These tech products do what they should do: make life easier.
 

By Kyle Lagunas 
 
 
 
From mergers and acquisitions to a thriving startup community in human resources and recruiting software, the last year has seen a lot of innovation. Social programs, mobile apps, and predictive analytics are what’s hot in transformative HR technology.
 
 
While many new products are certainly “cool,” HR practitioners, recruiters, and business leaders are most interested in technologies that make their jobs easier. Based on candid conversations with industry analysts and in-the-trenches professionals—plus a few lunch-table meet-ups—I’ve put together a list of the products that do just that. Here are the bee’s knees of HR technology.
 
 
 
 
 
1. What it is: Wowzer is a video interviewing application that makes it easy for recruiters to build an interview with recorded questions, and lets candidates record responses on their own schedule, cutting out the more time-consuming aspects of candidate screening.
 
 
How it works: Recruiters can create interviews from one page by click and recording interview questions or drag and dropping for previously recorded questions. Interviews can be sent in batches, and deadlines can be set for candidate responses. Recorded interviews can be reviewed, rated, and shared with hiring managers and recruiters.
 
What really impressed me with Wowzer is its recently released mobile app for Apple iOS devices. For recruiters and hiring managers, the same review, rate, and share functionality has been cleanly adapted to the mobile platform. For candidates, the app is especially handy. Because cellular service can be spotty, the Wowzer app downloads interviews to your phone, so you can complete the interview offline.
 
Why it’s valuable: Deloitte Mexico realized 85 percent cost savings for prescreening after switching to Wowzer, so it’s safe to say that video recruiting tools are worth your consideration. But it’s Wowzer’s focus on candidate experience that sets them apart from the herd. Clear instructions and helpful tips put candidates at ease, educating them on the process along the way. And at the end of each interview, candidates have a chance to share feedback.
 
 
2. What it is: Using fully configurable surveys and exit interviews, Murmur by CultureAmp offers insights into employee engagement. Murmur delivers data collected in a customizable infographic dashboard, providing line managers and executives with actionable information.
 

What it does: Murmur’s straightforward interface is designed to make surveys quick and easy for employees, while also gathering valuable information on engagement and morale. Surveys can be completed on the web, or on an iPad or smartphone.
 
Feedback on your leaders, your culture, and your people can be filtered by any demographic, and management can drill down to see response variances based on team, department, or company wide. Managers can customize dashboards to focus on up to five engagement drivers such as management styles, recognition, and transparency.
 
 
Why it’s valuable: Murmur designed its platform to take the heavy lifting out of gathering feedback, and its ease of use is attractive to employees. It’s a powerful and useful tool for managers, because it delivers data on engagement and turnover through infographics.
 
 
3. What it is: Entelo is a candidate-sourcing tool with powerful social activity analytics. Entelo’s search algorithm digs deep into the areas of the Web where candidates are showing off their work to find high-quality candidates.
 
 
How it works: Entelo’s engine looks beyond keywords in a candidate profile to find a proven track record of clout and ability online. It indexes activity in professional communities—such as GitHub, StackOverflow, Dribble, and GrabCAD—and gauges a candidate’s demonstrated expertise in relevant competencies and skills.
 
 
Entelo also looks for signals that passive candidates might be likely to consider a new opportunity. For instance, it looks for recent updates to a candidate’s online profiles, or merger and acquisition activity at his employer. Recruiters can also apply filters for minimum tenure and specific schools. They can also exclude founding members of startups, who are unlikely to jump ship.
 
Why it’s innovative: Entelo’s algorithm tracks more than 70 variables to identify potential movers, and its application of predictive analytics is impressive. Also, by aggregating candidates’ social data in one location, recruiters spend less time tracking it down manually and more time getting quality candidates in the door.
 
 
4. What it is: Silkroad Point is a talent management platform that fuses onboarding, learning, career management, and performance management with social technology. While some talent management tools treat social data as an add-on feature, Point incorporates it throughout its platform to measure employee activity and influence.
 
 
How it works: Influence is a valuable aspect of talent management: Influential individuals get recognition, managers identify high-potential employees, and employees have experts to whom they can reach out. While offering many standard talent management functions (onboarding, learning, performance management), Point also tracks 20 indicators to graph an individual’s expertise in various skills–and makes influence profiles highly visible in the organization.
 
 
New employees looking for an overview of product offerings, or project managers building a new team of experts, can search Point for influencers in the organization. And the more influential an employee, the more likely he or she will appear in a search for relevant skills and competencies.
 
Point also enables employees to connect with the people they need to work with to get their jobs done. From day one, new employees connect with coworkers and join relevant groups as a part of the onboarding process. Employees looking to build skills can search for experts in the company. And aspiring employees can network with coworkers who share similar career paths.
 
Why it’s valuable: Point does two things very well. First, it simultaneously encourages the sharing of learning content and strengthening of social connections within the organization, which enables employees to take a more active role in learning and career development. It also helps managers with performance management by providing visual representations of employees’ activity and contributions outside of their job descriptions.
 
 
Kyle Lagunas is HR analyst at Software Advice, a company that reviews human resources software and reports on technology, trends, and best practices. He can be reached at kdlagunas@softwareadvice.com. Follow his blog (blog.softwareadvice.com) and twitter feed (@KyleLagunas).
 

Tags: Contributors, Enabling Technology

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