HRExaminer Radio is a weekly show devoted to Recruiting and Recruiting Technology airing live on Friday’s at 11AM Pacific
HRExaminer Radio
Guest: George LaRocque, President, LAROCQUE, LLC
Episode: 139
Air Date: December 18, 2015
George LaRocque is recognized as one of the top global influencers and thought leaders in the world of B2B Human Resources and workforce technology. He has amassed more than 25 years in the field as a Recruiter, Talent Management professional, HR practitioner, HR Technology executive, analyst and consultant. George has launched some of the most successful HR technology brands in the market.
George is the President of LAROCQUE, LLC where he publishes the #hrwins reports on HR technology innovation. He speaks publicly where people are passionate about the connections between technology, talent, and work. He helps employers understand the HR technology landscape and the trends that are impacting their work in the field. He helps customer-focused HR technology vendors better understand the HR practitioner, where the market is headed, and how to better engage them. He can be found on Twitter @glarocque and on the web at www.hrwins.com or www.larocqueinc.com
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Begin transcript
John Sumser: Good morning, and welcome to HRExaminer Radio. I’m your host John Sumser, and we’re coming to you live from beautiful downtown Occidental, California where it is pitch black because these are the longest days of year and it’s 7:00 in the morning. There’s not a hint of sun. The coyotes are howling in the background if you listen closely, and we’re going to be talking to George LaRocque, who is the president of LaRocque LLC. George, how are you?
George LaRocque: I’m doing really well, John. Doing really well. Thanks for having me. How are you?
John Sumser: Oh, I’m great. It’s nice to hear your voice. Why don’t you introduce yourself to the crowd?
George LaRocque: George LaRocque, I’ve been in the industry for about 26 years. I’m an adviser and consultant for employers and technology vendors. I spend most of my time in HGM talent management and acquisition, and engagement, which is just about everything in my space. I published the HR Wins, which is a view on innovation and I help folks make sense of each other. I help buyers or customers make sense of vendors, and I help vendors understand who their customer is. I support that with a little bit of research, a lot of field work, and my experience having been both a practitioner and a vendor. I’ve been doing this type of work for about 6 years now.
John Sumser: That’s very interesting. How did you end up doing this? I can’t imagine little George at 5 driving his truck through the sandbox going, “Hey, what I want to do is help vendors, and buyers understand each other in the human capital marketplace.” Somewhere between sandbox time and now, a light bulb went off, or you fell into a ditch somewhere. Tell me the story.
George LaRocque: There wasn’t a lot of time between the sandbox and this, so it’s pretty much all I’ve ever done has been in this market. I had spent about 10 years on the practitioner side, and I started in recruiting on the agency side. I moved to the corporate side after 4 or 5 years. Then I created a consulting firm, which would now be called an RPO and a small HRO. We help folks in the Boston area, and lot of technology shops at that time in the early 90s with their HR and recruiting needs. We sent folks, our employees in house. At that point we were bringing technology with us, and one of the systems that we were working with was this, there was this tool called Hire Point, which became Hire Systems, which became BrassRing. At the point where they got funded, they tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to come over to the vendor side. I did that, and I spent about 10 years on the vendor side with folks like BrassRing, folks like Bullhorn, Talemetry, Deploy.
I had some great runs there, and then about 6 years ago I was at a point in my life where I needed a little more control and flexibility. I’d always helped my friends in the space, or really anyone in the space that needed help. They would call and ask for, they’d have a question or ask for some perspective. This time when somebody called I said, “I’d be happy to help, but do you have a budget for that?” They did, so I started really consulting at that point. As I started consulting, there was an evolution over the following 2 or 3 years where I realized that … And content. Marketing and blogging was really coming on at that point, and I realized that I could put my opinions out there and some people are actually interested in those. I started doing that, and that brought me into the world of taking briefings with vendors, and taking calls with some employers. Then I started to be viewed as more of an analyst, and it’s dove tailed into what it is today.
Sound logical, but it was …
John Sumser: It’s an interesting thing …
George LaRocque: Sounds like a great story, a logical sequence of events, but like any career, when you’re living it, it’s more like one decision after another and just going with what felt right.
John Sumser: The business of being an analyst is an interesting thing. There’s no way for somebody to qualify as an analyst. Do you have some insight about that? If somebody’s listening and they wanted to be an analyst when they grew up, how do you tell when you’re an analyst?
George LaRocque: I use the term analyst because that’s the language that we all understand. When I think of what I … I am an analyst, but the whole analyst world is being shaken up. When I say analyst, or let’s say when a client uses the word analyst I immediate expand it to include influencers, and bloggers and the traditional analyst because it’s a … I think first you need some expertise. That’s a common thread. There’s expertise and on a pure analyst side, the expertise may be doing research. It maybe just understanding the subject matter, and having access to a large body of data in order to see some trends. That may be the expertise. Then they apply within an industry.
In my case, the foundation was the understanding of the customer having been in the field and staying close to the field over time. I think the most valuable analysts, bloggers have … They don’t just start sharing an opinion because they’ve got one. It’s based on some experience and expertise. You can achieve that as a vendor. You can achieve it as a practitioner. All of these perspectives are valuable, but that I think is the first step.
Then, if you’ve got something valuable to share, it opens up the door to publish, whether it’s research, whether it’s pure reports on content. Then that opens up the door to, you generally have two or three parties that are interested in that research or that content. In my case it’s practitioners, it’s vendors, and it’s investors.
John Sumser: Got it. In some of your history you have some experience with sales. Do you think that that’s part of what differentiates you from other people doing this, is that you actually understand the communications gap between vendors and practitioners?
George LaRocque: Absolutely. I think understanding what it takes both as a vendor when you’re making that one to one connection with the customer to turn it into a customer. I think also, really more importantly, understanding what the customer is going through and what their perspective is and what their day what looks like, and how you fit within that environment. That was, when I first went to BrassRing on the vendor side as, I ran sales there.
When the founder called me and he said, “Hey, we just a bunch of investment, and we’d like you to come in and talk about a role.” I didn’t think he wanted to talk to me about sales. I thought he wanted to talk to me about account management or working with the customers really leveraging the software, because that’s what I was doing with my customers at that point. What he wanted was somebody who understood that who could help the customer understand how their software worked in order to buy it. I was a little bit of the, at first I was a little bit of … I wasn’t reluctant, but it was more of a, “Okay, I can do that.” Then I had a great run with it, but it’s that understanding of the customer and the empathy for the customer that I think differentiates an analyst, or differentiates a sales person, differentiates a vendor, a consultant, whatever your role is.
John Sumser: The marketplace is changing, and you’ve done some recent thinking in public about point solutions and ecosystems and suites. Tell me what you’re thinking.
George LaRocque: I think … Thanks for bringing that up. I think we’re at the beginning of the next big phase when it comes to, in some ways it’s something new and we’re in an ATI world is what some people have called it. I’ve adopted that. Another way to look at it is I believe that technology is, and the products are finally going to be able to deliver on the promise of being able to talk to each other more seamlessly. The client expectations for how software would be able to integrate and talk to each other has always been greater than what the vendors were ever able to deliver. The amount of work and effort involved in fitting together point solutions and platforms, it was costly and because it was in many cases hardwired, was out of date the minute it went live, and was hard to change.
As technology has evolved and APIs and platform as a service has come into play and been around awhile and I won’t say perfected, but it’s definitely evolved. I’m seeing much more success there, and when you look outside of our space there’s a trend for API as a product happening in B to B software. I think that’s the future. I think we’re at the beginning of a place where the customer is really going to start winning by having the ability to get their platform, get their point solutions where they need them, and getting the features and functions, and most importantly the usability that they deserve.
John Sumser: I’m going to go probably a little backwards on this, but where do you see … Specifically, who’s offering API as a service? That’s a very interesting thing. I hadn’t seen that yet.
George LaRocque: That’s the newest bit. I have a couple of vendor examples there. I’ve got employer examples of folks who are leveraging APIs between platforms and point solutions, but API as a service, or as a product, there’s a company … They’re both in talent acquisition, which shouldn’t be surprising because in talent acquisition, think about talent acquisition. The trends move so quickly. Point solutions need to come. They’re in favor and then they lose favor based on the trends. The macro trends like social, for example, has been around for a long time, but how recruiters leverage social, or as they were learning how to leverage social, this has changed over the years. The point solutions come in and out of favor.
There are three. One is RolePoint. RolePoint is in the employer referral world, Actually created a product, which is a middle ware. That’s not anything too new. There are a lot f middle wear and connectors out there, but to have one so focused on talent acquisition I think is worth mentioning. They’re connecting to every popular ATS and single sign on vendor that exists out there.
The other two I think you’ll find really interesting, our [Maggio 00:13:42], who is in the world of doing skilled and cultural match. If you think this has generally been an assessment based world where if you’re doing assessments with candidates, you’re asking them to fill out a form and there’s a cost. Whether it’s online or whether it’s paper, there’s a cost per piece for each of those assessments. What ends up happening is the employers end up applying that in a place where it’s worth the money. They don’t assess the entire candidate population, and sometimes or the entire employee population. By having this as an API that is using a science that looks at it’s linguistics, so it looks at things that you’ve written and it benchmarks skills and culture match. It’s extracting skills and doing a skills match the way we know how to do it.
Then it’s using linguistics to look at your culture match that you’ve bench marked with an organization. You can do this passively. The candidate doesn’t have to do anything. It’s an API that integrates with HR [inaudible 00:14:59] or ATS. I think that’s pretty cool, and there are huge implications in RPO or any employer environment for technology like that.
The other is GoHiring, which is a talent marketing API. They connect to recruitment analytics, they connect to job distribution. They’re the connector, not the … There is some function embedded there, but the point is there’s no interface that anybody has to log into. They’re getting the value of whatever capabilities these vendors bring to the table and they’re fitting into the ecosystem, if you will.
Whether these are the … These are the two or three that that I’ve seen now, but we’re going to see much more of this, especially in areas like talent acquisition and anything assessment based. Anything that’s got a high volume, a high transactional volume.
John Sumser: That’s interesting. You’re talking about services that become invisible, that their very essence is that they’re invisible. How do they stay sticky, and how do they get renewed if you can’t see them?
George LaRocque: It’s a channel play for them from the vendor side, but there’s a … That’s their value and their cost basis is much lower and the value that they’re providing is high to both the employers, and the vendors that are integrating here that are leveraging it. I think, when you think about employer brand and in the case of GoHiring or a RolePoint, or you think about a quality of hire, or culture fit, or the assessment based stuff. There’s a huge value there.
There’s a bigger thing going on here, John, which is culturally, the legacy vendors … I hate to do this, but I’d say anybody who started shipping their existing product … Let me put it, the existing product, before I don’t know, 2005 … I don’t know, something like that in that time frame. They were generally, it used to always be I want the desktop, right? They wanted to own the desktop, so integration was hard. It was only done with a select set of vendors who played in the way that they wanted to play.
These new vendors, including the platform vendors, or the vendors who have made the shift with new technology and new product. Culturally, they’re not concerned about owning the real estate on the desktop anymore. They’re concerned with the customer, and providing the value to the customer. These vendors would never think about, even while they’re creating an ecosystem, they would never think about locking it down. They think about opening it up and having the most number of integrations and touch points for their customer. It’s a really cool thing happening right now.
John Sumser: I get the theory. I get the theory, but integrations are expensive. It’s a capital investment to do an integration, and you have to have the cooperation of the people that you’re integrating with. If I wanted to start tomorrow morning having integrations with a variety of people in the ecosystem, it would be easy to develop integrations with new companies who are desperate for the business. They tend to be open and the companies that are the sweet spots, that everybody does business with, are jammed. Everybody wants a piece of their interface and they have to prioritize and they pretty much have to charge for the function. The question starts to be how do you actually do the disruption that you’re talking about? It’s a great theory. It’s a fantastic view of where the world is going, but if you want an Oracle integration, get in line, right? That means those 50,000 customers …
George LaRocque: Oracle wouldn’t be on the list of vendors. Oracle wouldn’t be on that list of vendors that I would say is embracing this culturally. I wouldn’t put them on that list.
John Sumser: Yeah, I’m sure that’s right, but you’re talking about the equivalent of a fleet replacement. If this is a trend in small entrepreneurial Silicon Valley companies, it’s interesting, but if it’s going to have legs and become the next thing it has to figure out exactly how to penetrate Oracle, and exactly [crosstalk 00:20:09].
George LaRocque: Here are a couple examples, and they’re outside of our space because I think you and I could kick around brands in our space and easily we could just argue those points back and forth. That’s too easy, right? Sales force, huge ecosystem. If you want to develop an app for sales force, it’s published, you can go do it. You can launch it. You can get it in their app exchange and the customers and the users in some cases, one path into that ecosystem, they bubble that up to the top. That can all be done really off of sales force’s radar or the part of the radar that they’re not paying attention to. They have, you can’t even count how many folks are leveraging their API. Let’s think about another trend that’s …
John Sumser: That’s true. That’s true at sales force, but it’s easy to do it technically. I don’t have any sense that it’s a success from a deployment and sales development thing. What I hear is that the people who invested heavily in that system gave up and are moving on. The technical work is interesting. The trend is interesting, but I’m not hearing big success stories about people who’ve made investments in sales force platform and are now vibrant companies as a result of it. I don’t hear that at all.
George LaRocque: Fair Sale is in our space … Vibrant, growing, global. Financial Force is in our space. They’re doing great things and moving forward aggressively. They’ve got a lot of traction in our space. Cornerstone on Demand developed a learning platform in that ecosystem just for sales on that sales force platform. Talked to them. It’s going extremely well. There are, if I look outside of our space, there are hundreds. I just spent time yesterday with a vendor talking about all of the potential sales force integrations from a sales tool and a market research perspective that are integrated. There’s some really cool stuff happening. When you have big numbers like that, you’re going to … Like any startups, or any technology vendors, there’s a lot more failure than there is success. That’s a whole different topic, but that’s the market. That’s the market.
Here’s one in our space, Greenhouse, they’re not playing at the enterprise, but the small and large mid market. They’ve got 60 published partners who have taken advantage of their API, but ask them how many folks are leveraging their API. It’s open and transparent, so they’re thrilled that they don’t know that number, but every time they talk to customers there’s a new one bubbling up. These aren’t all small shops. I think it’s a thing, and it’s the future.
I’m not saying that platforms are going away, I’m saying you get to have your platform, and as a customer you get to demand your point solution. The customers are going to do this, just like they brought smart phones into the workplace. The customers are fed up and tired with not having systems that talk to each other. That’s where this is going to come from, and that’s what’s driving it.
John Sumser: I think … I don’t really argue the trend. I’m not really arguing the trend at all. I’m saying that it is for many customers a very high risk thing to engage in because it’s new, there’s lots of turn. As you said, there’s lots of failure associated with it, and so what I’m looking for is something that’s other than a startup with money to invest who’s making some noise. I’m looking for a results stream for a customer. I’m not seeing anything. I’m not seeing anything.
George LaRocque: Here’s another one. Here’s another one, John. Here’s another one. You know Ronstadt Sourceright. This was the customer in this case. Very large, global … Ronstadt is a very large global firm, really … We used to call them a staffing firm, but they do so much and Sourceright is their outsourcing wing, or brand, if you will. They have gone with Great People. I don’t know if you’ve been familiar with them. They’ve been out for a couple of years. Great People developed their platform, their recruiting collaboration platform which has an ATS on the backend and marketing features, etc. etc. … Really fully featured system in platform as a service. By definition you’re able to deal with what comes next. You think about Sourceright, they’ve … They, Sourceright, has implemented Great People in financial services shops and they’ve implemented them in … These are global enterprise level shops.
Then Great People has been implemented in enterprise level shops, largely by their … More partners have implemented Great People in the outsourcing world as an ATS and recruiting collaboration platform than Great People has largely because of this, along with the API and the open integration comes usability that is, that’s the other factor here. What’s driving this is the ability to plug in to different solutions that a Sourceright needs to support a customer. This is, Great People’s probably one of the best kept secrets in the talent acquisition space. This is another, there’s real traction there. These are large, global enterprises leveraging this model.
John Sumser: I don’t doubt that staffing companies, which when they are pressed, when they see a threat coming, move fairly quickly. I don’t doubt that staffing companies are doing stuff, but we started talking about API’s for practitioner companies in HR doing recruiting and other related stuff, and I don’t see the update yet. I hear the story. I believe the story, but I don’t see the update, because I’m trying to get a sense for what the calendar’s really like. When will the people who I apply for jobs to have this seamless data capacity? It seems that it’s like the big data thing. It’s a really great story, but I don’t catch the traction with users.
George LaRocque: I know part of what was behind of the impetuous behind that piece that you mentioned … I wrote about a piece about this, and my thinking out in public that you mentioned was some of the research that I’ve been doing, which in this case was a lot of field work with practitioners. There’s a company here in New York. I was doing a session with some users in New York, and a company called JW Player, which is you’re watching any videos, streaming on the internet, you are some high percentage of the time looking at it, realize [inaudible 00:28:11] viewer. They’re more of a mid market company, and their director of HR told me that they selected [inaudible 00:28:23], which is an HRIS vendor, and Greenhouse, their ATS because of the ability to integrate, discuss. The company, you might know them, DISQUS has been public in talking about their love of the integrations that Bamboo HR brings to the table. Their model has largely been API driven as they stick to core HR.
It’s early. It’s early, definitely early. The beginning of this, as I said that right up front, but I would … My big message for the people that matter most, who are the customers, the employers, is stop adopting software that doesn’t have a transparent, well documented API and demand the capabilities you need. Demand that integration, because it’s possible, and it’s happening.
John Sumser: My sense is that if you said that … Oh my goodness, we have really chewed up some time. Let’s dig through this last part, and then we’ll wrap up. It’s been a great conversation. Thank you so much for pushing this around.
George LaRocque: It always is, John. Thanks for having me.
John Sumser: If I’m a customer here, and you say, “Start demanding that you have the transparency and access that you need,” how the hell do I know what I need? That [inaudible 00:30:03] a very, very smart and disciplined customer and my sense is that there may be a belief that there’s a problem, but being able to say that the problem stems from an integration issue in the technology. I think that’s a fairly rare user who understands that. Since the cloud decimated the IT function in HR, and it decimated the IT function in general, there are not practitioners wandering around who get the intricacies of tying pieces of software together. How do they know? How do they know?
George LaRocque: Here’s what I would say. Two answers for that very quickly. One is, the fact that we’re talking about this as a direct result of the sophistication, not only of the technology, but the increasing sophistication of the customer, and of HR. You and I did some research together a few years ago, and one of the most compelling data points there was how the … Or two data points. The HR leader was far more educated than the rest of their peers, and they came from other parts of the business, more than we really expected. That was a few years ago, and that was, I think foundational, and we’re seeing digital natives entering HR and becoming leaders in HR. That’s one thing. That’s definitely happening.
The other part of your answer is get some help. Call George LaRocque. Call John Sumser. Call Mark Steltzner. Call Elaine [inaudible 00:31:48]. Call … There are a [inaudible 00:31:51] of folks of different expertise that could shed light. I don’t know if you were offering me a plug, but I’m sharing it with all my friends there.
John Sumser: Thanks for hitting the softball. Thanks for hitting the softball.
George LaRocque: There are people that can help with this. There’s no shortage of them available.
John Sumser: What should I have asked you about?
George LaRocque: What should you have asked me about? Gosh, I don’t know. I really enjoyed this conversation. This is what I … We started having this conversation and a couple weeks ago, and we touched on it. That’s really fueled a lot of my thought leading into this conversation. I appreciate the opportunity to be here to talk about this. I think you did a great job today, John.
John Sumser: Thanks, George. How about a couple of bullet points for people to take away.
George LaRocque: A couple of bullet points I would say … You raised a good point, which is if you’re feeling the problem as an employer and you’re frustrated with the usability of your current system, or systems’ ability to talk to each other, and you don’t have that technical expertise or sophistication in house to help you figure that out, get some help. I think I’ve mentioned a few folks that are available to either help you or point you in the right direction to get that help. John is certainly one. I’m one, and [inaudible 00:33:42] advisers and the talent board and so forth.
Another bullet point would be for the vendor side. This is beginning, and there’s still time. This is where the market’s going. You’re going to see a lot of leading vendors lead because of the ecosystems that they’ve built with APIs and integrations and flexibility and putting the customer first into delivering the capabilities that they’re requiring. The time of owning the real estate on the desktop is secondary to providing the service and the experience the customer needs. There’s a lot written about this, and start consuming it.
John Sumser: Okay, and would you mind reintroducing yourself and telling people how to get ahold of you?
George LaRocque: Sure. George LaRocque. You can get ahold of me via HRWins.com. Plenty of buttons and links there, or LaRocqueinc.com. It’s really all one thing. I’m on Twitter at Glarocque. G-L-A-R-O-C-Q-U-E. You’ll find me on LinkedIn and anywhere else everybody’s hanging out these days.
John Sumser: Great. Thanks for taking the time to do this, George. It’s been a real treat. We’ve been talking with George LaRocque, who is the president of LaRocque Inc., and runs HRWins.com. It’s been great having you listening to the conversation. Thanks for joining us. This is the HRExaminer Radio. I’m your host, John Sumser, and have a great weekend. Thanks very much.
George LaRocque: Thanks, John.
End transcript