The World-At-Work, Job Descriptions and Compensation Analysis, Through My Eyes

The World At Work, through my eyes – Total Rewards 2017 conference, May 7-9th in Washington, D.C.

 

I had the pleasure of visiting our country’s capital earlier this week as HRIZONS exhibited at World-At-Work’s Total Rewards 2017 conference for the first time. I must say, the city is as clean of a city I’ve ever seen, the infrastructure was excellent (tax dollars at work) and the local cuisine was nothing short of exquisite, as my team can attest to, thanks to some pre-conference research my wife did to find us an awesome top chef restaurant to dine in. And, I managed to find 2 hours to squeeze in a 4-mile walk to see the sights with my trusted VP, Tech Solutions, Brian Sampson (the other guy in the photo).

World At Work Conference JDMS
In case you don’t know me yet, that’s me on the far left, next to a few members of our incredible team. And for those of you that do, yes, I am sporting a beard these days… just decided to change it up a little, plus, NHL playoff season is in full motion, which is an easy excuse because as everyone that knows me knows, I love hockey, and for those of you that don’t, hockey is all about growing out facial hair during playoff season!

 

Okay, down to business right… Here are my observations after attending the conference:

1. Compensation people are a lot of fun! I have to admit, I was a little worried that the conference would be dry but I met some very interesting and entertaining people along the way and with our team at our booth. Who said Comp Professionals weren’t fun anyways…

2. While the overall attendance seemed lower than I expected it would be, the quality of the conversations we did have with people from wide ranging companies and industries exceeded my expectations. Compensation and Total Rewards professionals really get the need for cloud technology and the importance of integrated solutions that make life easier for their end-user constituents – field HR, managers and employees.

3. Job description pain hasn’t been resolved! Despite the fact that some traditional compensation vendors are beginning to offer lightweight job description capabilities, it’s clear there is tremendous opportunity to help customers with our award winning JDMS® | Job Descriptions Made Simple solution for enterprise customers looking for a well designed, scalable solution. And of course, that’s exactly why we built it!

4. The audience was HCM cloud tech savvy!!!! At the event we showcased the fact that we were now able to offer two versions of JDMS® | Job Descriptions Made Simple. JDMS that is agnostic to all HR technologies, meaning we can make JDMS the system-of-record for job content and integrate to virtually any core HR system, talent system, etc. And JDMS for SAP SuccessFactors that includes pre-packaged integrations, SSO and a few other cool features that SuccessFactors customers will appreciate. It wasn’t difficult to explain the value proposition for either version and to my surprise, most of the feedback was along of the lines of “this makes sense”. A great sign that the market is maturing when it comes to HR cloud technology and hopefully, that our marketing and messaging is getting better and better.

5. Compensation and Total Rewards professionals care about data! We used this conference to showcase a new product we’re bringing to market called OrgInsight™ | Visualize Your Workforce. It’s really cool cloud HR tech, powered by an uber fast in-memory database, and incredibly powerful. We had quite a few companies asking about it and when they saw the ability to mash up compensation attributes with typical data organizations collect in their HRIS (age, ethnicity, gender), coupled with organizational data (divisions, locations, departments), spans and levels, and then really looked at some key comp data (compa ratio, mean salary, etc.), you could get some amazing insights into your workforce and how well, or not, your comp programs and diversity programs are in a visual depiction, representative to your organizational structure. Wow! That is a mouthful, insn’t it? And, it can do this at scale with organizations that have 10,000, 50,000, 100,000+ employees – not kidding!

In summary, D.C. is very nice to visit and sights see, the restaurants are great, and most importantly, I learned that Compensation and Total Rewards professionals are more than just a fun group of folks, they clearly play a very important role in HR and in organizations, and see the value of HR cloud technologies. And, that makes HRIZONS very excited to be a new and upcoming contributor towards making their lives better and easier with HR cloud technology, which in turn makes their organizations stronger and better run, and ultimately their employees more engaged and contributing to the organization’s objectives, which in most cases, has a positive impact, in one way or another, on the world we all live in. Or at least that’s what I believe…

So here’s to Compensation and Total Rewards professionals and to the impact we hope to make on this audience with our products and services to make them better at what they do.

We are excited about the journey and to helping our customers achieve success!

Signing off until the next blog…
Jim Newman, CEO

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