Every year our team attends HR Tech in Vegas, and inevitably every year I hear from someone on the show floor or post-event with the exact same complaint:
There’s nothing new or exciting.
-Various people
For whatever reason, I put on my crusader hat and I end up highlighting a few of the companies I’ve spoken with that have a truly interesting or innovative product, but that conversation never makes it farther than that private discussion. So this year I’ve decided to change that.
We booked a number of pre-briefings with different companies in the space and have some great things to share.
- If you’re at HR Tech, go give them a visit.
- If you’re not, check them out anyway. There are good things happening.
I’ve posted them in alphabetical order to avoid highlighting any “favorites” in the bunch. While we do sponsored research and other activities with the vendor community, we are careful not to highlight any companies as the “only” or “best” provider in a category. It’s a crowded market and providing insights to HR tech buyers on these types of technologies is a part of our ongoing research.
Some of the Interesting, Innovative (or Just Pretty Darn Cool) Companies at the HR Technology Conference
- Alight – Alight has been known for its payroll and benefits product for some time, but they recently divested the payroll portion to focus on becoming the best employee benefits navigation product on the planet. More than 70% of the Fortune 100 use Alight for that purpose, if it gives you any indication of their success at that mission. With more employers than ever being asked to do more with less, Alight helps make those decisions with data and insights, not gut feel.
- Appcast – Used by Sodexo, Six Flags, Lyft, and other enterprise organizations, Appcast is one of the industry’s leaders when it comes to programmatic, omnichannel marketing to reach the candidates your company needs. No more advertising in locations with low volume or low quality–Appcast helps focus dollars on the best and most valuable sources of candidates so talent leaders get the most bang for their ad spend. Their upcoming features are designed to capture and convert interest into applications.
- Beekeeper – One of the top solutions for supporting frontline workers with communications and other needs, Beekeeper is a midmarket solution that connects every worker with a relevant, helpful app that includes everything from onboarding and pay stub access to recognition and group chats. Their take on frontline app adoption maturity is pretty incredible, and it’s a helpful roadmap for employers looking to improve their approach.
- Betterworks – Taking a practical and employee-centric approach to skills, Betterworks is weaving performance management, goal-setting, and other relevant pieces into the bigger skills conversation happening across the market today. Their focus on performance alignment with the business is what our research shows to be a high-performing practice. They also have some capabilities in an upcoming release that will position them more competitively against some of the other talent solutions in the market.
- Chattr – Frontline, high volume hiring is getting closer and closer to a science than an art. With workers willing to jump ship and move to other frontline roles with little notice, employers that win are able to communicate and connect quickly. Chattr works with employers that have decentralized hiring activities, automating many of the repetitive steps so that hiring managers only have to touch the most necessary pieces of the hiring process.
- Clearcompany – One of the industry’s best kept secrets, Clearcompany serves a tremendous number of small and midsize organizations with their talent suite across hiring, performance, onboarding, and their recent learning acquisition. The recent arrival of Arnaud Grunwald, the new head of product with a track record of innovation, is going to bring new market-leading capabilities to this already solid system.
- Experian – Employers don’t want to be experts in tax credits, compliance, and similar topics. Experian Employer Services gives companies a chance to have some of the industry’s top minds support those areas while the businesses focus on the critical aspects of operations. Our newest HCM research shows that multistate employers have exponentially higher compliance risks. That’s the risk Experian is attempting to mitigate for the employment community.
- Gem – Gem sprung up in the last few years and took a commanding and dominant lead in the recruiting space. Their new CRM adds yet a new layer to the product, giving employers one source for an AI-driven ATS, CRM, and outbound sourcing tool. Their approach to AI has been careful and measured, unlike some of the solutions that quickly jumped into the market with a Chatgpt-backed interface early in the Generative AI era.
- Glider – AI autoproctoring for hiring assessments is where Glider got its start. Worried about candidates cheating on assessments? Glider can give you a picture of certainty that you probably wouldn’t believe if I told you. Now they’ve expanded into skills validation from a learning perspective, which is thrilling for all of us that want a little more certainty from our skills solutions than simply parsing a resume and assuming all of those skills are real and justified.
- isolved – I have watched the isolved team steadily do the right things in a consistent way over the last few years, and it’s paying off big time. Their growth curve is impressive, and they continue to innovate in the product to meet the needs of their client base. They have some new service offerings as well that were intriguing–for instance, they have a firm hold on HR outsourcing and support, but they also now offer outsourced recruiting as well for those organizations that are struggling to find and hire the right talent. The hot pink is growing on me.
- One Model – One of the most incredible data/analytics capabilities I’ve ever seen. Their new AI agents for analytics are simply incredible, giving employers a chance to get more value from their analytics by using purpose-built agents that interact and interface with the humans of HR and analytics for rapid and iterative insight generation. Plus, the applications for the One Model base product are broad and diverse across the HR landscape. This is one to watch closely.
- Paradox – Known for bringing chatbots into recruiting and being the longstanding providers in that area, Paradox has evolved its chatbot knowledge with Generative AI to make it more contextually relevant and helpful, avoiding the death loop that most chatbots can fall into if they are unable to perceive the broader nuances of a discussion. This was fun to watch. The new Assist Insights are also a great way to use Olivia on the internal side as a resource and helpful guide to explore data and generate insights.
- Skillable – Our research on learning and talent development shows a define learner preference for experiential learning, regardless of age or gender, but the difficulty is often in setting up or measuring outcomes from experiential activities. Skillable enables companies to create and deliver experiential learning environments tailored to their specific use cases, configurations, and processes. Organizations use these “labs” to provide safe places for employees, partners, and customers to learn and practice skills – then have those skills validated as they actually complete the work required within the lab. This takes experiential learning to a whole new and measurable level.
- Survale – Survale is the platform for candidate experience feedback. The platform can open a survey to candidates for feedback at any number of trigger points within the hiring process, allowing employers to have real, workable data to use instead of anecdotal feedback or only post-hire metrics to report.
- Talent Neuron – Talent Neuron has been in the industry for quite some time, but their new leadership team is pushing the envelope with new features and capabilities. One of the latest is using employer value proposition data from Glassdoor and similar sites for sentiment analysis. This helps create more aligned recruiting and branding messaging across the board, which is one of the top priorities for employers this year in our talent acquisition research.
Do you work for a solution provider and want to be on this list next time? Ping our team to get on our calendar.
Ben Eubanks is the Chief Research Officer at Lighthouse Research & Advisory. He is an author, speaker, and researcher with a passion for telling stories and making complex topics easy to understand.
His latest book Talent Scarcity answers the question every business leader has asked in recent years: “Where are all the people, and how do we get them back to work?” It shares practical and strategic recruiting and retention ideas and case studies for every employer.
His first book, Artificial Intelligence for HR, is the world’s most-cited resource on AI applications for hiring, development, and employee experience.
Ben has more than 10 years of experience both as an HR/recruiting executive as well as a researcher on workplace topics. His work is practical, relevant, and valued by practitioners from F100 firms to SMB organizations across the globe.
He has spoken to tens of thousands of HR professionals across the globe and enjoys sharing about technology, talent practices, and more. His speaking credits include the SHRM Annual Conference, Seminarium International, PeopleMatters Dubai and India, and over 100 other notable events.
