It’s that time of year again when all of us in the HR Technology business book our airline and hotel reservations and congregate in Chicago for the annual HR Technology Conference and Expo. Wait, did I say Chicago? Sorry, this year the conference was in sunny Las Vegas Baby! Anyway, this post is way late (and probably a dollar short) as the conference was over weeks and weeks ago. I have a good excuse or ten for being tardy on my post but I won’t bore you with the details. In my prior blogs posts about the 2009 and the 2010 conferences, I waxed on about the conference being about connecting with my social media network (especially my Twitter buddies – AKA my Tweeps). Making connections with the Tweeps was still an important aspect of this year’s conference. The Social Media factor at the conference continues to grow each year and I think we might have finally reached a tipping point. This year so many people were using the #HRTechConf hash tag on Twitter that the tweets were streaming into TweetDeck faster than I could read them. Information overload. So kudos to the conference organizers and all of my HR Tech Twitter buddies who helped promote the Social Media aspect of the conference. On the good news/bad news front the sponsored Wi-Fi was very spotty especially in some of the conference rooms that were more out of the way. In the larger sessions when everyone powered on their tweeting devices the Wi-Fi came to a standstill. What’s the good news in this? If the Wi-Fi had been 100% rock solid the tweet stream would have been OUT OF CONTROL.

What I Learned This Year

The expo floor as always abounded with a zillion vendors hawking their wares. I was having a conversation with one of the vendors who mentioned that in general the vendors were unhappy with Vegas/Mandalay Place in comparison to McCormick Place because the attendees were not a captive audience. At McCormick Place there was nothing around the conference center to do or see so most attendees with any free time would stroll through the expo floor. At Mandalay Bay, the attendees often used any free time to stroll over to the casino floor instead of the expo floor. Speaking of vendors, there were a ton of announcements at the conference and I do mean a ton. I’m too lazy to track them all down so here is a great summary of the announcements from Marketwatch.

Mobile was a huge topic at the conference this year but let’s first talk about the attendees mobile devices. The news reports indicate that the iPad has decimated the Netbook market and I can tell you first hand that this rang true at the conference. The iPad ruled and I could have counted on one hand the number of Netbooks being used. In a slight twist to last year, I witnessed a strong showing of people using physical keyboards with their iPads. In another nod to the strong growth of Apple, the MacBook Air also had a very strong showing among the attendees. Sorry Microsoft, the traditional laptop seemed pushed out this year. Hope you have big plans for Windows 8 to stem the market share loss.

Unlike mobile which has been brewing for a couple of years, gamification seemed to blast out of the woodwork from seemingly obscurity at the conference this year. For vendors and for companies the message this year is that if you want adoption of your application you need give workers a reason to use the app. Enter gamification which uses games design techniques applied to HR applications to encourage people to use (or adopt) the software. Gamification is no longer just badges but now includes awarding and redeeming points, achievement, challenges and recognition. There were many vendors showing applications with gamification built to the core or at least gamification techniques applied to bits and pieces. I’ll be curious to see in future surveys if gamification does indeed make a difference in adoption.

Just like mobile, analytics is HOT HOT HOT this year. The good news is there are now solutions that cover the spectrum of needs. Vendors are adding transactional analytics into their applications at a minimum and strategic analytic solutions are coming on strong. I encourage customers to take the long view when implementing disparate HR systems that each have their own transactional analytics to think about the impact of providing too many disconnected metric reports to their end users. While it might make sense to dip your toe into analytics by starting with built-in transactional metrics, only rollout the metrics that make the most sense and determine your long term analytics goals up front. Maybe an enterprise wide HR Analytics/BI system should be in you HR Technology Roadmap.

SaaS continues its steady march to replace on-premise HR applications. Nearly all vendors with on-premise solutions are re-architecting, re-coding or at least re-marketing their apps to say they are SaaS compliant. Don’t believe the marketing message however. Customers will need to dig deep and ask tons of pointed questions to determine exactly what flavor of SaaS the vendor is supporting. From the Talent Management panel the big take away was SaaS is really Saa (Software as a…). Service is still missing from many SaaS vendors. Customers are having to redo their contracts with SaaS vendors at renewal time and substantially beefing up the SLA and Service agreements.

The Awesome New Technologies for HR session was a hit again this year with the instant responses from the Twitter peanut gallery providing lots of colorful commentary. The Twitter users at the conference are pretty savvy HR Technology users so hopefully the vendors participating in the session captured the tweets (both good and bad) for future consideration. The iPad demo’s from Workday and Peoplefluent seems to garner the most interest and praise from the crowd and the tweets. Workday’s iPad app interface with the Swirl pretty much stole the show. By the way, for any session presenters reading this post don’t say “San Fran” when you mean “San Francisco”. You know who you are.

The Challenge For Next Year

The market for HR Technology applications has exploded the last couple of years. Core HR systems are hot again, suites continue to be rolled out, Analytics are front and center, Social Media is being embedded and everything is mobile, mobile, mobile. I found myself this year really feeling like I missed out on way too much. Trying to find time for all the great sessions, the expo floor, vendor briefings and hallway conversations with the attendees was impossible. The challenge for next year is to find a way to make more time available for all these things. Longer Expo hours, repeated sessions or maybe an additional day added to the conference might do the trick. Kudos to Bill Kutik and LRP for another great HR Technology Conference.

Most Important Takeaways

• Dwane Lay and Paul Smith make an awesome Penn and Teller combo.
• You know you have spent too much time in the elevators at Mandalay Bay when you can lip sync the Hubert Keller “Fleur” video.
• More men use moisturizing cream around their eyes than you probably realize.
• Ron Wallace is in amazing shape having to keep up with Naomi Bloom on her scooter.
• Bill Kutik needs a smart phone adviser the next time he gets a new cell phone.
• Naomi Bloom can operate an iPhone but not an iPad. Go figure.

No good conference is complete without some sort of video so I leave you with this awesome swag video by my good pals Dwane Lay and Paul Smith.

This Guest Post is from Kyle Lagunas who is an HR Market Analyst with Software Advice. Software Advice helps buyers find the right software for their business. Like the big consulting firms, Software Advice researches the market identifying the best solutions for each buyer.

When your organization announces, “We’re hiring again,” are you paralyzed with the fear of being buried under stacks of resumes? The process of reviewing resumes, interviewing candidates, and hiring/on-boarding is time-consuming. When searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack, keeping organized should be easier. Thankfully, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Due largely in part to the emergence of web-based Software as a Service (SaaS), organizations of any size and budget can tap into feature-rich web-based applicant tracking software (ATS) and streamline their hiring process.

As an alternative to traditional on-premise systems are still popular, web-based software as a service (SaaS) put big-time functionality at hiring professionals’ disposal without the upfront expense of on-premise implementations. In fact, according to a report published by Advanced Market Research, SaaS users are part of the fastest growing market of consumers in HR software – contributing more than one-third of revenue for software companies.

So, if you think you may be ready to get rid of your Rolodex and clear that stack of resumes off of your desk, here’s what you should know…

A Closer Look at Web-based Applicant Tracking Software:
ATS automates the hiring process from end to end in the – from how candidates view openings and complete online applications to scheduling interviews and securely storing resumes. And central to the process is ensuring that this workflow is easily accessible to everyone from the HR specialist to the CEO.

Most applicant tracking systems include a portal where candidates can complete customizable online applications. Resumes are parsed at the click of a button and document templates (i.e. offer letters) are quickly generated as well. Multiple schedules can also easily be coordinated so you can focus on interviewing. The ultimate focus of applicant tracking systems is the successful management of candidates’ lifecycles in the hiring process.

There are many applicant tracking solutions, as there are various needs across the industries (i.e. high volume of applicants, various positions to be filled, etc). As such, we’ve put together this comparison of some of our favorite systems:

iCIMSTalentPlatform: Hit the ground running in all of your recruiting initiatives with this robust talent acquisition package. Great for organizations of any size, with offerings far beyond ATS.

ApplicantStack: Ideal for HR managers that need to optimize hiring processes at an affordable price, ApplicantStack is a completely hosted, full-featured ATS designed for small and mid-sized organizations.

AcquireTM: Small to mid-sized business looking for a powerful, web-based ATS will love AcquireTM Talent Management’s user-friendly solutions for streamlining the hiring process.

Newton: In the cloud-based ATS market, Newton Software is widely known for its ease of use, easy implementation, first rate customer service and EEO/OFCCP compliance features.

How to Choose the Right Software for Your Organization

According to HR technology blogger Steve Boese, “There is almost no reason why even the smallest, least technically capable organizations and HR departments can’t take advantage of at least some level of automation to better manage the recruiting process.” Software developers understand that the hiring process varies from organization to organization, and there are more than 200 applicant tracking systems for you to choose from.

If you’re a small business owner, the first step in choosing the right applicant tracking software is identifying your needs and budget. If you’re new to applicant tracking, you’ll want to start with the basics in terms of functionality: online applications, interview status tracking, and document management. Or, if you’re ready for a complete package to deliver for years to come, go for the gold and invest in a top-of-the-line best of breed solution.

The next step is to know what the market has to offer. With the right due diligence, you’ll be able to make the best decision for your specific needs to ensure you can attract and hire the very best applicants to help take your small business to the next level.

This guide can be found in its entirety at: http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/hr/web-based-applicant-tracking-systems-comparison-1070711/

I read the tweets coming from the Workday Technology Summit on August 23 and was surprised. A couple of the analysts seemed to suggest that Workday should stop talking about its SaaS Multi-Tenant technology approach and focus instead on the business value of the Workday application when they are talking to customers.  While that might be good advice for Workday, I hope the analysts are not advising customers who are looking to purchase SaaS solutions to focus only on the functionality of the application and not worry about the technology.  Potential customers should absolutely dig into all the nooks and crannies of a vendor’s technology.

Vendors are not to be trusted especially when it comes to HR data.  If you are a customer thinking of using a SaaS vendor for HCM/TM applications (especially core HR) you had better make sure that the Vendor is using technology that is proven and fully supportable.  Sometime after go-live when the SaaS application experiences an outage or data breach is not the time to discover the vendor’s servers are running Windows Server 2000 or the database is Oracle 8i or the “servers” are a rack of Psystar towers.  You might get compensated for the downtime but at that point you probably have lost confidence in the vendor.

Customers need to fully understand the technology used to power the SaaS application. Purchasing HR applications/software should always be a joint venture between HR and IT.  HR can focus on functionality and usability and IT can focus on technology and security.

Laurie Ruettimann thinks HR Technology Conference co-chair Bill Kutik is no Old Spice guy.  Or is he?

“Hello HR Professionals, look at your HR Technology, now back at me, now back at your HR Technology, now back at me. Sadly, your HR Technology isn’t state of the art like me, but if you stopped using legacy ERP software and switched to true SaaS HR software they could be state of the art like me.  Look down, back up, where are you?  You’re in Chicago with the state of the art technology your software could be like.  What’s in your hand, back at me. I have it, it’s a Promotion Code for 30% off the HR Technology conference registration.  Look again, the promotion code is INFOBOX10.  Anything is possible when you attend the HR Technology Conference.  I’m on a horse.”

If I have not sold you on attending the HR Technology Conference & Expo by my witty Old Spice satire then you should know that the HR Technology Conference & Expo is THE HR Technology conference to attend.  Each year the conference has a shootout session where multiple vendors demo their live software to a scripted scenario.  The shootout has been so successful that this year there will be four separate shootout sessions with only 2 vendors per session.  I’ll be hosting one of the shoot out sessions this year so how better to spend your money except to come see me live and in person as sheriff making sure the shootout vendors stick to the rules.

But wait, there’s more.  Last year we had a highly successful impromptu Tweetup during Friday morning’s breakfast (and garnered interesting looks from those conference attendees who were not in the know).  We are stepping it up this year and for my loyal twitter followers we will be having another Tweetup Friday Morning with more, more, more.  I can’t discuss all the details yet but I know you won’t be disappointed.

I know I am forgetting something…think, think, think.  Oh yeah, don’t forgot my promo code of INFOBOX10 gets you $500 off the onsite price of $1,695 – just $1,195.

Need more convincing? You will be surrounded by 2,000 HR practitioners, vendors, consultants, analysts and bloggers from 24 countries (over 18,000 attendees in the last 12 years).  The conference will also feature free Wi-Fi in the conference center and giant Tweetstreams outside the expo floor and the general session room.

Still not convinced?  Laurie Ruettimann will be teaching a class called Twitterversity.  There will be a debate between guru Naomi Lee Bloom and Gartner’s Jim Holincheck, Oracle revealing more of Fusion HCM,  the Blogger Insight Panel (members not yet chosen), and “Awesome New Technologies for HR” from bleeding edge start-ups (chosen at the last possible second).

If you still need more information, head on over the conference website, download the PDF of the full conference brochure or check out my recap of last year’s conference. Finally, don’t forget my promo code of INFOBOX10 to get $500 off the onsite price of $1,695.  Go register now, while I go buy some Old Spice Body Wash.

Guess what?  The rumor on the street is that HR leads the industry in using the Software As A Service (SaaS) delivery model.  Surveys say that customers still prefer best-of-breed solutions over integrated solutions so that means more HR applications instead of less.  Guess what also is true about many of these SaaS applications?  They still use flat files as the main vehicle to shuttle information into and out of the application. In this model the customer is still required to develop an interface to the SaaS vendor.  Wait, what?  As a customer you still have to do custom development even though you are using a SaaS application.

There are several other more state of the art options such as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) or SOAP messaging.  I don’t know about you but when an employee gets hired into my core HR system, I would love to have the employee information zip over to my SaaS based Learning Management System within a couple seconds instead of sometime that evening when the flat file interface gets run.  When I push the button to fill a requisition in my recruiting application, wouldn’t it be great to have the new hire in my core HR system right away. Sorry SaaS Recruiting vendor, sending me XML files via FTP multiple times a day doesn’t count.

All is not lost fortunately.  The HR SaaS application vendors are starting to incorporate messaging or ESBs into their offering.  The most prominent example of this is Workday purchasing ESB vendor Cape Clear back in February of 2008.  Since then Workday has embedded Cape Clear into their application to allow end users to create their own real-time inbound and outbound interfaces.

For those other SaaS vendors who are still stuck in the flat file interface, you better get it together soon.  We are wising up and will be requiring state of the art real-time interfaces in our vendor selection criteria.

On episode 45 of the Bill Kutik Radio show, Bill Kutik interviewed Jason Averbook and Jason Corsello regarding the HR year past and coming up.  During the show the topic turned technical and Bill Kutik brought up the topic of whether SaaS will become the dominant delivery method for HR applications.  In answering the question, Jason Averbook discussed the myth that you do not need IT help when implementing SaaS application. Spot on commentary by Jason until he says:

Software as a Service requires just as much IT support as any of these other solutions. It’s a different kind of IT support, a different skill set.

Sorry Jason but I am going to have to disagree with you on this point. SaaS applications do not require as much IT support as on-premise solutions.  Let take a look at the typical IT tasks for supporting on premise vendor application and note the tasks that are also needed for SaaS applications:

My experience with SaaS applications show that you no longer need IT Datacenter support, Database Administration support, Application Infrastructure support and Application Development support (with the exception of interfaces).  Poof.  Gone. No longer needed.  Depending on the number of resources either partially or fully engaged to support your on-premise application, this could be a sizable reduction in the resources needed as you shift to SaaS.

Agree? Disagree?  Leave a comment and let me know.

One of our top notch HR Bloggers and HR Technology instructor at RIT, Steve Boese, asked the HR blogosphere if we would host some guest blogs for his students.  I raised my virtual hand as fast as I could and I sure am glad as one of Steve’s students sent me a fabulous guest post.

Today I am hosting a guest post from RJ Nicolais. RJ is just getting into the Twitter thing so if everyone could please follow him and give him encouragement to update his BIO and avatar and maybe add a couple more tweets, that would be great. I don’t want to embarrass RJ by mentioning all the wonderful things he said about my blog but lets just say he will go far in life if he keeps up the compliments.  RJ and I share some similar thoughts about HR and technology and all kidding aside, please give RJ your full attention for this great post about being afraid of change.

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To Change or Not to Change?

I’ve worked at several different organizations throughout my career in human resources and have noticed that they all have one thing in common: they are afraid of change.  Not just any change, but a special kind of change.  As HR professionals, we are supposed to be the “champions of change” and yet have difficulty changing ourselves.  We can take on wellness initiatives and change whole benefit structures (not to mention that we shoulder the responsibility for broader company culture shifts) but when it comes to technology we’re just plain frightened.  I would have used another colloquialism to tell you how I feel about it but that would be inappropriate.

The rate at which “technology” changes and evolves is totally insane – but that is the nature of the beast.  You can learn to accept it and embrace those changes or you can choose to resist and get left the in the proverbial dust.  I should probably tell you that I don’t think I’m really frightened, so I make that correction to the statement I made above.  There are those of us who truly embrace technology changes and get downright excited about them.  So we demo software and the newest (SaaS) solution for HR and we start to drool thinking about how much we can accomplish in so little time.  We may even start to sweat a little when we see the pretty interface we get to look at every day.

Then we talk to our bosses about it and our dreams are shattered.

“It’s too expensive.”  “There is too much at stake in a change.”  “It’s just not possible this year – maybe next year we can talk about it.” Or, my all-time favorite: “What we have now works just fine.” Those are all valid answers to valid fears.  I think that we need to get past those fears.  HR needs to spend the money to get the right solution at the right time.  Get the product that will be the most use to the company right now when growing the business is more important than ever.

Trying to work within the constructs of old software that doesn’t support the business any longer isn’t productive.  Excel isn’t a means to an end.  That is what scares me – outdated software and massive Excel spreadsheets.  It’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

Since @williamtincup over at Starr Tincup did not ask for my predictions for 2010, I guess I will have to blog about them right here on my shiny new WordPress Blog.  Since it is New Years Eve and my brain is now official mush for 2009, I could only come up with 5 (really lame) predictions.

SaaS continues to pick up steam

As company’s budgets open up in 2010 and they start looking at upgrading or replacing their aging legacy in-house HCM applications, they will turn to SaaS replacements.  Additionally many companies already using SaaS applications for Talent Management, Recruiting and Learning will switch to another SaaS provider based on perceived but not necessary real shortcoming of their current system  (grass is always greener syndrome).

Consumer information such as Social Security numbers will continue to get stolen

Many companies still have not implemented procedure changes and technology solutions to keep employee information safe.  Too many system administers, database administrators and developers have inappropriate access to employee information in the HR systems.  Additionally, too many people in HR also have access to sensitive employee information.  Controls are still not in place to prevent or detect when files containing social security numbers have been emailed, copied to USB drives or otherwise been spirited out side the company firewall.

Social Media sites will start to be unblocked

More companies will finally get the hint that blocking social media sites is not actually causing employees to avoid spending work time doing social media.  The rise in popularity of smart phones such as the BlackBerry, iPhone and Android devices that can easily access Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites convinces companies that blocking is futile.  However as more people start using sites such as Twitter and Facebook and post before they think, we will see an increase in the number of employees getting the boot at work for posting negative information about their company, co-workers or management.

Oracle Fusion Applications will…

…nope, sorry, no way am I going to predict anything about Oracle Fusion Applications

Bryon Abramowitz and Sarah White will move to a self hosted WordPress Blog

Okay, I sort of get to cheat on this. I started writing this blog post a couple of days ago when Bryon was asking for Blogger Theme help and I predicted that he would eventually be persuaded by his fellow bloggers to move to WordPress.  However Bryon jumped on this faster than my speeding greyhound and moved to a self hosted WordPress blog yesterday.  Sarah will eventually get plugin envy after seeing all the really cool buttons on other people’s blogs and will move her WordPress.com blog to a self hosted site.

There you go. I hope everyone has nice New Years Eve and I am looking forward to continuing the conversations in 2010.

Apologies on the delay in moving my blog to WordPress. I could bore you with all the reasons for the delay (work, work, work, bad cold, holiday gatherings, learning the Thesis WordPress theme etc…) but I know you could care less. You just want some new content to chew on. Especially that darn @thehrmaven who has been snapping her fingers at me. So how about a compromise? Let’s turn back the clock and remind of you some of my earlier work while you wait.

In my very first post, I told you to SaaS your SaaS. Now that was one sassy post. How about this beaut from last February when asked if you Twitter in the bathroom? In April I showed you how to convert filing cabinets into a ping pong table. Finally for all my new readers, this gem of a video from August entitled What I do (Wednesday edition) will give you the low down on my work and my passion for rescued greyhounds.

Now run along and don’t come back until I tell you I am ready.

I have had a nagging feeling for awhile that HR people are actually afraid of technology. I thought back on my last year of twitter conversations with my HR tweeps and could not think of any significant evidence of HR people talking about technology. In fact, many times during the monthly #HR_Tech chats, the participants bemoaned the lack of actual HR people participating in the chat. I spent some more time reading through the various blog posts written after the HR Technology conference and the Oracle OpenWorld conference. Unfortunately I only found a few HR bloggers that actually wrote about the technology at the HR Technology conference and could not find any HR bloggers who wrote about Oracle OpenWorld. Finally, I perused through my HR Blogs category in Google Reader and again could not find any significant evidence of HR bloggers writing about technology. When I say HR people are afraid of technology, I am not talking about people in HR IT, HRIS, HR Industry Analysts and HR consultants. I’m talking about HR generalists, managers and executives who own the HR function at a company.