Peoplefluent Making Strides in Data Integration and User Experience

Last week, I was invited to attend #WISDOM2013 – Peoplefluent’s annual user conference. I enjoy attending user conferences, as they offer a unique opportunity to fully immerse myself in a vendor’s brand, culture, and client community. WISDOM, which was held in Orlando, at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort, was no exception.

Two Days, Three Major Announcements

Peoplefluent kicked things off with a few major announcements – most importantly Jeff Carr has joined the team as President and CEO. Considering he had accepted the position only days before the conference, his performance in both the opening remarks and the conference in general were impressive. I think I speak for all of us here at Brandon Hall Group when I say we look forward to this bold move for Peoplefluent.

Another major announcement – of particular interest for the social-savvy hiring organizations – was of Peoplefluent’s Mirror solutions. Mirrors serve as a framework to inject video, social, collaboration and analytics tools onto recruiting, learning, and performance management platforms. Mirrors can be used to create use-case specific solutions – like the Leadership Development Mirror and Customer Service Mirror, which launched last week.

Powered by Peoplefluent’s acquisition of SocialText and KZO, Mirrors offer a media-rich user experience that is definitely ahead of the game in enterprise software. With the Recruiting Mirror – which will be live sometime next year – internal users can customize their Mirror (“to reflect what you want to see” – thus the name) to include important analytics, candidate tracking, and task management widgets. Additionally, the Recruiting Mirror will allow candidates to record and submit video CVs, and take a deeper dive into company culture.

The third major announcement was of Peoplefluent’s new integration platform, Colossus. In a nutshell, Colossus leverages a vast API library in order to reduce time to implementation for Peoplefluent customers and support integration of company data across disparate systems (e.g. applicant tracking system to HRMS).

Colossus offers valuable use cases for large organizations for which data integration has become increasingly complex. For example, freeing up performance management data to actively track quality of hire metrics within the talent acquisition suite is a pipedream for many companies. I think we’ll see more vendors developing similar technology in the next couple of years.

Key Conversations and Takeaways

Much of the conversation at #WISDOM2013 – both in formal sessions and in informal conversation – was centered on integration. Integration of data, integration of video and social technology, integrated talent management. And this was one of my key takeaways: the most effective hiring organizations aren’t just paying lip service to strategic human capital management.

On the contrary, they’re measuring performance of their people process – from talent acquisition to talent management to learning and development – holistically, as a sum of all efforts to attract, engage, and retain talent. And the conference was organized to facilitate these conversations, constantly reaffirming the need for better business acumen in HCM.

It was clear that Peoplefluent’s clients came expecting more than fluffy, feel-good presentations. One area of particular interest was that of employee, company culture and employer branding. Any session covering this topic was full of people with hands raised, asking pointed questions and engaging with each other in conversation that went far beyond slide decks (in a very good way).

A second takeaway was somewhat less heady, but just as prevalent: Use cases for video are getting much more sophisticated. A big part of this is the continued advancement of technology, but just as big is the increase in marketing-savvy hiring organizations.

In talent acquisition, video can do a lot more than give candidates a two-minute overview of a company. It can feature interviews with hiring managers and top performers (brand ambassadors); it can feature instructions and explanations of the talent acquisition process – in other words, it can be used to engage candidates far beyond the job description.

We talk a lot about innovation in this industry, and with Mirrors and Colosssus, Peoplefluent is making some great strides. With Carr at the steering wheel, I can only imagine what the next year will bring for Peoplefluent. One thing is certain: I’m looking forward to #WISDOM2014.