The annual HR Technology Conference and Expo is a lot what the “Speech From the Throne” must have been like during the middle ages when the reigning monarch would lay out the condition of the nation and decree the agenda going forward. Read into this opening however you choose. All politics aside, this is an important event and really does serve to illuminate the trends and trendsetters in the HR Technology industry.

This year I attended the event specifically to connect with partners, to strengthen alliances, and to meet new people.  And, while I didn’t have a lot of free time, I did get a chance to wander the expo floor, mingle in the press room for a bit, and towards the end of the show, just sit in the hall, observe and listen.

What happens in Vegas never really stays in Vegas.  Here are some of my takeaways from this year’s conference.

On the lighter side

1. Viva Las Vegas. Ok, I personally both fear and loath “The Vegas”. It’s not a place for those of us with little self control. But, it is the perfect venue for an industry conference. It’s designed to get in and out of easily. It’s relatively inexpensive and there are plenty of places to meet, greet, eat and be entertained.  The accessibility of the venue allowed me to cram in more meetings than I thought possible. Step into a lounge or a semi-quiet corner (there is no silence in Vegas) and you could get a private 30 minutes with that important someone.

2. Free Wi-Fi or rather Wi-Fi free. This is one of my only logistical gripes about the event. The availability of public Wi-Fi was a joke. I couldn’t get an email in or out over the free Wi-Fi brought to us by ADP (clearly not ADP’s fault) let alone try to demo Newton ( our applicant tracking software).  If I were ADP I would have been steaming mad that I sponsored free internet access and it ended up being a huge failure.  Given that just about every product at this year’s show is delivered over the internet, the organizers should have ensured that there was a big honkin’ pipe running to the conference.

3. You are What You Schwag.  I am still sort of amazed by conference schwag. I guess I don’t really believe that vendors are going to lure, or even start a conversation with their next customer by offering free Smarties and flashing key chains. If you do feel schwag is still necessary, why not raffle off an iPad or Kindle Fire? Give away something that won’t end up as a chew toy or as instant landfill. For more on the state of schwag, read William Tincup’s most recent contribution to Fist Full of Talent.

The meat.

4.Get Ready for the Suite wars. I read one analyst’s review of the conference this week in which he predicts that suite adoption is in the “very early innings”. I agree. However, this space is definitely going to get more interesting over the coming months and years.

I detected a sense of urgency amongst the traditional suite vendors as many are gearing up for a multi-front war.  The talent management vendors have gone on the offensive and are quickly encroaching on the more traditional HRIS vendors’ turf. Where they were once  partners, now many camps are leery and concerned that they may be sleeping with their enemies.  I predict competition for the same seats is going to get really heated as more vendors start extending their functionality in order to address the middle of the talent chain.

5. On Consolidation: the Writing is in the Cloud. There was quite a bit of talk and speculation last week about M&A activities in the HR Tech industry.  I believe this will continue to be driven by the aforementioned suite vendors and their fight to compete across the talent chain. It’s clear that several vendors have realized that they only have a few core modules that are in their suites that are complete features. And, they’ve realized that in their race to claim “we have that too” (I saw one group wearing shirts that said this) they’ve shipped some pretty “thin” modules.

More specifically, I predict that there will be strategic acquisitions made in the talent management space as most of the major suite vendors are pretty lean on both the very front (talent acquisition/recruiting) and late stages of the talent chains (secession planning).  Given the target customer size of many of the suites( mid to upper-mid market), I am guessing that the most demand will be for talent management (performance, review, retention) applications that come later in the talent chain. Plus, as companies like Successfactors close in on the middle of the talent chain and gear up for a full confrontation with the HRIS establishment, the suites will continue to look for opportunities at the beginning and end of the talent chain (ATS and Performance respectively).

Finally, I want to give a special shout out to our partner OneSource VHR, the exclusive reseller of Workday for the mid-market.  Thanks for letting me hang around your booth.  You make the Newton team feel like part of your team. We are grateful.

PS: OneSource VHR is hiring. Click here for a list of their openings.

Aside from some minor (but annoying) technical difficulties that occurred as a result of a data center migration (yes, we admit to these things and fix them right the first time), June was the best month ever at Newton Software.

Things are really coming together. Newton adoption rates are through the roof. This is a testament to Steve’s team designing the product to be easy for everyone to use. Companies that never envisioned having hiring managers use an ATS are adding dozens a month. Businesses that used to accept paper applications are using Newton to go digital with our customizable employment applications. And, we’ve partnered with a company that offers pre-employment screening tools, integrating their behavioral testing products into Newton creating a seemless experience for applicants and a clean applicant stream for businesses.

Here are some other June highlights.

• We released over 50 enhancements to the product this month.
• We signed up a record number of customers including some high-profile brands.
• Interest in Newton has never been stronger. More people contacted us this month than ever before. And, we are receiving referrals every week. This is a great sign.
• We were chosen as having the best technology, functionality, and usability in a competition that pitted us against some really established vendors in the applicant tracking space.
• We established 2 new strategic partnerships that we’ll announce in a couple of weeks.

Needless to say, we have quite a bit going on. The other day, Steve and I were talking about customers and the topic of where our customers are located came up.  I told him we have customers in places like North Dakota, Utah, New Mexico and up and down both coasts.  I don’t think he realized how geographically dispersed our clients actually are.  Wait until we hop the pond!

Steve likes maps so the marketing team built him a map of all of our applicant tracking software clients.

View Newton Applicant Tracking Software Customers in a larger map

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools.” Marshall McLuhan

We Wish

I  was at a barbeque in San Francisco this weekend and while everyone agreed that it’s nice that summer has finally arrived, our conversation inevitably meandered into talk of work and our summer work intentions.  Alex, a partner in a small marketing consultancy, remarked how he planned to lay low and enjoy the summer, taking some time off to relax.  “After all,” remarked Alex, “No one is doing anything this summer except waiting out this economy.”  Liz, an executive at an enterprise software company, agreed, mentioning that she’s observing “summer hours” and hoping that the fall will yield better results for her firm (I’d like to add that I hope it will yield better results for everyone).  When the conversation turned to me, I stuttered on about a fly-fishing trip and some weddings. I really didn’t want to tell the group that my summer is going to be as busy as they come and that “summer hours” are definitely not in the mix for me. I may dub this summer, “The Summer of Work”.

I see it like this. Throughout history, recessions have produced new leaders like HP, FedEx, and Microsoft. While someone was cost-cutting and retrenching, someone else was innovating. When spending is tight, companies look for new, less expensive ways to do routine things. It just so happens that hiring (my business builds recruiting software) is something that most, if not all, companies need to do at some point or another—and I can assure you that there is plenty of room for innovation in the world of recruiting software. Marshall McLuhan, a scholar of media theory, puts it best saying, “Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools.” This quote is very timely. When the anxiety subsides and the economy loosens up, the way business is conducted will have changed.

So at Newton Software we are pushing development harder than ever, making things smarter, simpler, easier and faster—making tools for tomorrow, because the economy WILL get better.

First off, in just a few weeks we will be releasing the recruiting software industry’s most innovative analytics application. Our product management, design, and development teams have been working tirelessly to design and develop a product that will allow companies to examine and reposition corporate recruiting programs to be more efficient and effective. Creating the behind-the-scenes algorithms and measurements is a time consuming process, and making the module easy to use, yet powerful, is 10x as laborious. Our entire team has spent countless hours interviewing HR pros, recruiters, and contributing our own domain expertise to this product. Look for more news about Newton’s analytic functionality in early July.

Second, we are integrating a billing system into Newton®. This will make it easier for customers to sign up and manage costs. It also means that we can offer an unrivaled transparency to our clients.  The addition of the billing system reinforces a key tenet of our business plan: take the friction and hassle out of buying our software (and, even cancelling it if you want to!). Our investment in online billing software marks another innovation in the recruiting software industry and will make a dramatic improvement in the way that HR, recruiting, and finance professionals will interact with a software provider (us). We anticipate providing hassle free, completely transparent billing and invoicing by mid-August.

Our third major project this summer is already underway.  We are designing a feature that will make it easier for recruiting agencies to do business with companies that are hiring, and vice versa. Since the beginning of recruiting a certain animosity has existed between recruiting firms and the companies they assist. We want to help smooth these relationships by making it easier for companies to get great resumes while at the same time freeing agency recruiters from having to make 100 cold calls a day. The end of the cold call is near, my friends. Solving an issue that has plagued both sides of the recruiting industry for decades is, as you can image, not easy. You can bet that the phrase “summer hours” has not come up at Newton (except when remarking that it is still light out when we leave the office at 9PM).

This so called “summer of work”, what does it mean? Well, at Newton, we see it as an opportunity to turn a slow buying cycle (read financial turmoil) into a business advantage and to launch innovate products that solve real problems for our customers. While we would love to be out fly-fishing, backpacking, spending time with families or just cruising around getting tans on our bikes, we are planning to hunker into the Newton fish bowl (that is what our friend’s call our office) to get some work done.

Please pass the sun lamp.

How’s the market? I can’t even begin to guess how many times that I have been asked this question. Having worked in and around recruiting for over a dozen years, people assume that I see trends in the labor market that can indicate the overall health of the economy. To a great extent this is true. The companies that I have helped start and run for the past 10 years are proven leading indicators of market conditions, especially for the technology markets: people stop hiring when things get scary, and they start hiring when things look good.

Over the last 10 years I’ve come to the conclusion that downcycles are “light switch” events: you come to work one month and things bright and sunny, the next month they are dark and gloomy. In November of 2000 the recruiting company I worked at started to notice a minor decline in revenue. By February 2001, our revenue was nearly cut in half. By the end of the year, the Dow had lost about 2000 points. In 2008, though this time better prepared, we saw the writing on the wall in the spring as the market tightened and revenue began to fall. By late August hiring had ground to a halt; we all know what came next.

Okay, so ask me “how is the market?” Well, if you follow me on Twitter, you may have caught a tweet last week about my growing optimism. Despite grumblings from some of the guys at my gym (taken with more than a grain of salt seeing as I go to a gym in the Bank of America headquarters), the constant gut-wrenching news from the cable news outlets (who seem to get paid to spread fear), and the worried calls I get from my future mother-in-law (she should get paid to worry), I can tell you that I believe things are on the uptick.

Here are a couple of reasons I am optimistic this spring:

1. In February and March both divisions of GravityPeople, the recruiting company that I co-founded in 1998 are doing really well – seriously. Now, they have great employees that have stayed level-headed and worked hard through what the pundits are calling the worst economy in 80 years, but the numbers are there too. Job orders are up and so is revenue. When I met with some of them today, they told me that they are seeing candidates with multiple offers. This is a really good sign that hiring is becoming competitive again. When hiring gets competitive it means that companies are moving from fear to growth.

2. March has been a breakthrough month for Newton, our recently founded software company. From the looks of it we will start April with several new customers, some press coverage, and some major inertia. Our customers are telling us that they expect to actually see some growth this year, and they’re getting prepared. At Newton we continue to invest in the technology and we are even starting to tackle some marketing projects.

3. The sheer amount of technological innovation that we are seeing in social media, cloud computing, content management, and the mobile spaces, to name a few, confirms to me that entrepreneurs, the backbone of optimism, are alive and well. It’s evident that many start-up companies are taking advantage of a slow sales cycle to innovate and challenge conventional technology and business models.

When I circled around with our teams today, suggesting that I am feeling optimistic, folks seemed to genuinely agree that they too are feeling more positive. In an open discussion we got to talking about all kinds of things like the growing lines at our favorite lunch spots, about the buses that we take to work being more crowded and about it taking longer to get a pint at the pubs after work. By the way, we weren’t complaining, much to the contrary. Social scientists would probably slap some moniker to this discussion and call it collective optimism. But, I don’t care what it’s called.

I am going to call it spring forward optimism and I feel good.