The top disruptors were crowned at the HRO Today Forum in Philadelphia.
By Debbie Bolla
For the last four years, HRO Today has been recognizing disruptive technology in human resources operations with its annual TekTonic Awards. Our categories cover the full gamut of HR outsourced services including HRMS, learning, social media, talent management, vendor management, and payroll. We also honor an overall winner for a solution that’s impact reaches far beyond innovation.
To select our 2013 TekTonic winners, HRO Today magazine identified top providers throughout the HR industry and solicited nominations through a Web-based research tool for each category. After submissions were received, the HRO Today staff conducted research and read submitted documentation to determine the winners.
HRMS Suite Winner
Solution: HeartBeat
Provider: SilkRoad
The Scoop: A cloud-based HRMS platform, HeartBeat helps HR teams overcome the hurdle of manual payroll, employee data, compliance, and benefits administration by empowering employees to take ownership of their own personal information. HeartBeat is a centralized platform and universal standard for collecting and securely handling all HR information, whether an employer has 50 people in a single office, or thousands of employees around the globe. With HeartBeat, employers have a unified front-end and system of record for all HR processes and data including payroll; seamless benefit plan enrollment and admin with easy integration to more than 100 employee benefits carriers’ systems and multiple plan options (medical, dental, vision, flex spending, 401K, life insurance); employee self-service features that allow employees to manage their personal information, benefits and time-off requests, alleviating HR’s duties; electronic form submission to cut down on time and paper resources; automated compliance with EEO, Sarbanes Oxley, and FSLA; and configurable workflows and reporting.
Customers have the option to use Heartbeat as a standalone platform, snap it on to their current third-party providers, or implement it as the HRMS component within SilkRoad’s entire Life Suite of products.
Learning Winner
Solution: Catapult™ Rapid LCMS
Provider: Raytheon
The Scoop: Catapult™ is a fully integrated web-based training development platform that rapidly authors content and facilitates its translation and localization. The key to effective multilingual training is developing a standardized course master that ensures consistency across the entire training population while accommodating appropriate cultural variation for local audiences. Too much standardization ignores the importance of local culture and language differences. Too much variation from one language version to the next sacrifices the key messaging and complicates course maintenance resulting in significant added cost. So, the challenge becomes finding an approach that delivers the benefits of localization without making it cost prohibitive.
Catapult’s Standardized Variation™ approach introduces language variants of a course to deliver the perfect balance between localization and cost. Catapult™ eliminates the need to have multiple courses for multiple language versions. Instead, one master course contains all the elements common across languages, such as key messaging and content sequencing. Then within that course master, a language variant can be created for a page to accommodate the localization of specific graphics and animations, and the language translation. As part of the course master, any changes to the master course will automatically update the language variants and trigger workflow to retranslate any page of the course affected by the update. In this way, course maintenance for multilingual courses is significantly reduced. Standardized Variation™ enables content development teams to reduce multilingual development and deployment costs by more 30 percent.
The learners benefit too. Because Catapult’s Standardized Variation™ approach keeps both the English master course and all its language versions together in the same course, Catapult™ is the only platform in the industry to produce a truly SCORM conformant multilingual course for the learner. While in the web-based training course, the learner can choose their desired language from a pop-down list and see the entire course immediately displayed in that language.
HR Social Media Winner
Solution: BranchOut
The Scoop: BranchOut is the largest professional networking service on the Facebook platform. The service leverages users’ social graphs and networks to help them find jobs, sales leads, and new hires. It is the largest professional community on Facebook with more than 30 million users in over 200 countries.
Talent Management/Recruiting Winner
Solution: Big Data for HR
Provider: eQuest
The Scoop: eQuest’s Big Data for HR is an innovative new service that provides critical capabilities to HR for the first time. Big Data for HR shifts and transforms talent acquisition from a reliance on hindsight and trial-and-error to one that provides recruiters with highly accurate forecast capabilities and actionable insights that are derived from predictive analytics. It can provide a sourcing strategy forecast by analyzing performance of job board postings to identify which boards will deliver the best results for employers’ specific recruiting campaigns. Because of the accuracy of the sourcing strategy forecast, recruiters are able to know in advance how to optimally allocate their time, money and staff for each open position. As a result, the cost savings from targeted sourcing strategies allow saved dollars to go to additional recruiting initiatives and resources can carry a greater recruiting load. Timely hiring requires timely recruiting, which comes from a well-thought-out recruitment marketing campaign. The forecast provides competitive advantage because companies can now know how to source the talent they need faster.
For the first time, Big Data for HR provides additional analytics that enable recruiters to benchmark and adjust their recruitment marketing strategy against their competitors in real time. Recruiters can make real-time adjustments to improve their employment brand through the brand traction index, a measure that reveals how the company’s employment brand is performing in specific labor markets and for specific jobs compared to their competitors in real-time. Not only can employers make adjustments to their employment brand, they can also make adjustments to their sourcing strategy in real-time to stay ahead of competitors.
Vendor Management Winner
Solution: StaffTrack
Provider: Staff Management | SMX
The Scoop: StaffTrack is Staff Management | SMX’s proprietary workforce and vendor management software. StaffTrack provides full lifecycle management for contingent workers and essential vendor management functionality. StaffTrack’s workforce management functionality not only enables applicant tracking and candidate management but also provides advanced scheduling and job-sharing capabilities, workforce performance analytics and comprehensive drill down capabilities for interactive auditing to the associate level. This granular workforce management is unique to the industry and essential to high-volume users of contingent labor.
Payroll Winner
Solution: Dayforce HCM
Provider: Ceridian
The Scoop: Ceridian’s Dayforce HCM solution is the only solution on the market that offers HR, payroll—including tax filing—benefits, time and attendance, and scheduling as a single application. At the heart of Dayforce HCM is a new SaaS HR/payroll solution. Dayforce Payroll features quick entry of time and pay; configurable audits; real-time fix and preview; tax record updates; self-service access to earnings; user-defined reports and embedded analytics; and mobile access to earnings statements.
Overall TekTonic Winner
Solution: Social Distribution
Provider: iCIMS
The Scoop: iCIMS Talent Platform’s most recent breakthrough innovation is Social Distribution, which is a power-up to one of iCIMS’ core products, Recruit. This particular product allows HR professionals to reach out to a larger talent pool through the use of social media. With Social Distribution, a user is able to have a branded Facebook page with the addition of a jobs tab. When a candidate clicks on the jobs tab they are redirected to a page with the organization’s job openings. If interested, the candidate has the opportunity to engage with the brand by following an organization’s blogs, news, events, and more. Once a candidate is ready to apply, they can click ‘apply’, get redirected to the organization’s career page, and start the application process.
Aside from Facebook, users can organize all their social media outlets, such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ on one platform. From their iCIMS account, customers can schedule which job postings get posted on certain social media sites and how often they are showcased. Furthermore, employees of an organization can utilize the application, allowing them to showcase job openings to their own social networks. By having employees post job openings to their personal networks, employee referrals are increased; saving an organization time and money sourcing and recruiting top talent.
Users also have the ability to pull reports that track where the candidates came from, whether it is from a certain social media site or a referral from an employee. iCIMS’ internal reporting recently showed that 20 percent of customer’s candidates came from the Social Distribution power-up.
