Analyst Perspectives

To strengthen its position in both core talent management and the social form of it, Peoplefluent has purchased a video collaboration platform and enhanced its existing recruiting products. My colleague Mark Smith wrote about Peoplefluent’s evolution toward a social talent management platform with its acquisition of Socialtext. In addition, our firm selected Peoplefluent’s customer Citrix for the 2013 Technology Innovation Award; it provides a practical example of how to use mobile technologies to create a succession planning solution for senior managers who are often traveling and need to work on processes like this wherever they may be. This case also is an instance of customers partnering with their vendors to achieve mutual goals.

Peoplefluent’s most recent move in building a social and collaborative system for human capital management was the acquisition of KZO Innovations recently. KZO provides a video collaboration platform that Peoplefluent is using in several parts of its business. The first step is to integrate video into its learning management product. The search and discussion features of KZO video collaboration could be a differentiator for Peoplefluent, enabling users to find any content in a video and start a threaded discussion or a chat session with a designated expert on the searched content; this is a new dimension in collaboration that makes video content much more usable by the learning community and therefore more valuable overall. Peoplefluent’s video collaboration technology is aligned to the needs of organizations for social collaboration, according to our overall technology research and also specifically in our sales research, as it combines several social technologies that are priorities for sales organizations, including discussion forums, application sharing and videoconferencing. Peoplefluent also enhanced its learning management product to include communities of practice; this core collaboration capability should help it improve the return on its investment in KZO Innovations because users can share video content in groups focused on learning activities.

Peoplefluent is also going to use this capability to improve its own customer portal. Embedding KZO video collaboration into its customer service experience should provide some of the same benefits of sharing video content and show customers this can work in a learning context; it could help promote training as new product releases come out.

On a related front, Peoplefluent released an update to its recruiting product that could harmonize with the KZO Innovations enhancement because recruiting and learning are complementary parts of the talent management workflow. While organizations often purchase these two products separately, having both share strong features within a single platform could attract customers that want to have fewer vendors for talent management; for new employees, having a single experience that guides them through onboarding and initial learning can be easier and thus more effective than having to learn separate systems.

This release of Peoplefluent Recruitment unifies the company’s core recruiting product with its contingent recruiting and vendor management products, providing recruiters and HR departments with a streamlined way to manage their hiring process for employees and contract labor in a single environment. This release includes several feature enhancements to its contingent labor management product Vendor Management System (VMS). There is more flexible business rules functionality so recruiters can set how to track their contingent workforce for tasks like time-sheet activation and approval requirements. Improved reporting capabilities and a new high-volume tool allows recruiters to extend contract labor engagements en masse.

To enhance the candidate experience within Peoplefluent Recruitment and encourage applicants to complete the process, Peoplefluent made its candidate forms more configurable. Customers can simplify the initial application process and leave collection of more detailed candidate information to later in the application process. This enhancement also works for those applying through LinkedIn.

I see the benefit of this release of Peoplefluent Recruitment as twofold. First, recruiters have a more efficient process, as they can execute all parts of their job in one place. This is an area our benchmark research on social media and recruiting identified: Nearly half (43%) of organizations in our social recruiting benchmark said they (or their recruiting team) spend up to five hours per week on external social media sites looking for candidates. Integrated systems may reduce the amount of redundant search work required of recruiters. Second, management now can go to one place to see a complete picture of how many people are being hired, how much is being spent and other factors.

Peoplefluent is executing on the imperative to move talent management from a simple process automation and reporting tool to an integrated, collaborative platform that works on mobile devices and will start to use big data from Human Resources. Its challenge is to bring individual products and technologies together as a single platform that provides a unified experience to the end user. Like many other vendors, Peoplefluent has products and components that are beginning to integrate into its platform, that take some extra time during implementation and upgrades. This is something the company is continuing to address in its release schedule, but with many different offerings as well as new social, mobile and analytics technologies, Peoplefluent will need to keep a close eye on the effort.

These advances in technology and releases show Peoplefluent making progress in building a stronger offering in talent management while advancing to meet the growing demand for business and social collaboration which has become a top technology innovation priority according to our research. The collaborative video platform strengthens its learning product and can be of use to other parts of its portfolio as well. Peoplefluent Recruitment was already a strong product, and this release unifies several formerly separate applications in a way that will benefit customers and differentiate the vendor in the market.

Regards,

Stephan Millard

VP & Research Director