really chuffed about considering this is. We’ve kind of come from nowhere. We’re new in the market in the us so to come in from nowhere and get up on stage within, you know, do a five minute pitch and come third against the competition, we were really, really proud of that.
Matt Alder [00:02:57]:
Yeah, it was good. There was some, you know, there was some frenetic Voting. Voting. There it was, it was all, it was all very, it was all very interactive. So what’s caught your eye here? So really in this episode of the show, I want to sort of take the opportunity of being at HR tech to look at, you know, what the future is for HR tech. So there’s hundreds of exhibitors here all selling the Next Big Thing. Sometimes the next big thing appears to be just a rebadged version of the Last Big Thing. So we’re trying to seek out some genuine innovation. What have you seen so far? What’s your feel from the show?
Gareth Jones [00:03:30]:
Well, I mean, like you, I’m kind of trying to see. Because we live it every day. I’m trying to look for something that’s a little bit different and you know, it’s. There’s not a huge amount, but my eye is caught by data and AI as we, you know, we have many conversations about that online. I saw Olivia, which is this kind of like automated kind of assessment, automated recruiter, personal assistant if you like. And there are a number of those around in operation at the moment. From talking to them, they’re really. It’s just managing a conversation at the moment and the recruiter still has to do all of the decision making. There’s no pre qualification. So actually I’m not sure how what utility there is there at the moment because the recruiter’s got to scoot back through the conversation with the AI and or with the bots and work out whether they’re any good or not. It looks nice and they’re promising that the algorithm will do some selection based on some criteria. But again, it sounds more like skills criteria. So from a chemistry point of view, we’re thinking how do you get the proper fit? But that was interesting. You can see it coming into our industry. The ones I really were interested in is a company called Randa. Have you seen that?
Matt Alder [00:04:47]:
I think I saw the guy do a presentation actually. So it’s kind of trying to reinvent job boards or something like that. Or did I, did I miss the point?
Gareth Jones [00:04:54]:
Well, yeah, kind of their pitch I think is. I can’t remember how they put it, but they’re trying to. They see the value in the individual so they want to put the control back into the individual’s hands. So they’ve got a model, so they’re, you know, you’ve heard of pre revenue. These guys are pre product. They’ve got a stand here, they don’t have a product.
Matt Alder [00:05:12]:
Wow, that’s amazing. Stand with. No, it’s a Nice stand as well.
Gareth Jones [00:05:17]:
It’s a very good stand and I’m going to quote this pre product thing, but the guy behind it has launched and sold a couple of businesses already and he’s got an idea. So they’re actually building a product right now, but they’ve come to market it forward and their whole pitch is about giving the individual insight and control over their career. The business model is interesting because all of that functionality which is aimed at the individual is free and the functionality aimed at the client is also free. So they’re hoping for free adoption and what they’re trying to do at the back end is use the data and monetize the data at the back end. So it’d be really interesting to see. So basically what they’re doing is great. UX focus on the user with a free distribution model and data science becomes the business model. Interesting. It’s the most unusual one I’ve seen so far.
Matt Alder [00:06:07]:
Yeah, I think there is an absolute flood of recruitment marketing platforms here. I didn’t quite know that there were that many and some of them are doing some really interesting stuff. But yeah, I’m kind of guessing that data is. Data is a kind of a massive, massive theme. We’re in the startup section of the, of the expo at the moment and I can’t quite count, but there’s probably 20 or 30 companies in stands next to you, obviously based on the fact that some of them can hear you talking. Who’s been interested in this little section? What startups have you seen that have caught your eye?
Gareth Jones [00:06:47]:
Well, I mean, do you know the thing that amazes me about this whole sector is that. So if you take a look over there without them hearing me, you can see text messages, the new email, text recruit. Now that kind of takes me back 10 years. I don’t know about you. And yet here we have a startup business looking at using text messaging. And in fact the personal assistant recruitment Olivia that we talked about earlier, that’s their single channel, it’s text messaging. So I’m struggling to see, I see a lot of startup activity, but I’m not really seeing anything truly innovative at the moment. Even in this sort of startup zone. It’s not necessarily an innovation zone is how I put it.
Matt Alder [00:07:29]:
Okay, that’s interesting. I think that, I think the text thing is interesting because even the, the voting mechanism at the conference for the, for the startup and everything is via text and I think a lot of that is, I think there’s a kind of a difference in adoption in terms of text in the US compared to Europe. So I think that some of it might seem like stuff that we’ve kind of sort of covered, you know, many years. Yeah. Many, many years ago to varying degrees of success. But I think there is a different, you know, there is a different market. There is a different market to that. Okay, so we’ve, there’s still, there’s still a sort of a, you know, a couple of days to. A couple of days to go. Have you, what, what, what are you sort of hoping to see? Any sessions that you’re going to go to or people that you’d like to meet?
Gareth Jones [00:08:13]:
Yeah, so definitely I’m interested in the analytics and data science sessions. I’m going to go to the footlocker session soon, which is Infor’s people answers where they’ve been, you know, using analytics and assessment data science, which is kind of where we’re aiming. So I’m going to be dipping into those for some inspiration. But I’m focused really on anything that’s got kind of new tech in it. The challenge is with the sessions, you never know until you get in there whether it’s actually going to be anything different. So, so, yeah, so. And more. Try and engage with more people here. It’s busy so we’re liking it at the moment.
Matt Alder [00:08:50]:
Cool, thank you. Gareth.
Bill Boorman [00:08:52]:
Hi, I’m Bill Boorman, I am MD of Innovation Technology for Recruit Daily, Founder of True Events, which hopefully some of your listeners will know. And I work with startups on advisory.
Matt Alder [00:09:06]:
So Bill, as someone who is on the pulse of innovation in this sector and is a regular visitor to HR tech, what’s been on your radar in this, this particular show? What’s, what’s different? What’s surprised you?
Bill Boorman [00:09:20]:
I think what surprised me and is different and this is about, I think seventh year I’ve been to this HR tech show is the innovation has been coming from places that we wouldn’t necessarily expect it. So you know, probably the best thing I’ve seen is what IBM are doing which has been driven out through Conexa and what they’re doing with Watson and combining their products. I think Career Builder are doing some really interesting stu with candidate sourcing platform workable. Really impressed with what I’m seeing as a sourcing platform. I think in recruiting we’re splitting up a pre apply stack and a post apply stack as two different types of technology and trying to get as much of that in one place. So everything from career sites managing but also external sourcing, being able to grab data information, build dynamic profiles. I think that kind of stuff on IBM, that innovation is coming from the older names, the older established companies and the startups where we’d expect to see it. I’m actually seeing a lot of duplication, the same content. Everyone’s kind of saying it’s employee engagement, but no one can actually say this is what employee engagement is. So I think what’s happened is consolidation of players with a lot of money and knowledge and they’ve actually, whether they’ve been playing a waiting game for a few years to see what happens, but it seems to be this year that it’s the big brands, it’s your career builders, your indeed your IBMs who are bringing things that are making you go wow. And the startups that are bringing things that are making you go that again.
Matt Alder [00:10:58]:
Thank you, Bill.
Bill Boorman [00:10:59]:
My pleasure. Matt, great to see you again.
Kirstie Kelly [00:11:02]:
So my name’s Kirstie Kelly. I run a business over in the UK called Launchpad, a video technology in the HR space.
Matt Alder [00:11:09]:
And what brings you to HR Tech Chicago?
Kirstie Kelly [00:11:12]:
I was lucky enough to be invited by the Star Conspiracy to speak at the Influence HR event on Monday and then stayed on for the event to talk to a lot of the big technology players. And what it’s allowed me to do is get really close to their product development teams, their affiliation partner teams, and just get sort of plugged into the, into the heart of HR tech.
Matt Alder [00:11:36]:
So what’s been interesting for you from the conversations you’ve had? What is the future of HR tech? What’s the message that’s coming across from all of these? Literally hundreds of stands that we’re standing in front of.
Kirstie Kelly [00:11:49]:
I’ve never seen so many platforms focused towards employee engagement and employee well being, which suggests that they’ve all seen a real need. And I think there are some really interesting ways they’re looking, you know, putting a lens to that problem. For me though, I’m delighted to see that the big players are really the innovators. There are some interesting new kids on the block, but there’s some really cool stuff coming out from The SuccessFactors and IBMs of this world and they’re stripping back their messaging. You know, I’m standing here looking at SAP SuccessFactors. Success is simply human. Oh, and obviously the stand that had the puppies on it, there was a.
Matt Alder [00:12:35]:
Stand with puppies on it. What was that all about? I kind of walked past and there was just this crowd of people who’d literally gone to the stand to see their puppies, which was strange. So what was that about?
Kirstie Kelly [00:12:46]:
So this isn’t a metaphor. They’re really where puppies on the stand. So this was really smart. It’s a wellbeing app. It’s talking about employee or people, people’s mental health and physical well being and they’ve partnered with Dog Rescue and I think it brings it back to the core of what we’re all here for. I mean, yeah, it’s all about technology, but it really is about people and about change and I think they did a great job and it was great to see the puppies.
Matt Alder [00:13:16]:
Thanks for talking to me.
Robert Newry [00:13:18]:
Hello, my name is Robert Newry, I’m the CEO and co founder of Arctic Shores and we create people insights from game technology.
Matt Alder [00:13:26]:
Now, are you actually exhibiting here? Do you have a booth?
Robert Newry [00:13:30]:
Yes, we’re partnering with the German psychometric company QT who have a US presence and they are our distributor outside of the uk.
Matt Alder [00:13:41]:
That’s interesting. And how are you finding it? I mean, how are people reacting to what you guys are offering?
Robert Newry [00:13:50]:
So we’ve had some interesting reactions around people trying to get their mind about doing a completely different approach to assessments. And part of the challenge for us and the interest for coming here is to see how do you communicate a totally new and innovative idea to an HR talent specialist who is very much comfortable with the current way of doing things and their current familiarity with the normal type of assessment.
Matt Alder [00:14:23]:
I think that’s really interesting actually, because I think that’s a challenge for lots of the, lots of the organizations who are, you know, who are here, particularly some of the less, well, less well known names. I mean there’s lots of household HR names, names here. What, you know, what’s piqued people’s interest? What have you done that’s sort of successful to, you know, to get people to think differently. Well, about assessment, which is obviously what you guys do.
Robert Newry [00:14:50]:
Yeah, my way of doing that is. And it’s easier when you’re actually funny enough in a large conference and you’re talking about it is to remind people that actually they’re all a gamer at heart. We’re all a gamer at heart, we’ve just forgotten it. And the example of that is Rock, Paper Scissors. And I have had people in Washington, I’ve had people recently in Budapest, I’ve had people in Singapore all standing up playing Rock Paper scissors and explaining to them the psychology of behind Rock Paper Scissors and what you can learn from people about that and then explain that we’ve just turned Rock Paper Scissors into a 21st century mobile app. And then that’s how we start getting Nice behavioral and psychometric measures.
Matt Alder [00:15:32]:
That’s cool. So taking the familiar that everyone familiar with and then kind of, you know, using that as a metaphor to pull things on. That’s excellent. So looking around at the rest of the show, what struck you about the state of HR technology at the moment? Where’s the innovation? Where, you know, outside of assessment, where, you know, where do you think it’s going?
Robert Newry [00:15:54]:
Yes, I mean, one of the things that I have noticed is very much around employee engagement. So we’ve been a bit more around the candidate experience. But really what stands out here is the wellness, the trying to encourage employees to get engaged in all aspects of the standard onboarding activities that they have to do within an organization. And some really interesting apps and ideas as to getting people to get a little bit more involved again in what has traditionally been a rather tedious activity that they’ve had to do within a company.
Matt Alder [00:16:29]:
Thanks very much for talking to me. And here’s to having a successful rest of show.
Robert Newry [00:16:32]:
Brilliant. Thanks a lot, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:16:34]:
On day two of the show, I decided to focus on a particular area of HR tech and I chose people analytics because of the rapid adoption it’s currently experiencing. In this segment, you’ll hear from David Green, global Director of People analytics at IBM, Al Ademsen from the Talent Strategy Institute, Chris Boderick from Be Near Global, and Manish Gol from relationship analytics company TrustSphere.
David Green [00:17:03]:
Hi, David Green, Global Director of People Analytics Solutions at IBM.
Matt Alder [00:17:07]:
So how are you finding this particular conference in Chicago?
David Green [00:17:11]:
Well, it’s actually the first time I’ve been to the HR Tech conference in the US it’s certainly big. There’s some good speakers and good sessions, a lot of vendors. And it seems this year’s theme is everyone saying they’ve got AI in their solution, which I think probably warrants further investigation as to how many really do have AI in their systems. And then if I look at the kind of the analytics space, there’s some pretty good vendors here. A lot of the big vendors now have developed analytics capabilities in their platforms like we have at IBM. But there’s lots of really interesting smaller organizations and startups here as well, like HIQ Labs, who won an award yesterday, which is nice to see a workforce analytics product win. There’s also Cruncher based out of Amsterdam, very interesting data aggregation product. They’ve got one model, and of course Vizier, although I don’t think we can call Vizier a startup anymore as well. They seem to be going from strength to strength now. The good stuff for me Is that if these companies are going from strength to strength, it means that the market for people analytics is growing and more and more organizations are adopting analytics within hr, which personally I’m very passionate about. And I think it’s very important both for organizations, but also for the employees within the organizations as well.
Matt Alder [00:18:31]:
Before we talk a bit more about people analytics, which we will, I just want to come back to the AI thing because you’re not the first person who has expressed some kind of concern about the banding around of the term in a kind of bandwagon fashion. Could you explain a little bit more about what you mean? You know, what is AI and what isn’t AI?
David Green [00:18:56]:
Well, I think AI is where the machines are learning and are able to, you know, teach or advise people. I think advisory or bots I think is the probably the way this is going to go initially. And I’m not sure that for people. Most of the organizations that say they have the AI capability are able to do that. I mean, we’ve, we’ve obviously developing this sort of capability at IBM through Watson and we’re increasingly using that within the HR space as well. But you can imagine the number of years and the number of man hours and the investment that’s gone into doing it at IBM. So yeah, it’s this year’s analytics, isn’t it really? So last year everyone said they had analytics, particularly in their recruiting platforms and all I could see was some pretty nice looking dashboards, but not really analytics. So yeah, I think AI is issued analytics. There we are.
Matt Alder [00:19:48]:
Yeah, I think that’s a good way of putting it. I think we’ve got, what we’ve got is we’ve got genuine AI and then we’ve got AI as marketing. And I think, you know, I’ve seen a couple of solutions which are kind of bot chat messenger based and they’re, they’re, they’re, you know, they’re very good for what they’re doing, but they’re just following a script. So, you know, if this X equals Y, please go to page 7 kind of kind of thing. So it’s interesting, you know, particularly talking to you guys about the sort of machine learning stuff and, and that kind of thing. So just to come back to analytics obviously being your area of expertise, I mean, how do you think the market has developed in the last couple of years since it became such a big thing that people were talking about what are the real trends, what’s on your radar, what are your clients saying to you?
David Green [00:20:40]:
I think interest levels continue to grow, but I think it’s gone from just interest now into adoption. Still. There are more organizations that haven’t embedded analytics with HR than there are that have. But the number that have does seem to be growing. And certainly at this conference and other conferences that I’ve attended, you know, we’ve kind of moved beyond the why to the. To the what and the how. And there’s some very clear messages that seem to be coming out in this conference and the other ones I’ve been to this year. Focus on the business. You know, analytics is the opportunity to solve business problems. That’s what it should be about. Al Ademsen chaired a panel before lunch today. People like Peter Howells are on there. You know, and even across all the vendors that were represented on that panel, you know, it’s fairly clear that, you know, even though obviously they’re there to try and push their technology products, you know, it’s not all about technology. Technology will help you get on the way, but it’s far more than that. And for many organizations, it’s a culture change, both within HR and actually externally and within the organization as well. So I think that’s probably why the adoption hasn’t been as quick as maybe some predicted, you know, a few years ago. But, yeah, I think it’s. It’s coming along. There’s lots of people doing really good work, which is always good to see.
Matt Alder [00:21:59]:
Fantastic. So, final question. What’s the thing that surprised you the most on this trip?
David Green [00:22:04]:
Oh, that’s a good question. That’s actually put me on the spot for the time being, actually. I think it’s the way that people are prepared to collaborate again, because analytics is a growing space, I think vendors and practitioners are mostly quite open in terms of talking about some of the pitfalls, some of their experiences, sharing lessons learned with their peers. And I think that’s good because I think if we collaborate together, we can accelerate the space forward much quicker and help organizations actually get benefits from the investments they’re making in this space.
Matt Alder [00:22:39]:
Thank you very much.
David Green [00:22:40]:
Thank you very much, Matt. Enjoy the rest of the show.
Al Ademsen [00:22:43]:
Hi, I’m Al Ademsen, the founder and executive director of the Talent Strategy Institute. We’re an education and advisory firm building community on people, analytics and the future of work.
Matt Alder [00:22:53]:
Fantastic. And what brings you to HR Tech Chicago?
Al Ademsen [00:22:57]:
I’ve had the good pleasure of coming to HR tech for the past 10 years or so, and I’ve spoken. I think this year was the sixth time that I either participated on a panel or did a session. And at 11am this morning we had five thought leaders and technologists talk about the future of people, analytics, technology and it was a lot of fun and I was honored to be a part of it.
Matt Alder [00:23:22]:
And what was the, what was the kind of main theme of that? So in a, in a, in a, in a 30 second sound bite, what was the, what was the conclusion you came to in terms of, you know, what was the future?
Al Ademsen [00:23:32]:
Analytics is massive and we need to think about it systematically. In other words, there’s a lot of different types of analytics. There’s not just one, okay, that’s an analytics technology. There’s talent market analytics and turbo labor market analytics. There’s social network analysis, natural language processing and on down the line. So we need to be open minded about what’s possible and really be attentive to what leaders want or need to know and make sure the appropriate analytics are being done to help answer those questions.
Matt Alder [00:24:04]:
And from the, you know, from the expert itself, in terms of all the things that are going, that are kind of going on here, what are you seeing as the key themes and what are you thinking that the, you know, the HR community is sort of most.
Al Ademsen [00:24:16]:
Interested, most interested in, well, culture, engagement, those types of themes. At the same time it’s all about the interactivity with the technology because the more employees interact with it, the more data is going to be there. The data quality is going to be better, thus the ability to derive insights from that data is going to be better. So a lot of engagement culture type themes which I’m actually celebrating, I’m very excited that it’s. Because historically it hasn’t been about that, that’s been viewed as too flighty. But now many are realizing it’s fundamental to how they attract and retain key talent and drive high productivity and so forth.
Matt Alder [00:24:56]:
So really the kind of relationship between people and technology and you know, the analytics that throws off, I mean, yeah, I mean that’s interesting. I think that’s certainly something, that’s certainly something that I’ve noticed sort of walking around this absolutely massive expo. It’s nice to be sitting down actually to be talking to you. I suppose. So. Final question. There’s about 24 hours of the event left to run. What are you looking for or what are you looking forward to in the rest of your time here?
Al Ademsen [00:25:28]:
Rest of my time here is having a good time and connecting with people. This event is the flagship event in our discipline and so as I shared earlier, and I firmly believe it to be true, is that we do very little alone. The greatness of our community is what is advancing the practice. Meaning it’s not one vendor going off and trying to do magic behind the door, nor is it one company doing magic. It’s like we’re sharing knowledge, we’re sharing ideas, and we’re trying to help leaders make better decisions. We’re trying to have an employee experience that is a desired place to be and a desired place to go. So, given this community, you know, I’m interested in connecting with people I haven’t touched base with yet and nurturing new relationships, you know, getting deeper into existing relationships. I mean, it just. It’s about the people for me at this point here on out.
Matt Alder [00:26:21]:
Fantastic. Well, on that note, very nice to meet you.
Al Ademsen [00:26:24]:
Yeah, well, likewise. Nice meeting you. Thanks for having me. Matt.
Chris Broderick [00:26:27]:
Hi, my name is Chris Broderick and I’m the CEO of Be Near Global, a company focused on people analytics, engagement, and social analytics.
Matt Alder [00:26:37]:
Fantastic. And what brings you to Chicago?
Chris Broderick [00:26:40]:
I actually live in the Chicago area, so. Fantastic to have an event like HR Tech come to Chicago.
Matt Alder [00:26:47]:
And how are you finding HR tech? What, you know, what are the themes that are coming out? What do you think the sort of state of innovation is in your particular sector of hr?
Chris Broderick [00:26:57]:
Yeah, it’s exciting to see this whole notion of AI and natural language processing is really coming to the forefront. Having a history, a legacy of spending about 14 years at IBM, I was part of a team that. That brought natural language processing into analyzing social data. So really excited to see this extrapolate across the marketplace.
Matt Alder [00:27:21]:
That’s cool. And what are you seeing as sort of the best use cases of that? So extrapolating that data, all of the social stuff that’s going on, how’s that kind of manifesting itself practically?
Chris Broderick [00:27:34]:
Yeah. I think what’s really fantastic about it is that it can exponentially speed the rate of change. While I was at IBM, we saw how change can happen much more quickly, that people who have a concern in a particular area can raise the concern on a social platform. And then through natural language processing, we can understand across the enterprise the importance of that concern and then bring that to bear with the right resources at the executive level and actually change policy.
Matt Alder [00:28:10]:
Fantastic. I was slightly distracted there because as. As you were talking, a robot went past. Well, kind of a robot, a thing on wheels. So. So there we are, you know, living, living, living the dream. But that’s, you know, that, that’s, that’s really, really interesting. And what surprised you the most? You know, what’s the most surprising thing you sort of come across at this.
Chris Broderick [00:28:31]:
Event, you know what I found and new insight to what’s happening in the hiring space. Actually, there’s a company, a startup called Unitive, that’s doing some exciting work about taking bias out of the hiring process, both on the side of the way that job descriptions are written and as well as information that comes to an employer about a person’s resume using algorithms to replace work wording that is unintentionally creating a bias for the person who is receiving that information. So I think really exciting to only tee up self selected resumes where a person, someone reviewing those resumes doesn’t understand whether it’s a male or a female, doesn’t understand whether it’s a person of a particular nationality or culture, and instead they come up with the resumes that best fit the criteria that they have established at the beginning of their session, which I think is just a fantastic advance for really getting to the right people and not unintentionally biasing those selections.
Matt Alder [00:29:44]:
Thank you very much for talking to me.
Chris Broderick [00:29:46]:
Thank you.
Manish Goel [00:29:48]:
Hey, I’m Manish Goel. I’m the CEO of Trustsphere.
Matt Alder [00:29:50]:
So what does Trustsphere do? Explain it to me.
Manish Goel [00:29:53]:
Yeah, so what Trustphere does is we do something that we call relationship analytics. So it’s really social network analytics and organizational network analytics. So the way I describe it is when people think about social, they think about Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. We don’t do that. What we do is we work with enterprises to understand from narrow cast communication. So think about email, voice, im, sms. What we’re able to do is understand the social graph for an organization based on that, on conversations that, that we’re seeing. So one thing is we never ever touch content. So we never look at the content of any messages. We don’t even look at subject lines and emails. But what we’re doing is continuously listening and understanding from communication flows that are going on what that social graph looks like. What that does is it gives us a huge insight into what the organization looks like and how work really gets done in the organization.
Matt Alder [00:30:40]:
So basically you’re sort of taking all this data from email. I am. All these kind of, all these forms of sort of internal communication and you’re really kind of tracking relationships. Would that be the sort of best way to describe it?
Manish Goel [00:30:54]:
Yeah, absolutely. So we’re taking basically data from communication and collaboration systems and we’re tracking and understanding relationships that exist both internally between employees. So I call that the inside, inside view and between employees and customer, suppliers and partners, which is an Inside, outside view. And we use that really to transform the way people understand their organizations. And we’re very big on democratizing data so ensuring that individuals get an understanding of their own relationship networks at trustfully, we firmly believe that an individual’s relationship network is a very valuable asset for them. And collectively across the organization, it’s incredibly valuable as well. So being able to understand, track and measure relationships allows an organization to leverage those relationships in really interesting ways.
Matt Alder [00:31:39]:
And what are some of the kind of outputs or use cases for that? So practically if I’m an organization, what am I getting and how can I use it?
Manish Goel [00:31:47]:
So one of the simplest use cases for this is around offboarding and onboarding, so transitioning. So one of the things that people don’t do is they don’t necessarily maintain relationships in a systematic way. What we at Trustphere are able to do is when an employee leaves, we’re able to press a button and see all of the relationships they’ve had in an organization. I just want to distinguish between connections and relationships. Most people use LinkedIn. We have like a thousand connections on LinkedIn. How many of those are real relationships? Very few. And what we’re understanding is the real relevant relationships that exist between an employee and either other employees or between customers, suppliers and partners. So from an onboard, from an off boarding perspective, it means it makes it very easy to get a transition report generated which says here if John was leaving, here are John’s top 50 relationships that he has with his customers or internally. What that does is it allows a line manager to effectively transition those relationships over systematically. But secondly, it allows Jenny, who is going to be taking over John’s position, to have the same report as an onboarding report. And what that does, it allows her to accelerate her performance in terms of being able to get to know the relationships she needs to build. In fact, we’ve got some great stat, we’ve got some great data on this which is we’ve been able to find with clients that they can take what typically takes three months to get a sales rep onboarded and productive. They can bring that down to one month. So if you think about that from a bookings perspective, it means you accelerate booking of revenue.
Matt Alder [00:33:11]:
Absolutely. And that’s, you know, that’s fantastic. And it’s like, you know, what a brilliant, brilliant way of making use of data that otherwise people probably wouldn’t even look at. So just sort of final question, you know, the show in general, this kind of massive expo hall that we’re sort of standing at the back of what, you know, what are your thoughts, what have you spotted, what’s your sort of other takeaways from some being immersed in this environment for a couple of days?
Manish Goel [00:33:39]:
Well, the first thing that we’re finding is this. It’s a very big show, so there’s a lot of players that we’re seeing in the HR space. The analytics space in itself is starting to evolve significantly. There are players who are playing and talking about analytics in different ways, which people weren’t talking about years ago. And I think there’s an increasing awareness around that. What we are though finding is, and particularly what I see is there’s a lot of people who are typically doing the same sort of thing in here. The larger players have some level of innovation. In fact, we’re working very closely with IBM around some of their innovation as well. But we’re finding some of the startups also have some of the innovation that’s available to them.
Matt Alder [00:34:16]:
Fantastic. Thank you very much for sharing that with me.
Manish Goel [00:34:19]:
Pleasure.
Manish Goel [00:34:19]:
Thank you very much. Thanks.
Matt Alder [00:34:21]:
It seems appropriate to give the last word to an HR practitioner. Here are some thoughts from Neil Morrison from Penguin Random House.
Neil Morrison [00:34:30]:
Hi there. My name is Neil Morrison. I’m the Director for Strategy, Culture and Innovation at Penguin Random House uk.
Matt Alder [00:34:36]:
So what brings you to Chicago?
Neil Morrison [00:34:39]:
Well, I’ve come across one to speak, but two also to explore what’s going on in the technology world in the us. I think often a lot of the things in the US break before they come to the uk and so to get a sense of what might be coming our way over the coming months and years.
Matt Alder [00:34:55]:
And based on what you’ve seen, where do you think the innovation is in HR technology? Sort of according to everything that’s at this show.
Neil Morrison [00:35:04]:
I mean, there’s a lot of concentration on talent acquisition and I think that seems to be where most people are putting their time, effort and money. And in some ways that kind of is a little bit disappointing because I think there’s a whole range of areas within HR which would benefit from technology innovation, which just isn’t happening. And what you tend to get is almost the same kind of process, the same talent acquisition processes being replicated by numerous vendors. And I think in some ways the challenge is really for people to spread their ambition into some of the different areas. That said, there have been some really interesting products that I’ve seen that actually look at maybe some of the less glamorous parts of the work.
Matt Alder [00:35:45]:
One of the things I’ve noticed is a new phrase that I’ve come across which is Millennial recognition platform. There seems to be a huge amount of kind of employee engagement platforms here. I mean, what are your thoughts around that and technology’s role in that?
Neil Morrison [00:36:04]:
So I’m a little bit skeptical about the power of the badge in really kind of creating recognition for people. And I think in some ways it feels like a really easy thing to do because people look at gaming and they say, oh, everyone likes to get crowns or everyone likes to get jewels or everyone likes to get something. So let’s take that into the workplace. For me, recognition and employee experience is about a holistic approach to, you know, that employee journey. It’s not about taking one single element. That said, you know, I’m 42, 43, so what do I know? Maybe it works for millennials and it doesn’t work for me.
Matt Alder [00:36:41]:
Finally, what are you talking about later?
Neil Morrison [00:36:43]:
I’m talking about employee centric workplaces, not employee eccentric, which is really about how you use technology to create excitement for employees and for candidates, but in a way that takes a customer service approach to it rather than looking at it from a kind of simplification of HR process. So something that’s really based on the individual and creating an environment for them that excites.
Matt Alder [00:37:08]:
My thanks to Neil Morrison, Gareth Jones, Bill Boorman, Kirstie Kelly, Robert Neary, David Green, Al Ademsen, Chris Broderick, and Manish Gol. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes, Stitcher, and via your podcasting app of choice, just search for Recruiting future. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
