In this episode we discuss: Which HRIS do I need? We are joined by Matt Bradburn, Founder & CEO of the People Collective. 

We chat about the following: 

• What are our views on Rippling? Personio? Factorial? BambooHR? HiBob? 
• What is a good vendor choice for a scaling company of a few hundred people that wants something that is very customisable? 
• What is a good all-in-one vendor choice that is good at employee engagement and for UK companies supports international expansion into the US? 
• What are the “gotchas” when buying an HRIS?  
• What is the hidden, dark secret of all employee engagement tools? 
• What is a good vendor choice for a mid-market ATS? 
• What is a good vendor choice for compensation? 
• Which products are really exciting for 2024?

References:

HRIS vendor evaluation

• Rippling
• HiBob
• Factorial
• Personio
• BambooHR

Other HRIS vendors mentioned

• CharlieHR
• Humaans
• ATS vendors
• Ashby
• Pinpoint
• Workable
• Greenhouse
• SmartRecrruiters

Other products mentioned

• Sana Labs
• Pando
• HarrietHR

Biography: 

Matt is a globally recognised People and Talent leader. Through his work as the founder at People Collective, he's helped over 150 companies shape forward thinking people and talent strategies to scale sustainably.  

Passionate about how talent shapes business outcomes, he loves to discuss the best ways to help employees reach their full potential.

He previously led People Ops at Peakon prior to their exit to Workday. 

Summary:

• Healthy eating habits and vegetable subscriptions. 0:05
• Bethany is trying a new vegetable subscription service called Odd Box, which delivers a random mix of fruits and vegetables each week.
• Bethany is not excited about the included cauliflower and tuna, but is looking forward to trying new vegetables during the summer.
• HRIS options for a 100-person company. 3:02
• Bethany is frustrated with the lack of great options for HRIS systems, especially for smaller companies.
• Brandon has a utilitarian experience with Rippling, with a cluttered drop-down menu and limited performance review functionality compared to other HRIS systems.
• Brandon and Bethany discuss their experiences with Rippling, a HR platform founded by former Zenefits employees.
• Rippling's sales process was qualified and thorough, but the product did not appeal to Brandon due to its utilitarian nature.
• HR software options for employee experience. 7:28
• Hi, Bob has a mature talent module with performance reviews, goals, and check-ins, making it a strong choice for employee experience.
• Hi, Bob's org view module is a visualization tool for headcount planning, but it's only available for enterprise companies with 200+ employees.
• Brandon gives Bamboo HR a rating of 4.5 out of 5, praising their sales engagement experience but criticizing their basic performance and ATS modules.
• Bethany notes that Bamboo HR's pricing is high and their product is trying to eat up the market, but their sales experience is professional and crisp.
• HR software options for a small business. 13:03
• Bamboo HR's reporting and custom field functionality was frustrating for the speaker, with delayed responses from the customer success team and limited flexibility.
• Bethany suspects a churn issue at a company, possibly due to Hi Bob's functionality and Personnel's focus on being an all-in-one solution.
• Personnel aims to differentiate themselves from Hi Bob and other competitors by offering a modern and progressive product with a focus on employee experience.
• Brandon and Bethany discuss HR software options, with Persona and Factorial being the main focus.
• Factorial is positioned as an all-in-one solution with a focus on finance and operations, while Persona is seen as a more utilitarian option with a better user experience.
• HR tech stack for scaling companies. 20:18
• Bethany and Brandon discuss HR tech stacks, with Brandon providing insights on various products and their pros and cons.
• Bethany describes her experience with bamboo HR, expressing frustration with its limitations and lack of good analytics, and Brandon agrees that it's not the best option for scaling companies.
• HR software for mid-market companies with limited options. 22:38
• Matt Bradburn is frustrated with Bamboo's prescriptive performance module, wanting more flexibility in choosing what to assess.
• Matt recommends Humans for an employee data layer that's easy to manipulate and connect to other software, making life easier.
• Matt Bradburn recommends using Hi, Bob as a mid-market HR platform due to its ease of use, reasonable performance, and ability to download Excel files for analysis.
• Matt Bradburn advises reducing HR tools to the bare minimum to achieve a loved stack, citing Lattice and Deel as examples.
• ATS and employee engagement tools. 27:49
• Matt Bradburn shares insights on employee engagement tools, revealing their limitations and the need for more prescriptive actions.
• He highlights the importance of using AI to improve employee engagement, rather than just measuring it.
• Matt Bradburn prefers Ashby, Workable, or SmartRecruiters for ATS, citing ease of use and new features.
• He believes these options are the most popular and well-regarded in the market, with Greenhouse being the most expensive option.
• HR tech trends and product strides in 2024. 32:07
• Matt Bradburn is impressed with summer laps' learning creation landscape, particularly their multi-threaded approach to onboarding and sales.
• He also appreciates Panda's performance development, which connects employee journey to career growth, and Harriet HR's ease of access to HR information through Slack.
• Matt Bradburn notes that Rippling, a CRM system, is great for US-focused companies with international employees, but lacks customization for US benefits.
• Matt Bradburn hears anecdotal evidence of frustration with Rippling among European users, including those who experienced difficulty with European SAS compliance.
• HR tech consolidation and customization. 36:33
• Matt Bradburn discusses the challenges of creating a comprehensive HR platform that meets the needs of various countries and legal requirements, while also providing customization options for users.
• Matt Bradburn and others discuss the Goldilocks problem of finding an HR platform that is not too rigid or too fluid, but rather just right for the user's needs.
• Matt Bradburn: Too many Workday implementation consultants on LinkedIn, making it hard to find accurate data.
• Bethany: Consolidation is needed in the compensation space, but no one has a good product vision for a single tool that does everything.
• HR tech, security, and due diligence. 40:46
• Matt Bradburn: Security and corruption are top concerns when buying an ISS solution.
• Bethany: Integration and customization are crucial, but vendors may not deliver on promises.
• Matt Bradburn advises businesses to prioritize simplicity and due diligence when selecting technology.

Brandon 0:05

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the operations room a podcast for CEOs I am Brandon Mensing, joined by my lovely co host, Bethany Ayers. How are things going, Bethany? There? Okay,

Bethany 0:16

Brandon, I thought I'd give a bit of an update on my eating. Because, you know, everybody wants to know about. So I thought I'd carry on what's been happening post Zoe Park

Brandon 0:26

500.

Bethany 0:28

Yeah. All right.

Brandon 0:29

Let's do it, Zoe. So

Bethany 0:31

this one is, I stopped with the subscription because there was no point and I now I just know I need to eat as many vegetables as I can. So I ended up with a subscription to odd box. Do you know odd box?

Brandon 0:45

I do, actually. Yeah, I like their little stick. Do you also have a subscription? I don't. But I like the idea was appealing to me. But I didn't do a subscription.

Bethany 0:54

For anyone who doesn't know odd box is one of these vegetables, subscriptions but it's supposed to be abandoned fruits and vegetables. There's either too many, they don't look quite right. They're too small. They're too big, whatever. Mostly they look fine. We had some avocados a couple of weeks ago that looked a bit like passion fruit. And my husband was not convinced and he refused to eat the avocados. They were fine. They were just like little mini avocados. And I'm trying to eat the rainbow as everybody suggests. So you know all of the colours because every colour is different vitamins and it also makes it a little more interesting. So this week, I opened up my odd box. And it is parsnips, cauliflower. And you know what I feel about cauliflower, not my favourite, chestnut mushrooms.

Brandon 1:43

So odd boxes, you can't specify what you want. It's just a randomised set of vegetables that show up on your doorstep every week. You

Bethany 1:50

can say no to up to three things a week. But I don't always remember. And then you don't know what you're gonna get substituted with.

Brandon 1:57

Yeah, something even worse, pretty much

Bethany 2:01

because it doesn't get much worse than cauliflower as far as I'm concerned. And so I'm currently roasting my vegetables for the week and instead of eating the rainbow, I'll be eating white and brown. I am thoroughly uninspired for this week.

Brandon 2:15

Okay, all right, so the odd box is happening. That's part of your programme. You're into that.

Bethany 2:20

I am also basically every week I roast vegetables and then eat vegetables for lunch like vegetables, the tahini or with beans or slightly embarrassing and a bit of a throwback, but I'm really into tuna at the moment like tinned tuna.

Brandon 2:35

Tuna has a throwback flavour to my early 20s.

Bethany 2:39

Exactly like I'm just having a bit of a nostalgia moment. But yeah, I'm not sure how Tintin and roasted cauliflower are gonna mix but I'll let you know.

Brandon 2:48

So the Zoe's subscription is off. You know what to eat. So now you're doing it independently of the ZOE subscription.

Bethany 2:55

I am and I'm really looking forward to the summer when there's something more exciting than parsnips and cauliflower on the agenda. There was a lot of overshooting for a while as well. And I don't know if I can look at another aubergine for a while. So

Brandon 3:08

today, we have a phenomenal topic, which is which HRIS do I choose, we have an amazing guest for this, which is Matt Bradburn. He is the founder and CEO of the people collective. So before we get to that, Bethany, I think you are gonna set me up I am

Bethany 3:25

trying something new today. Thrilling

Brandon 3:27

for reversing seats here. Yeah,

Bethany 3:29

and we're talking about HR I SS, or as you'll notice that Matt calls them H races, which I thought was like an Atrus. And so we're clearly we're not the cool kids, we are not in the know who is an Atrus. It's basically like a CRM, but for your HR brand. And I know you've done a bit more research than I have, because I basically tried to do this research and got so frustrated, I gave up and there just didn't seem to be anything great on the market. If we're 100 person company scaled up needing to upgrade from whatever it is that we're using to a slightly more grown up Atrus or HR is what are our options. I'm going to start with the one that I'm most excited about rippling.

Brandon 4:21

Bethany 6:46

And then hired back everybody who was good from Zenefits, with everything that they've learned, and then just built rippling. So although they're not a very old company, they're very experienced company.

Brandon 6:57

I see. So that says the product should be fantastic them, which is why we're

Bethany 7:01

so excited to see it. And I was also qualified out, it was at a point where they weren't selling to Europe yet, and they just won't even let me see a demo. So that's rippling, are we going to give it a score out of five?

Brandon 7:12

I think the utilitarian nature of it did not appeal to me. If I was really concerned about finance operations in the backend of it, I'm sure I'd be super excited by replaying, but I'm not particularly so in this case, I'll give it a three. I was hoping

Bethany 7:25

it was going to save the hrs world, but maybe not. So Hi, Bob. Not to be confused with charliehr. Because for whatever reason, we just need to add people's names to Bob

Brandon 7:37

and Charlie Charlie. Yeah, but actually the benefits provider and UK Ben, have you heard of Ben? Oh, no.

Bethany 7:43

But at least that's benefits. But again, like another male name.

Brandon 7:48

Hi, Bob is a good product. In particular, the talent module has performance reviews, goals and check ins one to ones and it by far out of all the vendors that are reviewed, they definitely have the most mature talent module of all them. So if you're truly looking for employee experience, as part of your hrs, hands down, Hi, Bob is the right answer for that. They also had uniquely a really interesting feature for workforce planning. They do a tremendous amount of scenario planning with headcount, you're like what does that picture look based on revenue? A, what does that picture look like based on revenue B. So the fact that they actually had this scenario planning headcount feature, I've never seen that before, it was definitely not a part of the other hrs is,

Bethany 8:30

and that's really interesting. So there's a tool called org view for really big companies. I'm not sure if you've ever come across it by a company whose name I can never remember. It's like converse, Sikka. I can't remember con something. But it's org view. And it's a great tool, but they'll only sell it to enterprises. So I'm wondering if Hi, Bob, because I've not seen it is doing something so like, is it easy org charts, and actually, like a visualisation tool to do the different scenarios? Yeah,

Brandon 8:59

exactly. So there's a visualisation component to it. When I went to the qualifying process, I asked them if I could actually purchase that module. And what she said to me was that is only available for customers that are 200 plus employees. So to your point, it's geared towards bigger scale enterprise companies.

Bethany 9:16

So when I was looking at hrs is I don't know why I didn't look seriously at Hi, Bob. It wasn't getting great reviews at that point. That was probably two, two and a half years ago. When was last time you looked at it? And has there been improvements? My

Brandon 9:29

evaluation was done in the past three months. So this is a very recent assessment. I think there's a reason why right now, at least in Europe, Hi, Bob is kind of eating up the marketplace, which they are, I think that they just have built in momentum around having a good product that is really targeted towards the leans towards the employee experience. And I think there's a real spot for that right. Now. The other thing to mention is again, modularity is really quite strong in the sense of, they've got the hrs for price a, they've got the talent performance module, Time and Attendance compensate Shion with Mercer benchmarking as a bit of an add on to that compensation, the payroll hub, your voice, which in this case is the ability for employees to express themselves, whether it's in survey form or otherwise. And pricing wise, which I did get from Hi, Bob, if you're 100 person company, and you want the HRIS plus Performance plus talent, the the ATS part of it, that product is 18,000 pounds for 100 people, 400 people. So this is not the top end, I can get the rippling number, but at least for the other competitors, this was the most expensive product that was out there. And the other little bit on the sales engagement experience, part of it was the sales rep that I dealt with. Very fast, very transactional. Here's the price, here's the demo, do you want to buy it that kind of scenario. So it wasn't the best wasn't the worst, but

yeah, but they're just trying to eat up the market, aren't they? So like, it's all about high price and sales. So. So out of five,

I want to give them a 4.5. But I can't I'll give them a four just because I'm a stickler.

The next one is bamboo HR. We were bamboo users. I have a lot of opinions on bamboo, but I will hold them back. So Brandon, you're trusting bamboo HR,

I can't wait for this. So on the performance module side, very basic, very basic one to ones very basic for check ins and very basic for the actual performance module itself. I would say the ATS was also very basic. So when it comes to that employee experience and a bit of the ATS, not particularly great, I would say on that side of things. The other part that I felt with bamboo was it really felt like a Legacy product where it does the basics really well, but doesn't really do a lot beyond that. And the other little piece of this for European customers was that the only modules they sell for European customers is the hrs itself. In performance, all the other modules are not available for European customers. So that's obviously another issue. And I think the rep in this case was trying to sell me on the fact that there was integrations for all the other stuff that I might be looking for in this case. And then purely from a commercial standpoint, this came in the second most expensive product, which was not 18k. But 16k. And the 16k includes their case, they charge for an implementation fee of 2k. So that 2k is part of the 16k, if that makes sense. So your one is a 16k total. And your two is 14. Exactly, yeah. And then interestingly, three weeks later, I got an email saying that there was a discount out of nowhere. For 13k. I was like, Oh, lovely, I didn't have to negotiate at all. And I've already received a discount fabulous. And then the other part of bamboo, and I'll give them some credit for this, which is they know how to sell. They had by far the best sales engagement experience out of all them hands down, it was really professional, really crispy. And the sequencing that I went through was tremendous. Just a great experience from a sales point of view.

So I was not part of selecting bamboo HR was already in place when I joined. I just didn't like anything about it. So super basic, the reporting was awful, you couldn't create your own custom fields, you had to ask the customer success team, and they're based in California. So it was like a 24 to 48 hour delay every time you wanted a custom field, which just goes to my hypothesis around the fact that CSM teams are just papering over the cracks of product issues, like what kind of tech debt are they dealing with that they can't figure out how to let customers create their own custom fields. And then also like the drop down menus, you'd have all these issues. So for exit interviews or reasons for exiting, you either couldn't change the ones or you could add to it, but you couldn't remove any of theirs. And some of their exit reasons were just bizarre, like, did not like it found it really frustrating found the customer success not particularly helpful, or the customer experience not helpful. We tried to use it to track our one to ones and then there was like this little pink button that would arrive. And if the little pink button happened, this little circle, it would be recorded in the reports. But sometimes a little pink circle would happen, and sometimes it wouldn't. And so I had all these direct reports, and I would know I've done a one to one and there would be no pink circle and it wouldn't count and another one would, and nobody could figure out why the pink circle happened or didn't happen. That's how it's immensely frustrating. So frustrating. So bamboo HR out of five, two,

I would say I mean just a tech that thing, making vast assumptions here but like just what you said rings true in the sense of if they don't have a fully featured modular product available for Europe right now given how how long they've been on the marketplace that tells you something about their situation.

I suspect they have a churn issue and they're dealing With rippling and Hi Bob taking everything from them, or they'll maybe persona to our next one in line. They're German, right?

Yes. So persona was the new kid on the block, I got the clear sense that their product development dial is cranked to 11. They are hyper focus on fleshing out that product as fast as humanly possible. So they were kind of cranking out what I would consider to be like for like functionality of the basics and getting it out published as fast as they possibly can. So payroll, surveys, compensation, time tracking, etc. So they're really playing catch up Functionality wise to high bulb and bamboo, in this case, look and feel very modern, very progressive, but they obviously will need to differentiate if they're gonna be successful in the marketplace. I think what I found interesting philosophically was that personeel made it very clear to me that they believe hrs is are not meant for employees to do a daily check in with if that makes sense. Whereas high Bob does, because in high Bob, you've got things like kudos, so employees can give each other kudos, or announcements from the company going through Hi, Bob, in this case. So there's an expectation that high Bob becomes a system whereby employees are expected to log into Hi, Bob, at some point on a weekly basis, daily basis, monthly basis, whatever, whereas percent, who doesn't believe that, and I think the rep characterised Hi, Bob, as the Instagram of hrs is a good one liner, I thought, and then on the performance module side, good functionality supporting the expected elements, feedback cycles, and goals and so on. They also had the ability to track training, which was a bit of a nod to kind of development aspirations on the part of employees in this case, I thought was quite nice. They have just released compensation and surveys as features, I can imagine, they're probably pretty basic upon publishing them, and they're gonna have to iterate quite a bit to get them up to speed a little bit. So I think the general mantra of personeel is that they want to be the all in one or the new kid on the block, they're pushing out as many features as they can. And they're gonna have to work hard to get these things up to speed in terms of being competitive, I think with Hi Bob, and bamboo and rippling as well, last little point commercially is that the product also has an implementation fee included for your 115 K. So just marginally less than bamboo. In this case, they have actually just recently introduced an accelerator programme, which was applicable to the 100 person company scenario. And that accelerator programme brought them in at the most inexpensive company, actually, in this case, which is 10k. So 10k seemed like a fabulous price.

And so out of five, I felt like, I want to

like personeel, they're like the little train that could you know, to try to crank stuff out in the price is quite a good price of this case being 10k, I think. But in terms of the actual feature functionality, experience, given the fact that there are quite far behind, as of literally today, let's say 2.5, I think if you if you have limited budget, you want an all in one, Persona is probably reasonable bet to make,

you're betting on the fact that they're going to develop rapidly have less tech debt, maybe listen to what's needed. But you get in in a nice low price that you won't have in a couple years. Yeah,

lock it into a three year lock in.

And then the final one is factorial, yes,

factorial. So they are again also positioned as an all in one hrs with all the modularity and features that we come to expect, again, a very utilitarian functionality, kind of a clinical user experience to it. And I thought personeel and high Bob definitely provided a better user experience. And the other element here is that factorials position like rippling, which there's they're much more interested in integration with finance and operations. In particular, when it came to features around that space. They had features for expenses, they had features for SAS app management, or vendor management in this case, which obviously is much more finance related. They had a feature for space management for your office, if you can imagine. So there really was a heavy skew of factorial, really on the finance operations side unless on the the employee experience side of things. And speaking of that, the performance module was very basic. The goal module was very basic, the one to one module very basic. And the features were siloed from each other. Commercially, I thought factorial actually was doing the most interesting things here, which is they actually had a free trial, which the others don't, where you can actually access the product independently of dealing with sales and interact with the product. They had super modularity. And with a modularity, they had absolute transparent pricing of what those modules were on the website so you can very clearly see what you're buying and kind of package them together. So I thought that transparency on pricing was great. So I thought that felt very progressive to me very modern, and as an HR buyer that seemed very interesting and attractive to me. Was it cheaper? Yeah, exactly. So the last bit was relatively cheaper coming in at 12k. In this case. So on our little scale that we just talked about, it was the cheapest until personeel introduced this accelerator programme at 10k. So definitely on the lower end of things, 12k

is still a lot for a self serve motion. So not surprised have to throw some people in during some of that, like, it's a lot of money to commit to if you have some questions. Yeah,

no, that's a good point. I think if you're above a certain threshold, they definitely did want to talk to you, if that makes sense. I think if you're below a certain threshold, it was more pure self serve in terms of the motion, if you want it to be that way.

And so what would you give factorial?

I think again, because the more the finance upside lessened the employee experience. And again, we're this utilitarian thing happening, I'll probably throw them into the the 2.5 bucket.

Right. So basically, Hi, Bob is the clear winner at four. Yes, exactly. Then we get rippling, I think it's three. And then we have bamboo, personeel, and factorial all kind of languishing together, except that bamboo is going backwards and personeel and factorial are going forwards. Yeah, I

think that's the best way to think about it.

Thanks very much, Brandon. I wish I'd had you do all that research when we were last looking for an hrs. So we just gave up and stuck with them who?

I think this is a fabulous chat. Warming us up for our guest today. Mr. Matt, Brad Burks. I think Matt Bradburn will give the the skinny the scoop and the what do they call it? The dirt.

And we're back, I am delighted to welcome Matt Bradburn to the podcast. Matt is an expert on the tech stack for HR teams. So let's get started with maybe my story. And then you can tell me what I should have done. So we had bamboo HR, I hated it. I hated the fact that every time you wanted to add a new field, you had to ask the CSM to do it and wait 24 hours, which is insane. To me. The analytics weren't great. Nothing was good. And so then it was like, Okay, we need to find a new HR. Yes. So then we started looking, and they were all equally bad. And then there was workday, which is super bloated. So which one is not equally bad, which one is the right one for a scaling company has a couple 100 employees.

I'm gonna get my bamboo feedback first, because quite frankly, one of the worst features I think I've ever seen on an HR is, is the performance module in bamboo, where it says, it basically prescribes all the questions that you have to ask during your performance process. And then just says you get to. So if you don't like their questions, you're like, how would I design like a great performance process? Maybe I want to change this over time. Maybe folks don't love this or like, the questions aren't giving me the right insights to be able to develop a growth? No, no, no, doesn't matter. Bamboo decides. These are the overarching, I have sour on from bamboo says no, these are the questions that you must ask. And that's incredibly infuriating. I'm all here for a bit of a walled garden, like something that makes your life easy. But I'm not here for something that's so prescriptive that you're like, this is like a fundamental piece of performance assessment, being able to choose what I'm assessing against, not just have me told that I have to assess against the things. So yes, I share your frustrations with bamboo. very annoyed. So

which one should we have gone for?

There's this perennial curve and wave that's been going on for well over a decade now, between platform versus point solutions. Do we have a platform that does a little bit of everything? It's a jack of all trades? Do we want, you know, half good platform, but with a bunch of point solutions? Do we just want something that's basically like a CRM for our people that just has their names, their holiday records, and then I don't have to worry about it, and it just does the thing. And then I can tap other solutions as and when I need them. So yeah, what was your approach at the time? What were you like, I want XYZ.

I want a CRM system for people that I can change and customise in the way that we use Salesforce.

Okay, so what I love for that is humans. So humans does a great job of this. And I'm not saying I had any influence in the product, because I didn't, but I did know the two founders really well. I remember sitting in a cafe with two guys. And they were like, What do you want from a system that you don't have at the moment, I was like, I just want an employee data layer that I can then manipulate and just have that data layer. And then I can go and do all the things I want to do. But just knowing that I can like look at this in like a spreadsheet style form, where I can go and like compare contrast, run my own analysis and other things will plug into it. Just easy API I connections that work super well. And then I can plug into performance software. And it all just ties up nicely. And they're like, yes, that is what we're gonna go and build, making your life easy, so that you're not spending your time doing to be perfect.

So that's a nice recommendation. So maybe a broader recommendation. If you're a classic mid market company, a couple of 100 people, you want a good all in one solution. And in particular, your more modern progressives, you really want that employee engagement side of it, to have a bunch of tools there to really make them come alive for the company. And let's say, you've just opened up your first office internationally, so your UK base, but you've actually kind of landed in the US as an example. So there's different kind of international requirements as well. And that scenario, which I think is pretty traditional for a scale up company, what are we looking at there?

I mean, typically, you're gonna say rippling, your options are pretty limited at the moment, as you say, like, we've got this kind of weird scenario, we got solutions right at the bottom, you're Charlie hrs, do you love like, I've always been a fan of Charlie and Charlie. It's like the plucky little guy that just keeps on truckin. And it does its thing, and it does it really well. And actually, I always recommend, like, if you're super early stage, just by Charlie and Charlie's, it's really simple. And it does the thing super well. But then you get to that like mid market point, that's where you've got your high, Barb's your bamboo hrs, you're rippling to an extent persona, which is trying to play in that zone much more than it was doing previously. And those are the ones that I'm seeing most CEOs, or CEOs put in place if you're moving over to other places. And Hi, Bob has clearly made a whole bunch of improvements, like it's got some good bits and some bad bits. But do I love it? No. Do I love any of them? No, we're having to choose the best of a bad bunch it Yes. And if that's the case, then I'm probably going to be looking at Hi, Bob as my number one, because it will do most of the things I want it to do, it will do reasonable performance, I'm not going to use it for comp benchmarking, and it will do all of your like employee records, the analysis has got a little bit better, but at least you know, worst comes to worst, I can just download an Excel file and then go and do all the analysis I want, which is fine. And it's got reasonable API access and plugs into things fairly nicely. And of course, they've just bought Pinto as well, which is going to make your payroll easier. So I think with the consolidation in the market, that's a nice little piece of consolidation from them. So we're probably going down that route. Okay,

so that makes sense. And then how do you get to a love stage? So let's say you're using the best of a bad bunch, you've got Hi, Bob, how do you add layers around? Hi, Bob to put into a scenario where I love my stack. What we've

seen instead is people be like, how do I reduce absolutely everything to the bare minimum. And it's led us to this really randomly, quite interesting point in the HR market, where you have, let's take something like a lattice or a deal. And what they're doing is they're like, cool, we will build an Atrus. Now, we're a performance tool, but we have to build an Atrus because that's how we get sticky with our customers. So lattice is a great performance tool. hando also a great performance tool, I'd be plugging one of those in, probably or maybe leaps them as well, like any of those three, do a good job, they will roughly do the same thing. panto takes a slightly different approach, which I prefer around like levelling progression, career advancement, when it comes to that, then I'd be looking at what ATS I needed depends on my hiring. At that stage, I might look at employee engagement. But again, Bob will do that, to a certain extent, I can probably say this. Now, because I've left an employee engagement company, I'm gonna say the thing that no one wants to say, which is, employee engagement is absolutely a useful metric to look at. But the problem with employee engagement tools, is they provide you with a dashboard, they do not provide your frontline managers with any of the useful ways to actually take the information within that dashboard, and actually help improve the ways of working within your Oh,

I like it, revealing the underbelly of the employee engagement SAS base.

I say this as someone that sat in an employee engagement company, using the software, and I loved it, and it was always our aim at pecan to get to that next level to get to like dashboard to actions like how do we get to this point where we can help managers develop and grow because we know that they're the ones that have the biggest ability to influence employee engagement within the business, like the data is super clear on that, but actually being able to be like, how do we be prescriptive within these like really precise scenarios for so many people at so many different companies from like, pret and EasyJet as to clients, right, like the needs of those two businesses, in terms of what their managers are going to find useful is pretty diverse right? Now, I can imagine now, if you're an employee engagement company, like pecan, you'd be applying AI and being able to use that much more effectively, to actually then go moosh the actions piece, but yes, the dirty little secret of employee engagement is it doesn't actually help you improve employee engagement. It just helps you measure employee engagement. It just helps you measure it. It doesn't help you improve it. And fundamentally what's free input. So I'd be using Hi, Bob's employee engagement module. I might use culture and if I've got some extra money that I just want that I probably wouldn't an

ATS or not well, I mean, right now, nobody's hiring. But let's assume people are hiring again, which ATS Would you go for.

So there is a pretext there, but I love working for Ashby's clearly come through as like, you know, a great alternative. And people are loving it, the new features that they put in there are really appreciated by so many folks in terms of like the, the AI work and our scheduling, and what they're doing for ease of use for hiring managers. So a lot of folks will look at that pinpoint again, like, that's like another one I'm seeing coming through like a little bit more, and again, increasing in popularity. But if it were me going at a 200 person, company, 100 person, company, 300, somewhere in that range, I'm probably picking one of those three. I know there's greenhouse, of course, which is very popular. But for me, I remember once comparing how many clicks it takes to put a job live on workable versus greenhouse. And for me, you know, when I talked about that walled garden, in the beginning, I'm like, workable is wonderful. Because it took me I can't remember the exact numbers. But let's say for the sake of argument, it was somewhere in the teens. So let's say like 15 clicks to get a job life. Whereas greenhouse took to the level I wanted it to be like 41 clicks to put a job, like, that's

insane. Both are insane. Numbers are like, I thought you're gonna say like three clicks and 10 clicks. But my assumption is workday, super expensive. Yes. In terms of like, ATS, is your going to be going for a luxury? Yeah,

I'd go from one of those three. ATS is like, it's a bit of a luxury like greenhouses expensive, never used to be better. And they just haven't, you know, kind of taken the product that much further forward. SmartRecruiters is a reasonable option, like it's got good pricing levels around it, and, you know, can be good for quite large distributed businesses. But you know, fundamentally, I think that Ashby pinpoint workable selection is what the people would probably want to choose.

And they all cost the same. Are they broadly the same?

They're broadly the same. And it depends how nice they're feeling at any one time. And

how well you negotiate right?

Saying nothing.

Tell me this, then, who in your view is impressing you in terms of product strides, or really quitting, phenomenal experience in 2024 Going forward, so you think about really good feature functionality, really good experiences, who's impressing you right now in terms of progress.

There's three that are really impressing me, so the summer laps, so what they're doing for l&d is just like quite phenomenal, watching a live demo of the CEO create sales, onboarding, based off all of their notion documentation in like a really beautiful multi threaded learning approach. And then him like press the button, it all translate to Japanese. And you're like, of course, there are problems with it. Not everything works perfectly all of the time. But I was really impressed with the strides that they've made with that one. And I think that that will come to dominate the learning creation landscape. And that one, I think what panda were doing, and their approach to performance development is a really good one. What I really love about that is how they take this idea, like when you work in People Ops, often you'll get this quite siloed project and like pieces of work. What they're doing is like connecting that whole like employee journey from onboarding through levelling and progression, like how people's careers grow, giving people like an opportunity to like, see how their capabilities map out closing perception gaps, with managers, using visuals really well to show that it's not about like the performance management side, it's much more about the employee growth journey, and how that will maps to compensation, things like that. So loving what they're doing. I think that that employee journey piece, connected with a basic CRM. Fundamentally for me, that's like the heart of what it actually means to develop and grow in a business. So you kind of suck off everything else. And then the last one is Harriet HR is just a really easy way of taking all the information that you have in a business and being able to get answers quickly as an employee. So it just links into your slack. And you're like, cool, what is on maternity leave policy? How does this work? How many days leave do I have left this year? It just connects everything together. That is what most people want. Most HR questions at the bottom on the service desk level are just those over and over and over again. And actually if you can remove all of that stuff, it makes everyone else licenced life up the chain far more interesting. But

then that also relies on having a repository for

good quality information. Yes.

And then can we go back to rippling the tools you've talked about are interesting, but none of them are the hrs. I know you're a fan of humans.

There aren't many new ones coming through by fundamentally,

I'm really curious about rippling because it was in America, and they had the tightest go to market I've ever experienced where they just call They'll fight me out. Because I did not have enough employees in the US to talk to us. And the fact that we were a UK company, they hadn't sorted out GDPR, they were just like, No amazing discipline for the STRS, to really know that I've never seen another sales, another business be that tight. So well done rippling for executing perfectly on your go to market. So they subsequently have moved into Europe, or at least to the UK. I haven't seen a demo because I left working at that point. But I just thought they were the best idea I had ever seen. What is your feeling, because you did not recommend them as the holy grail of a CRM system.

So I think if you are very international focus, if you're a US focused company with some European employees, and even if you're expanding your model, and where you're where your friends are based, it's great. It lacks some customization around us benefits. But as a global Atrus, and EO our platform, brilliant, it will do your job, it certainly should be would be on most people's lists to go and look at. However, I have heard, and these are anecdotal, there's just surprising amount of numbers of folks who are using it now, over here who are a little bit frustrated with it, including a couple of who were like we tried it, we implemented it. And then we left pretty swiftly afterwards, the typical us moving to European SAS problem, which is Oh, Europe's just Europe. Now, Europe is so many different countries. And when you break it down in HR, it just gets 10,000 times worse. So that is generally what I've heard. And it's a problem Hi, Bob had a while back, and child HR a part two, which is fundamentally, you've got so many different countries, all with so many different policies and approaches and legal requirements for their employees that it's really, really hard to get all of that right, within a platform. Most of the EMRs have, obviously big CS teams who are dealing with a lot of the heavy lifting their and their legal teams and CS teams are the ones sorting that out. It's not part of the platform to solve that all of the time perfectly. Whereas when you're an Atreus, you can't really do that you kind of have to have the power of solving all of these things otherwise, like, what's the point?

What about the New Kids on the Block? So we've got personeel and factorial both seem really interesting, both doing some kind of neat things in the product. What's your take on those two vendors?

Plus, Sonya absolutely is doing some interesting things. The better reviews I've heard are from the mid to Enterprise Client, like small enterprise, shall we say? They don't want to go and spend the, you know, the million bucks minimum contract fee on workday. But they do want something which can deal with, you know, the size of the organisation. They're dealing a lot with maybe like, like internal workflow management, and trying to think about things like utilisation, maybe it's like a large consultancy or something like that. Estonia can do a great job there. But they're like lower end of the market that they're pushing. It's almost like for me with greenhouse, there's so much customization within the platform, that it doesn't make it plug and play and I can just run with it.

We're definitely talking about a Goldilocks situation here. Like you've been the the bamboo of it's too rigid, to the greenhouse. It's too fluid. And it's like, well, who's who has it just right.

That's my my first question to you. What did you want at the time, and I think some folks want huge levels of customization. Like it's important to them for whatever reason, some folks just want to be told that these are the three performance questions that you should ask. And I'm just going to do that from bamboo. Most folks are probably sat in the middle of like, I want enough customization within my field, but not so much. Typing on LinkedIn, like Workday implementation consultant, how many workday implementation consultants are there on LinkedIn, lots, way too many. Anyone who kind of needs some external help to get it up and running is a bit of a red flag.

So one more last stab here on a different category compensation modules, or compensation vendors that are out there as well point solutions. What's your take on that, because long as hrs is are trying to pull in compass part of their suites, some are good, some are not so good. And there's a bunch of point vendors, what do we do there? midmarket tuner people, what do I do?

The problems that we see are three, four years ago, you had Radford, and you had auction. In fact, you would buy one of those datasets, if you want to just pay for Bradfords. And you had a bunch of different locations and you needed some information great if you cheaper and just wanted to use auction impact and upload your data for free. Also great. Now, however, you've got so many different options, equity, Kansa, pay, Ravio, figures, yada, yada, yada, right? And everyone's uploading their data into different things, which means that getting accurate data is really hard, which means that people are buying the amount of times I've seen people be like, Yeah, we have Ravio and figures in Europe. I'm like, How have we got to a situation where you need to buy to SaaS solutions to get to a point of actually getting some insight into compensation. So fundamentally the ideal outcome is that there was one winner who goes and buys all of the others. And then you get all the information in one place. And then you get the most detailed, insightful outcome possible, or maybe a couple of minutes, maybe two or three minutes, where you can be like, okay, cool. I'm not getting gouged on pricing at the same time, the Dun

and Bradstreet, Experian and Expedia situation for compensation. So if we talk about consolidation at a higher level, what I don't understand is why can't it all be consolidated? I just want to buy one tool that does everything. Well, anybody doing that? Well, like who do you think has a good product vision or is looking at a consolidation more broadly, like who would you back to be the HubSpot or now No, not HubSpot on Monday of, of HR tech?

I'm sure someone can do it. I'm sure someone out there between Hi, Bob and personeel, probably I'm going to tuck my bets on those two are going to do the best job of it.

Different question when you're buying hrs ISS solution? What are the gotchas that people typically forget about or don't check in on and the regret, again, quite deeply afterwards? What what are those like top two or three gotchas that make sure you do your DD on?

Corruption? Number one is just security, like doing a deep dive, like speak to a data protection officer, speak to a CIO, think about what are the security features that we have to have? But fundamentally, that's where I see people be like, Oh, actually, this now doesn't work in this country. And I can't use it here. And now, two different things. It happens. The SAS Classic is the thing and actual feature that I can use, or is it a half baked feature that I'm getting a beta of? Or is it something you're telling me that's definitely happening are definitely on the roadmap for the next quarter? And then it's three quarters down the line, and I don't have it. And so

you do end up having to really slow down, think it through an ask, do you integrate with this field? Oh, a custom field? Would that be possible? Or this is our workflow? And this is what we envision? Can you do that? And then they're gonna tell you yes. And it's just either it's a lie, or nobody's thought about it. And I would like to get those warrantied when you buy, like you say, I can do this vision, we warranty that I can do this vision. And I can't, I'm gonna break the contract. And that's fine.

I would like to play a quick word association game here if we actually could, so I'm gonna throw it out a company name. Give me your your one word, response to whatever comes to mind. The first one is rippling.

Pretty good. If I'm in the US Happy Days, I'm a happy person.

Okay, I love that. How about Hi, Bob. Sorry,

adoption? Bamboo. Makes me sad.

Makes me sad?

It does. It makes me so sad. If I wanted my applications to look like MS Paint from Windows 95. Then I would go and like, use MS. For Windows 95. Right like Sorry, Paul user interface designer there, but you're terribly your job.

Persona to functional

Germanic might take over the world. No,

nice. I like that. And last one factorial factorial

interesting option, but seems to be trying to do too many things all at once.

Thank you for playing that game. I know it's a very stressful game to play.

No worries. That's a little bit stressful. Yeah. If

our listeners could take one thing away from our conversation today, what would that be?

Is what are you trying to achieve as a business? Therefore, what are you trying to build as a people team? Therefore what technology do you need to support that strategy, and then ensuring that you get the right technology that suits that strategy and suits the workflow and the processes that are going into that strategy in that plan, and don't throw yourself at shiny things because they look shiny? Sometimes buying the simple thing that does the one thing well, Allah, you know, your humans, etc, is a great way of doing it. Just because everything's got like 50,000 Extra features, doesn't mean that any of them will work. So do your due diligence on that. And yeah, get some warranties.

100% won't all work. Matt, just before we go, you are a font of knowledge. If anybody wants to tap into the font of knowledge that you are, how can they? Or can they at all? Are you just gonna tell everybody go away?

They can? No, no, not at all. Feel free to drop me a message. Anyone can get in touch with me via our website at people collective.io Or you can find me on LinkedIn, Matt Robin, and that's where I tend to hang out the most.

Lovely so thank you, Matt, for joining us on the operations room. If you like what you hear, please subscribe or leave us a comment and we will see you next week.