HR technology – Page 9

November 8, 2019

Symphony Talent Debuts New Composition With Acquisition of SmashFly

Symphony Talent’s acquisition of SmashFly Technologies is being called one of the most significant HR technology deals of 2019. Industry observers note the combined company will serve an estimated 750 companies out of the gate, including a number of Fortune 500 and multinationals.

Symphony Talent announced the transaction Nov. 1, though it didn’t disclose financial terms.

On the surface, the deal brings together two complementary offerings. Symphony Talent is known for its employer-branding and creative services, while SmashFly is regarded for its recruitment marketing and candidate relationship management tools.

In an interview with RecruitingDaily, Symphony Talent CEO Roopesh Nair said the combined company “can really help practitioners create their strategy and accelerate their brand across touchpoints, across channels and audiences.” Among other things, he added, customers will benefit from “a more unified and consistent approach” to talent acquisition.

Ben Slater, vice president of marketing for recruiting platform provider Beamery, said the deal underscored the importance of technology to today’s talent acquisition strategies.

“It’s not enough to have career site and brand collateral. You need functionality for building and nurturing talent pipelines, managing events and campaigns,” he said. “In short, you need a platform to do the heavy lifting once you have developed your employer brand strategy.”

Strategic or Tactical?

Nikki Edwards, principal research analyst at industry researcher NelsonHall, said the acquisition will strengthen Symphony Talent’s market position. Introducing SmashFly’s technology into the company’s mix will result in “a more complete service/tech offering,” she said.

“Service providers are increasingly leveraging technology to deliver a better service, but those service providers are experts in their own field first … and usually experts in technology second,” she observed. In a market crowded with companies offering sophisticated platforms and tools, “it makes business sense for service providers to partner with or acquire companies with the intellectual property they need.”

For Symphony Talent, making such a move is particularly important, said Chad Sowash, an industry consultant and co-host of the recruiting podcast “The Chad & Cheese Podcast.”

In recent years, he explained, the company has struggled with a number of organizational, operational and marketing issues. Symphony Talent “hasn’t done a great job when it comes to letting the market know who the hell they are,” he said. “SmashFly has done a better job.”

On a tactical level, Sowash thinks Symphony Talent acquired SmashFly with its eyes squarely fixed to compete with TMP Worldwide Advertising and Communications. Since January, TMP has purchased social media firm Carve, recruitment tech company Maximum, programmatic recruitment platform Perengo, and employer branding and recruitment marketing firm CKR Interactive. “Symphony had to do something and I think they had to wait to be able to do the right thing,” Sowash said.

In this case, the right thing was not just to acquire SmashFly’s technology but also its customers, revenue and “the engineers who are building SmashFly for the future.”

Having such expertise in-house will be critical to Symphony Talent’s success, Sowash said. However, that success is by no means assured.

“I think this is going to be the point where we either say, ‘This is where Symphony Talent actually took off from the launch pad or it blew up on the launch pad,’ ” he said. “This is all about execution. They have all of the tools, all the connections to be able to make this happen or to fail miserably.”

November 8, 2019June 29, 2023

DailyPay Inks Deal With Kronos to Join Workforce Dimensions Platform

Daily pay benefit provider DailyPay joined the Kronos Inc.’s Workforce Dimensions Technology Partner Network.

According to a Nov. 7 release, through a custom API integration with DailyPay, Kronos can share data that enable DailyPay to calculate each enrolled employee’s available balance and facilitate the instant transfer of funds when an employee requests it.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Employers can now offer DailyPay — a 2019 Workforce Optimas Awards winner in the Innovation category — as part of the burgeoning on-demand pay benefit offerings. According to the release, DailyPay is fully compliant with wage and labor laws in all 50 states and allows employees “the freedom to exert control over the timing of their pay and to feel more secure financially.”
According to the Kronos website, other Workforce Dimensions partners include financial wellness provider Branch, Cornerstone Learning and work opportunity tax credit processor HireCredit.

“We are excited to work with Kronos to provide a life-altering benefit that helps the 78 percent of Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck,” said Jason Lee, CEO of New York-based DailyPay, which was founded in 2015. “Through the Kronos-DailyPay relationship, companies have the opportunity to streamline their payroll process and allow their employees to access the money they’ve earned prior to their next payday.”

Workforce Dimensions from Kronos is described as the “first next-generation workforce management solution. Cloud-native, mobile-native, and powered by artificial intelligence, it delivers real-time analytics to drive in-the-moment decisions to unburden managers from time-consuming, low-value tasks and empower employees with an engaging experience.”

“Workforce Dimensions is built on a completely open and extensible platform, enabling innovative integrations with partners, including DailyPay, that empower employees in ways that simply are not possible with legacy solutions,” said Mike May, senior director, Workforce Dimensions Technology Partner Network, Kronos, in the Nov. 7 release. “Providing a great technology experience not only drives user adoption, but it also helps organizations to engage and retain their workforce.”

November 4, 2019June 29, 2023

Personalization Versus Ease of Use

I recently had coffee with a benefits leader who is implementing a new technology platform for her organization’s employees and spouses. Her scenario is much like that of many of our clients: She works for a big organization with employees all over the United States and in many locations around the world. The company’s benefits and HR programs are complex — and getting more so as it seeks to meet the needs of different employee segments and an increasingly diverse population. Data is used for everything in the organization, and HR is catching up to the rest of the enterprise.

Their goal is to provide a better experience for employees, driven by data. Her team is looking at consolidating all benefits information from existing channels (including the intranet, external sites, vendor sites, email newsletters and more) into a personalized portal.

But she has a lingering concern: As we look to offer employees a highly personalized experience, do we unintentionally make it harder to access benefits information?

This is a critical question. Ease of access and ease of use need to be the highest priority if we are going to get the right people to use their benefits at the right time. It’s also an often-overlooked question when pursuing personalization. And it becomes even more important to consider when you’re using personalization and engagement to drive health strategy. Personalization is among large employers’ top health care initiatives for 2020, according to the National Business Group on Health’s latest survey. Some 26 percent of respondents said they plan to “implement an engagement platform that aggregates point solutions and pushes personalized communications to employees.”

That initiative follows employers’ top three strategies, which are largely focused on changing the health care experience: implementing virtual care solutions, a more focused strategy on high-cost claims, and expanding centers of excellence to include additional conditions.

So, why are personalized tools getting so much attention? Personalized portals and apps are good at doing several important things. They can serve up data-driven content, send just-in-time notifications, and help identify missed opportunities in a very relevant way. They can also deliver recommendations, which helps create the “Amazon” experience so many plan sponsors are looking for.

Amid all this incredible promise, it’s important to remember that these tools can deliver customized content only if and when people use them. By their nature, personalized tools have more access barriers, because all that personal information needs to be protected. It is easy to underestimate the amount of effort it takes to get people to engage frequently with even the most cutting-edge and appealing platforms. You must have a compelling reason to check anything out. You must have an even better reason to go back.

If you’re asking someone to download an app, authenticate with personal information, keep that app up to date, allow notifications, and go back to it frequently, is that actually easy? Each one of those action steps is a specific user behavior that has to be promoted and encouraged.

Think about when you log in to a website and have forgotten your password. Are you always motivated to track it down? Or do you file that for “do later” and move on to something else? We all have a lot of to-do’s and a lot of distractions — especially on our phones.

When you’re considering a personalized app or platform, you need to take into account the ease of access and the amount of resources you’ll need to drive ongoing use.

Of course, we have clever ways to encourage engagement. And this is where we can really use HR’s unique advantages.

First, we can make something so enticing that you can’t resist going there often. The best example of this that I’ve seen recently is a large retailer that puts their employee discount in their benefits engagement app. The only way they can use their discount is to have the app on their phones. You can bet all their employees are using that app.

You can also make the app so critical to an individual’s day-to-day job that using the platform becomes a de facto job requirement. Some large companies have built their HR apps to include core functions like scheduling and time tracking. If you have to use the app every day you work, it’s an ideal channel for serving up key benefits and HR reminders.

There is tremendous promise with personalization. But that promise can only be fulfilled if people have a good experience with personalized tools and use them frequently. It is our job to use all the tools we have to make that desirable — and most importantly, easy.

October 31, 2019June 29, 2023

Must You Tell Employees When You Are Surveilling Their Devices?

It’s unusual these days for an employee not to have a device issued by their employer, or on which they can access their employer’s information — cell phones, tablets, laptops, and other computing devices.

Conventional wisdom (California notwithstanding) is that if the employer owns the device, the employee has zero privacy rights in that device, its use, or the information stored on it.

That conventional wisdom, however, might be changing.

The Federal Trade Commission just announced the settlement of charges it had brought against the developer of certain “stalking” apps.

What is a stalking app? It’s one that runs surreptitiously in the background of a device so that the user of that device does not know that the app is tracking their physical movements and online activities.

In this case, the apps in question “allowed purchasers to monitor the mobile devices on which they were installed without the knowledge or permission of the device’s user.” The apps also came with instructions so that the purchaser could “remove the app’s icon from appearing on the mobile device’s screen so that the device’s user would not know the app was installed on the device.”

Notably, one of the apps, MobileSpy, was specifically marketed to monitor employees.

The Settlement Agreement and Consent Order [pdf] specifically addresses the employment concerns raised by the app.

Prior to the sale or distribution of any Monitoring Product or Service, Respondents must obtain … [a]n express written attestation from the purchaser that it will use the Monitoring Product or Service for legitimate and lawful purposes by authorized users. The express written attestation must state the legitimate and lawful purpose for which the purchaser is using the device, which may include only the following: … 2. Employer monitoring an employee who has provided express written consent to being monitored….

In other words, while the FTC brought this case against the company that developed, marketed, and sold the stalking apps, the settlement specifically prohibits that company from selling the apps to an employer unless the employer certifies, in writing, that it will only use the apps to monitor employees who have provided express written consent to being monitored.

Legally speaking, this development is very interesting. The law is figuring out how to catch up to advancements in technology.

Practically speaking, I’m wondering why employers aren’t already obtaining consent before tracking their employees. In my mind, this issue raises a fundamental question of the type of employer you want to be, and the type of relationship you want to foster with your employees.

Do you want to be an employer that is open and honest with your employees that operates on trust? Or do you want to be an employer that slinks around behind your employees’ backs and breeds dishonesty and distrust? I know how I answer this question. How you answer it says a lot about who you are as an organization.

October 22, 2019June 7, 2022

Hourly Worker Burnout Is a Major Problem. Stop Overlooking It.

The CareerCast stress report analyzes 11 factors that represent the most common stressors including deadlines, public scrutiny and physical demands.

When you hear the word “burnout” in the context of the workforce, a specific image comes to mind. You might picture a lawyer or consultant logging 80 hours a week and managing high-intensity clients, pushed over the edge by a messy court case or a business trip gone wrong.

You’re probably less likely to picture the service worker giving you your burger and fries or health care provider caring for your aging parents at home, overcome by prolonged periods of mild stress. However, shift workers are equally, or perhaps even more, prone to burnout than corporate professionals.

As technology and automation advance to simplify the lives of skilled laborers, the needs of low-wage hourly workers are forgotten. Corporations feel pressured to increase productivity, which creates a chronically stressful environment for workers who are on the frontlines dealing with customers every day.

The Wave of Burnout in Hourly Workforces

Burned out employees are now commonplace in industries requiring an hourly workforce. White-collar workers may take certain job elements for granted, such as predictable hours and flexibility over where they work for the day. But these perks rarely exist for hourly shift workers. Shift managers receive pressure from higher-ups to build schedules that maximize profits and minimize the number of employees needed on a shift, meaning schedules promote high stress and often differ from week to week.

Erratic scheduling is made worse by chronic understaffing, thanks to low unemployment – ultimately leading to increased demands on the existing workforce. For the first time ever in the U.S., the number of open jobs has been higher than the number of people looking for work for 17 straight months. Low-skilled workers such as nurses and restaurant workers are in the highest demand as more people go to college and more baby boomers reach retirement.

This has led hourly workers to form different relationships with their work. For once, low-skilled workers have leverage in the job market and may be inclined to find new workplaces if their own current conditions are not optimal. In July, 3.6 million people quit their jobs – the highest number ever in a single month.

Employers should be feeling more heat than ever to improve work conditions and worker satisfaction. Doing so needs to start with empowering your workforce through better management practices that give employees control and recognition. Using a digital workplace is a powerful, cost-effective way to ensure your workers don’t burn out.

Leveraging Digital Workplace Tools to Prevent Burnout

Promoting worker engagement can be the difference between burned out workers on the verge of quitting and satisfied employees. Digital workplace tools enable managers to spend more time engaging with customers and employees and give back some of the power frontline workers lack. By optimizing these areas with new technology, you can set up your workforce and customers for lasting success.

Keep communication fluid. Just as it’s important for workers to receive clear communication from higher-ups, it is crucial for managers to accept feedback from those working the frontline. An internal communications platform simplifies the process for getting in touch with employees and opens up opportunities for your workforce to connect, share and receive important information. These tools can also boost retention by ensuring that employees receive the recognition they need to stay satisfied through measures like badges, gamified leaderboards and mobile communication.

Allow agency in scheduling. Burnout among hourly workers is often attributed to stress over scheduling, particularly in industries where employees may not know their hours for the week until the day before. This is exacerbated by paper schedules that hinder last-minute changes. A digital workplace allows employees to request time off and swap shifts with coworkers directly, giving them a healthier work-life balance and a more predictable schedule.
Create opportunities for upskilling. Providing ongoing training to build new skills is an excellent way to ensure employees feel satisfied at work. Unfortunately, it’s often neglected because it can be time-consuming to build and deliver, and therefore costly. Digital tools enable employers to deploy low-cost, personalized training across your company to boost engagement and productivity.

Though retention and workplace management seem trickier than ever, employers are not powerless against the labor shortage, nor the wave of burnout. Instead, use this as an opportunity to stand out as an excellent employer by taking your management processes to the next level. Doing so positions you as the upstanding employer that workers will turn to when another has driven them to burn out.

October 7, 2019June 29, 2023

Google Cloud Hires McInnis-Day as New VP of HR

Brigette McInnis-Day has been named Google Cloud’s new vice president of HR.

Brigette McInnis-Day, vice president of HR, Google Cloud. — Brigette McInnis-Day, vice president of HR, Google Cloud

Bringing over 20 years’ experience, McInnis-Day previously worked as chief operations officer and head of the digital HR strategy and transformation teams at SAP Successfactors, one of the world’s largest cloud-based human capital management providers.

As COO, she defined and implemented business strategies that were needed to achieve sustainable growth and customer satisfaction across SAP Successfactors’ largest cloud organization. She was committed to establishing the right goals, culture and vision, and bringing them to life to effectively support 6,500-plus global customers.

While managing board level HR and digital transformation strategies, McInnis-Day also led global organizational change and redesign and consulted senior level executives. According to a press release from Google, she enjoys amplifying employee experiences, revamping compensation elements and stimulating people development. She is also passionate about working to build cultures that promote women and early talents in leadership, diversity and inclusion, pay equality and digital transformation, the release stated.

Aside from the workplace, McInnis-Day is also an author, speaker and contributor for several publications, including the World Economic Forum Agenda, Fortune, Forbes, HRExecutive and other innovation forums. She enjoys spending her free time with her family, and describes herself as a travel and fitness enthusiast, the press release stated.

Google Cloud is a suite of public cloud computing services offered by the search engine giant. It includes a variety of hosted services for compute, storage and application development that run on Google hardware. Google Cloud can be accessed by software developers, cloud administrators and other business IT professionals.

Also read: Taking a Page From the Gig Economy to Ease the Recruiting Process

As stated on its website, “Google Cloud is widely recognized as a global leader in delivering secure, open, intelligent, and transformative enterprise cloud platform.”

Taking on her new position at Google Cloud, McInnis-Day will continue to lead large-scale, global teams and help individuals succeed through innovation by overseeing HR with a focus on acquiring and developing talent and shaping the culture to drive business growth and transformation.

The release noted that she is looking forward to playing an active role among the growing Google Cloud talent pool.

September 24, 2019June 29, 2023

Google Hire Is Fired

Applicant tracking systems providers breathed a small sigh of relief in September when Google announced it was officially shutting down Google Hire, the cloud-based applicant tracking system that the search-engine giant launched barely two years ago.

It’s a fitting end to a product that was never a good fit for Google’s portfolio of solutions, said Othamar Gama Filho, CEO of recruitment marketing automation platform Talentify. “I was more surprised when they launched it than when they ended it.”

Google Hire promised to simplify the hiring process for recruiters. By utilizing Google’s powerful search capabilities, open API environment and G Suite tools, including Gmail and Google Calendar, recruiters would be able to more easily find and communicate with candidates, and schedule interviews. At least that was the pitch.

But in reality it didn’t offer a lot to make it stand out in an already crowded market. “The global ATS market is small compared to what Google is used to,” Gama Filho said. It’s projected to be a $2.34 billion by 2026, which may be exciting for a burgeoning tech startup, but is hardly worth the attention of a company that generates billions of dollars in revenues every year.

Google also never explained how the global platform would accommodate the unique data privacy regulations in every country where it was offered. Gama Filho noted that Google is already facing antitrust investigations in the European Commission for its Google for Jobs app, which could have chilled its interest in the recruiting space all together.

The real truth is Google Hire never found it customer base. “A lot of ATS platforms integrate with G-Suite, so there was not a lot to differentiate the offering,” he said.

It also wasn’t a good fit for Google’s business model, said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst for Constellation Research. “Google never does anything in business apps. They can make a lot more money attracting the HCM SaaS vendors to their platform than competing with them.”

Mueller also points to Google Hire’s origin story as a potential harbinger of its early demise.

Google Hire was originally developed at Bebop, a startup tech firm led by Diane Greene, which Google acquired for $380 million in 2015. As part of that acquisition, Greene was brought in to head up Google’s cloud business.

Greene was lauded as a veteran of the enterprise software marketplace, and Google leaders believed she could help them compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

They were right. During her four-year tenure (she left earlier this year), Google Cloud increased its revenues to $1 billion per quarter. While it is still third in the public cloud marketplace, it’s closing fast on Amazon and Microsoft.

What does that have to do with Google Hire? Many believe buying Bebop was just Google’s way to get Greene onboard. “But they still had to show stakeholders that they didn’t waste the acquisition,” Mueller said. So they kept it on the books for a few years, used it to showcase how their technology could help recruiters. “But never really did anything with it.”

For customers of Google Hire, the good news is that it won’t be officially shut down until September 2020, giving them almost a full year to find a replacement. Google has also generously agreed to keep it running for no additional fees.

The lesson to be learned from the rapid rise and fall of Google Hire is that nothing lasts forever, Mueller said. “Especially when comes in the cloud.”

September 10, 2019June 29, 2023

What Color Choice Can Do for Your Workforce

Color choice can help enhance the mood of an office setting.

Boosting productivity and wellness is a challenge for which organizations are looking to more creative solutions.

Color choice of the office is one relatively simple yet impactful tool that organizations from hospitality to tech are implementing to elevate the level of productivity, wellness and experience in their spaces.

“People are starting to see the psychological effects that color has on us, especially in the workplace,” said PPG Color Design Manager Vanessa Peterson. “It can really spark certain emotions and spark certain responses from people because they’re integrated into a space for so many hours.”

This reaction, Peterson said, has to do with what certain colors communicate in a space and how that communication works with other elements of office design to create an overall atmosphere. For this reason, blue is often chosen over others for interior design.

“Many of the colors that we find in nature, specifically blue, have caused a lot of really great health and mental benefits because of its serene and peaceful nature,” Peterson said. “It reminds people of the sky, or it reminds people of the ocean, in a very calm and tranquil space.”

Even within the color spectrum of blue, slight variations in shade can communicate different things, which in turn affects how people might feel in a space.

“One of the great things about blue is that for the most part, each version of blue has an identity of its own but also reflects the idea of either calmness or wellness. That idea of wellness can be integrated into an atmosphere where it gives you this feeling of power and it can feel very regal,” Peterson said. For example, a stronger blue such as cobalt is often used in sports companies’ marketing and darker shades of navy that exude a sense of maturity are used by universities.

The design industry is also seeing a heightened interest in color choices for products, Peterson said.

“Not only are you having desk and wall colors and furnishings go into this more serene setting, but you’re having tech companies do this with their products as well,” she said. “They’re going into a lot more beiges and a lot more soft corals, mints and blues, even into the actual technology to give that overall feel.”

The search for the equilibrium of office color and design is also about more than just improving productivity. Creating a sense of serenity in a space that people go to everyday can improve mood, too.

A study conducted by the University of Texas found that more bland colors such as beige, gray and white induced feelings of sadness and depression, particularly among women. This was in contrast to colors like blue and pale green, which produced feelings of productivity and peace in study participants.

PPG also named “Chinese Porcelain” its color of the year, which is a rich, natural blue and was selected with the idea of serenity and clarity in mind.

“With everything that we’ve been seeing happen socially and culturally around the world, we really felt that that shade of blue emoted that sense of serenity that people are looking for in this day and age,” Peterson said. “They want to have that sense of wellness, that sense of peace and they want to see a color and feel something that’s outside of that idea of intensity or anything that would make you feel disturbed.”

August 15, 2019June 29, 2023

Venture Capital Funding Frenzy Over HR Technology on Record Pace

If you haven’t started your own super-successful HR technology company it’s not too late.

Venture capitalists’ love affair with HR tech firms is on track to break records as they dole out millions of dollars to entrepreneurs who promise to transform the human resources landscape. According to HRWins by LaRocque LLC, venture firms invested $1.741 billion in HR tech companies in the first quarter of 2019 and $1.448 billion in the second quarter.

The first quarter alone was “significantly more than any quarter in 2018, and $677 million more than we tracked in all of 2017,” according to LaRocque. And Jason Corsello, founder and general partner of Acadian Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm specializing in the future of work, predicts that HR tech deals will hit $5 billion in 2019.

The continued investment interest in this space makes sense. Despite years of VC investment into promising HR tech companies, there are still a lot of problems that current vendors haven’t solved, like:

How can we recruit strong candidates when unemployment rates are so low?
Why does our candidate experience still lag despite our cool new interactive recruiting page, YouTube recruiting channel and automated email response tools?
Can I hire freelancers instead of full-time staff, and where do I find them?
How are we supposed to reskill an entire workforce when we don’t know what skills they are going to need?

These are big, difficult questions and VCs are eager to support entrepreneurs who claim to have the answers particularly because the market is strong, said David Mallon, chief analyst at Bersin, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “Companies have set aside healthy budgets for the right solution and VCs sense that there is money to be spent.”

TA and Training Lead the Pack

This year’s deals are tipping heavily toward recruiting technology firms. “Talent acquisition is a massive problem in organizations today,” said Corsello.

This year alone Jobcase, a social media recruiting platform for blue-collar workers, secured $100 million; Built In, a Chicago-based tech recruiting and media platform received $22 million; and AllyO, an artificial intelligence conversational recruitment platform received $45 million.

The current spending spree follows at least a half-decade of heady HR tech investment. Funding and deal activity hit new highs in 2015, with firms landing $2.4 billion across 383 deals. That follows similar high rates of investment in 2013 and 2014 alike.

Also read: Venture Capital’s Love Affair With HR Tech Rolls On

This year, start-ups offering solutions to find and manage gig workers are also gaining a lot of attention because “no one has figured out how to manage the entire workforce yet,” Corsello said. He pointed to Jobble, Sense, and Instawork — all gig recruiting platforms that secured healthy VC deals in the past few months. “It’s a huge area of interest.”

Skill development is also a hot area as companies attempt to prepare for the “future of work.” The biggest deal of 2019 is Coursera, the online learning platform that offers degrees and certificates, which secured $103 million in April to push its value past $1 billion. Other learning and development companies are drawing attention and investment, though this space has been less innovative, said Mallon. “We still need a philosophical shift in how we think about developing people before the technology can catch up.”

That’s not stopping VCs from investing in this space, though a lot of these deals still feel like investors throwing money at the problem to see what sticks. Mallon points to past investments in companies offering MOOCs — massive online open courses — and microlearning formats. “It wasn’t because they were so effective as learning tools,” he said. It was about trying new solutions.

And even the biggest deals shouldn’t be seen as proof that this technology will be disruptive. “A lot of companies are still only tackling the easy stuff,” said Chris Havrilla, vice president of HR technology and solution provider strategy at Bersin, Deloitte Consulting LLP. Whether it is high-volume recruiting platforms or chunky content training apps, these tools may solve problems, but they aren’t reinventing the workflow — “at least not yet,” she said.

Mallon believes innovations will come sooner in talent acquisition than in learning and development, and he expects VCs to continue investing across this space.

While not all of these VC investments will pay off, HR leaders shouldn’t be afraid to experiment, added Corsello. He suggests earmarking 20 percent of their budget to pilot new solutions. “You can test software at a relatively low level of risk to figure out what works for you.”

HR tech is in dire need of innovation, which is driving venture capitalists to pour big money into the space. But pure venture capital firms like Acadian Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz aren’t the only ones making these deals. A number of enterprise software firms, including Salesforce, Cornerstone OnDemand, Workday and Randstad, are getting into the VC game, investing millions of dollars into promising start-ups to bolster innovation.

“Most are using it as a hedge strategy,” said Corsello. While these are still venture capital deals and not acquisitions, companies may invest in two or three start-ups with similar solutions to see which ones they may eventually want to acquire. It’s a third alternative to the build or buy model for innovation, he said. “They are taking an ‘invest, watch and acquire later’ approach.”

While some entrepreneurs may balk at investment from a software company, viewing it as an early stage acquisition, it can be a benefit. Corsello pointed to Workday’s recent investment in talent acquisition firm Beamery, which generated a lot of speculation that it was a precursor to an acquisition. “Some companies don’t want to be aligned with a single vendor, but that deal gave Beamery a lot of exposure to Workday’s customers,” he said.

These deals are also good news for companies seeking new innovations to address their talent acquisition, training and employee engagement issues. “All of this interest indicates that there is a lot of innovation happening,” Corsello said. “HR executives should be paying attention.”