At long last here’s the full download. At our team meeting today, we reviewed the observations gathered by our team throughout the conference. These are our honest opinions, no holding back. Some might need a spoonful of sugar to help it slide down, because as I mentioned previously: not all vendors are created equal, and who knows─ we may have just caught them on a bad day.
Vendors
- Halogen Software could be a viable solution for the 5 pillars of Talent Management, but performance mustbe selected to get anything else. They claimed their sweet spot is 100 to 10,000 employees. That’s a sweet spot a mile wide, which is meaningless.
- PDS/Vista HRMS looks like it could be a good solution for one that isn’t on our radar at all, but the impression given was that they don’t work well with consultants.
- Kronos did not have time for consultants at the convention.
- Benefitfocus finally released Point-In-Time reporting and new data analytics with some pretty cool drill down capabilities. We love the impact Benefit Informatics is having here.
- NetTime Solutions has real time data, mobile, dashboard analytics, SaaS and─ per the guy running the booth─ they have ACA reporting capabilities, but he didn’t sound too convincing. He did say they could take hours worked and plug it into scheduling software to ensure hours worked doesn’t exceed HR’s plans for offering benefits to variable hour employees.
- LBi has call center, Knowledge Base and Time & Attendance software. IVR and Speech Integration is a bolt on to their existing call center. Their major focus is on clients running PeopleSoft.
- Mangrove Software appears to be a flexible company that might be a good fit for the under 1,000 employee market, particularly for clients that need some custom capabilities. It is a total HRIS system. It wasn’t flashy or sexy but seemed to be reliable, consistent and dependable.
- ADP demoed their recruiting module that will be released later this month within Vantage and as a stand-alone product. It appears to be a more comprehensive solution than the current Virtual Edge product. This software was acquired in the Right Thing acquisition.
- SuccessFactors is slowly moving into payroll and benefits so they can be a total HCM solution, but payroll and benefits are still lacking. This would be great to keep an eye out and watch what they are doing in those areas.
- Infor was a big waste of time. The original speaker was unable to make it and the replacement was a marketing executive who talked about the millennial workforce. He never once mentioned Infor and there was certainly no demo.
- Cornerstone OnDemand focused on talent and mobile apps. It would be interesting to compare the industry’s response to mobile technology with the reality of whether clients are really clamoring for it. Sitting at lunch with HRIS leaders from three different companies, none of them felt that the need for mobile devices was as strong as the market seems to portray it.
- SumTotal’s system was really impressive. It was a far cry from the demos we say last year. It was very user friendly, intuitive and the data was contextual-based─ so if an employee was coached on people skills, the system automatically recommended people skills-type course─ which is very future-forward. We have some questions as to configuration and how to ensure the flow from one area to another works (e.g., a high-performance gets a salary increase; a person that is rated low should take a couple of specific courses; a person that scores highly in an area can be a mentor). They claim to be “the first and only open platform,” having the only master data model that makes sense of the data and provides context and the content information to users. While the front end of the system was impressive, we know from experience that SumTotal struggles with the back end.
- Achievers has a great system for Employee Recognition programs. It ties employee recognition and compensation programs together and sends great messages to employee populations. The energy of the system itself was contagious.
Topics
- Video interviewing is the “hot” thing and a number of vendors offered this service.
- Background and reference checks were also a topic with a handful of vendors in attendance. Skill survey claims 325 web-based surveys written by behavioral psychologist, delivered via email from the candidate’s email. (Seems like a great opportunity to cheat the system.) They claim scientific validation to measure success, and the results of the reference checks have given pause in 15-20% of hiring decisions where previously without the survey it was less than 5%.
- Dropping a cell phone on the floor of an ice bar does not bode well for a crack-free screen.