Personnel Today Awards 2023 shortlist: HR Tech Provider of the Year  

The Personnel Today Awards 2023 take place on 21 November 2023. Now that the shortlists for each category have been revealed, we take a closer look at the entrants hoping to win the HR Tech Provider of the Year title.

Culture Amp

Already used by 6,500 organisations across 193 countries, Culture Amp aims to help organisations of any size within any industry to have genuinely productive, fulfilling people strategies by amplifying the employee experience. People science (PS) is embedded in the Culture Amp platform, blending organisational psychology and data science with real business insights and user empathy. The PS team comprises 50-plus researchers, scientists, and advisers with PhDs ranging from organisational psychology to machine learning. They analyse millions of survey responses worldwide to feed insights from top-performing companies back into the platform consistently, working with customers to identify the best way to survey their own employees, create strategies for collecting feedback, and sift through data to make impactful business decisions.

Culture Amp aims to empower companies to transform employee engagement, develop high-performing teams, and retain talent via cutting-edge research, powerful technology, and the largest employee dataset in the world. It does this by providing organisations with the ability to achieve intentional culture at scale. The firm constantly reviews its data pool to identify new means of supporting organisations. For example, data from over 1 million responses found that if a manager doesn’t show interest in their career, direct reports are 43% more likely to leave.

One client, Fishawack, was struggling with its people policy: there were issues around disengagement and high staff turnover. The company implemented Culture Amp and saw its engagement scores for new starters and its ratings as a great place to work hit new heights.

Health Sector Talent

As at May 2023, the Southern Health and Social Care Trust, one of five NHS Trusts in Northern Ireland, had about 600 care packages outstanding, each package representing both a patient and a hospital bed. Its goals were to fill more of its domiciliary care vacancies in order to discharge more patients and to attract more people into the occupation. There was a need to explain what domiciliary care was and that anyone that had ever cared for someone at home; a child, a parent, a sibling or other relative or friend, that with the proper training and support, could do this job.

The tactic was to recruit at scale and pace with the mechanism being to host three large scale recruitment open days over a two-month period. HST was selected because of its tech, a proprietary system built from the ground up during Covid-19 to deliver candidates faster and at scale.

HST and its platform Healthdaq delivered improved efficiency and better outcomes than had previously been achieved by the Trust. Improved talent attraction with simplified application stage has resulted in record job applications being received for social care vacancies within the Trust. Furthermore, digital advertising campaigns generated 8,738 visits from 6,491 users leading to 974 expressions of interest and 302 formal applications.

The Southern Health and Social Care Trust says it has yet to come across any provider other than HST that can provide an automated yet customised nurture journey of tailored, personalised and relevant branded content served through a social-style interface experience which is directly linked to the stage the candidate is at. Among the most innovative aspects of the package is that it: personalises a user’s content experience depending on their known data; can bolt-on modules built around the candidate experience; and continues to support candidates even when they haven’t been successful in their application.

Meet & Engage

Meet & Engage’s clients reported facing challenges in how to effectively keep candidates informed and feel confident during the application process in order to prevent drop-outs. The company’s goal was to create a solution that would give candidates the information and support they needed to feel prepared and confident at each stage of their recruitment journey. The result was Recruitment Process Nurture.

Meet & Engage says that on average, 95% of candidates said the content was useful in helping them prepare for their next recruitment stage. One client found that those who had registered for the portal were 17% more likely to complete the first assessment stage, with 17% more likely to go on and pass that stage. Another client saw a 74% increase in black heritage candidates succeeding through to the second stage of their process.

There is little to no further input needed by the client once Recruitment Process Nurture is deployed, allowing recruiters to spend their time focused on supporting candidates in other ways. In 2022 Meet & Engage implemented a new candidate engagement portal for one of SSCL’s customers using the Recruitment Process Nurture functionality. SSCL said the expertise and insight from Meet & Engage had been invaluable in evolving its services.

OpenBlend

The OpenBlend platform is specifically designed to support effective manager-employee conversations that extend beyond performance to include wellbeing, motivation, and development. It’s also built to support employees at an individual level. The platform enables employees to highlight a number of key ‘motivators’ that have a direct impact on their ability to perform, and which should be discussed alongside their performance goals. By capturing these unique drivers, OpenBlend helps managers to frame highly effective conversations around the issues that matter most to each and every individual.

The platform is used by 60-plus organisations, including well-known brands such as Gymshark, Dr Martens, Foxtons, Lacoste, M&C Saatchi, Joules, Joseph Joseph, and The Princes’ Trust.

OpenBlend does not only use technology to differentiate its offer. As a team, it complement its platform with a strong customer-centric ethos, and dedicates time and resources to support this. It’s a topic that founder, Anna Rasmussen, has written about, and it’s why its customer retention sits at 98%. Customers have remarked on how helpful it was that OpenBlend ran the training sessions for HR and provided hands-on support. The team has been described as being “super flexible” and willing to adapt to evolving needs.

During the Covid crisis, Travelport engaged OpenBlend to support better connection, wellbeing, and performance through meaningful conversations. It said OpenBlend had played a critical role in helping it to introduce coaching for performance as a staple of its culture and had been an important part of its success in people terms.

Zalaris

Zalaris is a comprehensive HR and payroll services and technology supplier specialising in providing transactional business services supported by a single, cloud-based, global solution. Globally, Zalaris has seen 15% year-on-year revenue growth. With a net promoter score of +56, Zalaris serves two million employees monthly, worldwide, for more than 350 clients in about 150 countries. It continues to gain major clients, including Hitachi Energy, Sony Entertainment, CLAAS, Porsche to name a few with more in the pipeline for 2023.

Zalaris is investigating innovative ways to automate payroll by, for instance, using phones as digital capture devices. Pay on demand is another innovation allowing employees to access monies earned before the month’s end, while a CO2 mapping feature charts employees’ business and commuting travel with the aim of reducing emissions. Then there’s the Global Payroll Control Centre solution, which charts data analytics on a world map, giving customers full control of their multi-country payroll. Clients can reduce costs by 25-30% by deploying Zalaris’ PeopleHub platform.