AI Transcript
Alright, podcasting live from the GP booth at SHRM 24 in Chicago. Today I've got Yutaka Takagi, principal product evangelist from the HCM platform isolved.
Hey Chris, nice to meet you. Really enjoying our presence here this year. It'ss always great to connect. We call our customers and HR users, people heroes, right? It's always great to connect with people, heroes, the people who are making really the magic of connecting employees with their employers. Employee needs, with employer needs every day, just loving hearing the stories.
Nice. So I don't think I've had, I saw my show before, so just tell the audience what you guys do first.
Yeah, so we're a comprehensive human capital management solution provider, but we go beyond your typical hire to retire solutions. One aspect that's a little different from us is that we don't necessarily require that you get our core HR or payroll up and running. You can kind of modularly pick what parts of the solution suite you want. So if you want recruiting, you want talent management or you want that core HR and the workforce management aspects, we can kind of pick and choose. The other aspect of it is that we offer a whole suite of services as well. So HR augmentation services help really strategize on what's going on with supporting things like as I'll say, as sort of fundamental as policies, handbooks to more strategic thinking around how do we design our job boards and our job descriptions, how do we design our performance processes? So we offer a whole suite of services, HR services, benefit services, et cetera, to support our customers as well. And again, that can be somewhat modular. You don't necessarily have to have our people cloud suite to leverage some of our services and really aim to serve our small midsize organizations generally here in the United Sates.
That's definitely our sweet spot is I'll say between 50 and 500 employees tends to be our sweet spot across really, but across really all industries across the United States and certainly all 50 states.
Nice. Now, is employee experience your core, would you say, as a product or…?
Yeah, I think that's really what we really focus on in terms of how do we find value in an HCM, really that connection between what does the employee want and need out of work in their lives and what does the employer need out of that employee at that time? Is it a certain set of skills? There's certainly the conversation around skills-based talent management skills-based hiring, certainly one of the things that trends that we see, or is it a set of credentials or whatever the case might be, really aligning what the employee wants and needs out of work with, what does the employer need out of them Now as part of that is getting the right person hired, advertising the right jobs. I mean, these are some of the talent acquisitions that certainly is your area of expertise, but also then getting them paid correctly, making sure they're scheduled correctly, making sure we measure that talent. And then in those spaces between work, how do we ensure that we're engaging those employees through things like employee resource groups and other communities that they can have so that employees feel more connected with the work and the workplace. Okay.
How's the company? How many employees? Give me some background.
Sure. The organization has been actually around since the mid eighties. We started right after the COBRA Act, consolidated omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986 was passed. And so that really was the genesis of our organization, started as an organization called infinisource, providing employer services around COBRA and benefit continuation. Then we've kind of continued on from there and built up to this full suite HCM technology platform along with the set of services that I mentioned earlier. We have about 2,500 or so employees and we serve over 170,000 organizations, over 7 million employees tracked and managed through our human capital management system.
Very cool. Very cool. How would you define the employee experience? Can you talk about that?
Yeah, it's everything about what the employee finds in their connection to the employer. So every single touch point there around when they first start to look for a job at your organization, whether that's in an active outreach program or they're coming to your website, so all the perception that they gather about that. Now, certainly when we think about employee, if I put that in air quotes there, it begins at the point of hire when they get hired and start onboarding and really start acclimating to the culture of the organization. I think one of the things that we see in some of the data points around employee expectations and where some things are maybe falling off a little bit or there's a little gap today, some of the things we see are things like employees don't necessarily know what workplace norms are. I think we see some of that in some of the data because I think there's definitely a bit of a generational gap.
When you look at some of the Gen Z workforce in particular, they entered the workforce just as the pandemic was getting started, working from home was what they got hired into perhaps or very early on into their careers, and now maybe there's a return to office or hybrid arrangements and employees don't really know what's what those expectations are. And so I think that's one of the things we see in the employee experience are how do we establish those norms? What does it mean to be back in the office? What does hybrid work mean? We saw this actually in the Harris poll, did published a thing a couple of weeks ago around, they call it quiet vacationing, right? This idea that a lot of folks are taking vacations or PTO without filing PTO, right? They're just kind of going somewhere else and working. So I think one of those things is around that. What are those expectations? What does taking time off look like and what should that mean when you take time off? I think those are some of the fundamental things around employee experience that are a part of, I think some of the gaps that we're seeing.
So what are some of the use cases for isolved when it comes to the employees brand? Give me a couple of specific examples of how you work with an employee and with your touch points there. Sure.
I think from an onboarding perspective, again, that's kind of really where we want to begin, right? Again, certainly through the talent acquisition process, setting expectations appropriately, but once they accept that offer, I think the table stakes around onboarding or let's getting the paperwork part of it out of the way. But again, establishing those communication points, establishing learning early on, we know that that's one of the key parts of value that employees see and the really expectations that they have of the employer that you're going to provide learning opportunities for them. And so really inserting learning right upfront and throughout the employee life cycle, that's certainly a key component of what we call learning grow in the iSolve suite. Another part of that is an engagement management part of iSolved, which is really provides a space for employees to communicate with one another in a very sort of modern social platform. They can earn reward points for participating in conversations, giving kudos to each other, et cetera. And those rewards points could be turned into maybe company swag or gift cards, things like that. Again, just as a part of the rewards and recognition component of what some of our customers are trying to do. So those are some of the things that we see being effective for our customers in helping to create that culture, help create communication transparency and establish those norms for those employees.
So you haven't mentioned the word AI yet. Is that coming from myself or talk to me about how you think AI is going to affect the future of the employee experience maybe?
Yeah, the joke I always give is that this is the year 2024, and so I'm contractually obligated to talk about ai, but what absolutely, there's AI throughout the suite, right? So again, in the town acquisition end, certainly things I'm sure you're familiar with, job description, creation, candidate matching against their profiles as they submit a resume, some of those things that just help reduce the administrative burden on recruiters as they field dozens, hundreds of resumes. That's part of the suite today. Conversational assistance, we released a plug into Microsoft Teams last year that allows conversational feed feedback to happen. So employees can say, just in teams, start querying the isol bot, if you will, and ask about, Hey, what does my time off look like? What are my pay statements look like? But now we're expanding that this year, taking it out of teams, the teams part's going to stay, but also building it into the isop platform.
So right directly in that employee self-service experience, employees will be able to ask those questions and then take it to the next level, which is what we call always on hr, where we'll be able to upload policies, handbooks, any sort of documentation. Generative AI engine will read and understand what those policies state, so that when employees come in with those questions anytime of day through the isol, they'll be able to ask, we just found out we're pregnant, what are my parental leave rights? And then the gen AI engine through the conversational assistant will give them that answer right back. So those are some of the things we're working on.
So you're a product evangelist, I want to talk about that a bit. What's your biggest challenge in that role right now?
I think it's always trying to keep up with what there's, I'll say the three components are what's happening in the business world and then the economy at large. The macro picture of it, what's happening from a technology perspective is the second part, right? AI is definitely one of those things that it's hard to keep up with. There's a lot of moving pieces, whether you're talking about recommendation engines or generative AI or there's so many layers to the technology that we have. And the third is really, if I'm quite honest, the communication part of it is something that I'm personally always working on is how do I articulate what we do around those issues that our customers are facing every day? And so that's my job is to figure that out and to help articulate that to the market. How often do you
Talk to your customers personally?
Yeah, we do actually a road show here at isolved…We call it People Heroes Tour, where we invite our customers, so not industry analysts, not consultants, but our customers. We go out to where they are. Quite honestly, so far in my relatively short time here at the organization, I've done six or seven of those places just outside of Philadelphia, new Haven, Connecticut, Dubuque, Iowa. So we're not asking them to come to the city center necessarily, right? We want to go to where they are and we invite them to spend a morning with us. We share some of our research, we ask them to chat with one another to network. We feed 'em a little bit of lunch and we get feedback there. So we do that about once every other week or so, and we do that throughout the year. So this year I think we're doing about 30 of those throughout the country. Nice.
Yeah. Your customers almost give you a lot of feedback about the product. What's one thing they told you to do that you actually implemented?
Yeah, I think one of the big things is the user experience. One of the things that we did four or five years ago is we rebranded our organization. If you come to our website, you'll see the pink color everywhere. So that was a big effort, big lift. And so as part of that rebrand, obviously that changes a little bit of the user experience and the user interface of the solution. Key thing that we did as a part of that was releasing a mobile app. And so that was definitely sort of the, I'll say low hanging fruit that we hadn't done that We implemented, I think 2022 or 2 23 to put an actual app rather than just a web app out there so that we have a one place that our customers can tell their employees, go download the app, get access to all the things that they do in isof. And so that was one of the things that we did was around that user experience and user interface part of it to provide some value to our customers.
Cool. You guys hiring at all?
Absolutely. We're always hiring. So isolvedhcm.com is our website. You'll find a whole host of roles, particularly we're always hiring in our customer facing roles, so whether that's the sales side or our customer support, customer account management, those tend to be areas that we're always hiring in.
Awesome. Well, great to meet you and thanks for your time today. Thanks.
Sedonna Lyons, Quick Supply Company
Today, I've got an HR generalist with me, our first practitioner on the show this week. Her name is Edna Lyon. She's from Quick Supply Company based in Iowa, and they are in mining and construction, I think, right? She said. So we're going to talk to her a bit about what she's up to. She's also an isolved customer. So we'll talk about that. But how's the show going so far? Is it your first SHRM or no?
It is my first SHRM, and I'm actually sponsored by isolved because I'm part of their people hero community. Oh,
Great. Okay. So let's start there. What modules do you use and how long you been with them? You have some details. So
I've been with the company since 2022. We are a mining and construction, so we hire for blasters, CDL drivers warehouse, some inside some outside sales, but it's mainly going to be those blasters Just
In Iowa or elsewhere?
No, we are in 15 states. So we are from North Carolina, and then we have some construction side of the business that are all the way over in Oregon and Utah. So we are kind of coast to coast.
Okay. Do you yourself do any recruiting at all, or
I do not, and I prefer not to if I'm a hundred percent honest.
What do your recruiters tell you about hiring outlets? What are the biggest challenges? They say
The biggest challenge is finding those niche positions. So blasters, they have to be licensed, so there's a lot of competition. So it's just trying to take from others, but be the better option. So it's like a fine line balance, but there's not a whole lot of blasters out there. So within the company, we are looking to kind of grow our own so that way we can help them become licensed so that way they can kind of have a career
Path. Do you have in-house training for them?
Yes. We have a whole safety team that devotes towards training for CDL drivers for blasters, and then they also are that main team for any safety deeds.
Other than iSolved, what's your HR tech stack in terms of other software do you use?
So we mainly use iSolved for our system. So we use iSolved for applicant tracking for the recruiting side. We do have one in-house recruiter who manages that. And then we use the onboarding module, which will give the employees a better user experience. We went from DocuSign and now we're using the onboarding module. And it's nice for me because it actually builds them into our HRIS system for payroll, and it kind of takes that burden off of me. But then we use payroll and we're constantly looking at other items that we might be needing. So when I started in 2022, we had paper time sheets, so we added that as well. So we have the timekeeping piece, but we're constantly growing, so our needs are constantly growing as well. So every year we're kind of looking at our roadmap, seeing what we need, what our employees need, and kind of figuring out what's going to be the best solution for them,
Get a favorite feature?
Oh, workflows. So when I started, we didn't have workflows initiated, but it's kind of been nice to get those up and running. So that means the employee can actually update their address in the system and it notifies us, and then we can approve or deny. Typically we approve, but we call them to make sure like, Hey, are you the one actually doing this change? We do like that safety feature, therefore they approve or deny. They can also update their taxes within the systems, so that's super nice. And then they can update their own beneficiaries, dependents, things like that.
Are you a power user of isolved?
What do you mean by power user?
Well, are you always in it every day?
I am in all the isolved platforms. I'm in the ATS system, I'm in the payroll system, even though I'm not the recruiter, I do help the recruiter with the onboarding piece. So I am in there weekly to kind of figure out who's in the pipeline, and then I have a whiteboard that I just kind of jot those names down and kind of keep track on them. And then once they're through onto the onboarding piece, I'm the one that connects with them to say, Hey, you're missing something. I can see it looks like you didn't complete your taxes. Are you having any issues? Kind of help troubleshoot. I'm also the main point of contact for all the employees if they're having any issues with login, things like that. So I'm kind of the one person that can assist with that for the
How's the support for my Sims? I mean, isolved. Do you get good support on that end?
Yep, good support. We do have a touch base, I believe every three months with our,
Can you call them or do you use it all? Yep,
You can call them. They actually updated their phone system so you can get the specific department you're looking for now. So that's very helpful. So if I want to talk to somebody about taxes, I can just call them and say, Hey, something's going on with the taxes. Can you help me out? If I want something, some assistance on the timekeeping piece, like, Hey, we're adding this new code, but it's not GL mapping correctly, can you assist with that? They can do stuff on the backend that we can't see, and that kind of helps us out.
Any advice for a potential isolved customer about using the platform? Since you're a power user,
Learn the system in and out. So they're going to give you the system, they're going to give you some training, but really, really know the system that's really going to be your best. They do have university that gives you documents for training, so you don't always have to ask, you can look it up and find it yourself, but really knowing the ins and outs of the system is going to be their best.