There will be over 400 HR product and service providers in the expo hall at HR Tech in September. A typical company makes use of 8 - 11 of these tools, some as many as 30.
And that is wonderful. I love working in HR Technology. Companies are increasingly free to mix and match different solutions to deliver the employee experience that is right for them. New products come to market all the time. And the entrepreneurs behind these products are pretty consistently driven by a desire to make work better for employees.Better for employees that don't work in HR Operations and People Analytics, that is. Because all that innovation leads to data fragmentation. In your organization, you might recruit candidates using SmartRecruiters in some countries and iCIMS in others. You might do candidate assessments in Criteria Corp and Weirdly. Those candidates might get hired into Workday, have their performance reviews in Reflektive and share their own feedback through Glint surveys.
This would not be in the least bit surprising. And it also wouldn't be surprising if your internal systems landscape changed significantly within the next 12 months. The pace of innovation in this space is not slowing down. And the all-in-one suite vendors can’t keep pace with 400 best of breed tools. So if you want to adopt new technology and benefit from all this innovation, you will have to deal with data fragmentation. How do you adopt new innovation without losing your history? What if the new technology isn’t a fit? Can you try something else without having a gaping hole in your analytics and reporting? How will you align your data to figure out if the system is even working?
We're going to call this One Model Difference your Data Insurance Policy. One Model pulls together all the data from your HR systems and related tools, then organizes and connects this data as if it all came from a single source. This means you can transition between technology products without losing your data. This empowers you to choose which technology fits your business without suffering a data or transition penalty.
I remember chatting about this with Chris back at HR Tech last year. At the time I was working at SmartRecruiters and I remember thinking... Here we are, all these vendors making our pitches and talking about all the great results you're going to get if you go with our product. And here's Chris literally standing in the middle of it all with One Model. And if you sign up with One Model, you'll be able to validate all these results for yourself because you can look across systems.
For example, you could look at your time to hire for the last 5 years and see if it changed after you implemented a new ATS. If you switched out your HRIS, you could still look backwards in time from new system to old and get a single view of your HR performance. You could line up results from different survey vendors. You'd literally have "one model," and your choice of technology on top of that would be optional.
That's a powerful thought.
A few months later, here I am getting settled in at One Model. I'm getting behind the scenes, seeing how how all this really comes together. And yeah, it looks just as good from the inside as it did from the outside. I've known Chris for a while, so it's not like I was worried he was BS-ing me. But, given all the new vendors competing for your attention, you'd be nuts if you haven't become a little skeptical about claims like data-insurance-policy-that-makes-it-so-you-can-transition-between-products-without-losing-your-data.
Second, One Model doesn't charge per data source. That would be like one of those insurance policies where everything is out-of-network. With One Model, your systems are in-network. If you add a new system and you want the data in One Model, we'll add the data to One Model. If we don't have a connector, we'll build one.
One of our clients has data from 40 systems in One Model. 40 systems. In one single model. In its own database. With no fees per data source.
So go wild at HR Tech this fall. It is in Vegas after all. Add all the solutions that are right for your employees. And tell all your new vendors you'll be able to hold them accountable for all those bold ROI-supporting metrics they’re claiming. Because you can put all your data into One Model for all your people analytics. You can see for yourself. And if you swap that vendor out later, you’ll take all your data with you.
Just don't wait until then to reach out to us at One Model. We love talking shop. And if you happen to like what you see with One Model, we can have your data loaded well before you get to Vegas.
One Model provides a data management platform and comprehensive suite of people analytics directly from various HR technology platforms to measure all aspects of the employee lifecycle. Use our out-of-the-box integrations, metrics, analytics, and dashboards, or create your own as you need to. We provide a full platform for delivering more information, measurement, and accountability from your team.