A while back, I had the opportunity to speak with HR Smart, a talent management software vendor and service provider. As with many vendors, HR Smart has had applicant tracking since 1996 and they have been slowly building a suite of talent products around that ever since. The conversation intrigued me mostly because they have taken a bit of a different approach to their software development than many of the other vendors.
At the core of the HR Smart’s offering is philosophy. Rather than purchasing many of the talent components, they have elected to build each module on their own. This has good and bad that comes with it. The bad first: if you have to develop everything on your own, it’s possible that you have slower development times than your competitors, and correlating to that, at any given moment, you might have a bit less functionality. I haven’t actually seen the product to compare it with others I know, so take that one with a grain of salt.
The good is that you have better control over product direction giving you much better integration. Instead of cobbling together disparate applications with different table structures and standards, you can build the thing to “interoperate” from the very beginning. Other vendors have spent a lot of time and money integrating applications over the last few years, and one could argue that almost as much time was spent integrating as HR Smart spent developing. R&D should theoretically be easier as time goes on since each additional module has a core base of code to work off of.
The really good, is that if you have built the entire suite from the ground up, instead of cobbling together processes and trying to make them connect at logical places, you can design end to end processes and workflow. What this should get the HR buyer and customer is perhaps a lower emphasis on feature functionality and a greater emphasis on great processes. I’m definitely not going to say that other vendors’ processes don’t work, and I can’t say that HR Smart’s is any better, but from a theoretical and philosophical perspective, the story is pretty good so far.
One of the things I loved was in their recruiting process. HR Smart described to me an algorithm they had built that would automatically track recruiter and source effectiveness after hire. This could be applied to a new requisition, performance reviews, etc. This is the holy grail of HR technology – not to just improve process, but to assist in the diagnosis and shaping of the future process.
So far, HR Smart has some good partnerships out there and I’m surprised that I didn’t know more about them. For example, they run Monster.com’s applicant tracking functionality. I like organizations with good product, but I like them even better when the philosophy around how they deliver product and service is right on. They should be another fun company to watch.
