Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Value Index research, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Total Compensation Management 2023 is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research. Drawing on our Benchmark Research, we apply a structured methodology built on evaluation categories that reflect the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to human capital management vendors supporting the spectrum of total compensation management. Using this methodology, we evaluated vendor submissions in seven categories: five relevant to the product experience ﹘ Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability ﹘ and two related to the customer experience ﹘ TCO/ROI and vendor Validation.

Having just completed the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index for Total Compensation Management, I want to share some of my observations about how the market has advanced since our assessment three years ago. For more than two decades, Ventana Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of related areas including Total Compensation Management (TCM) as well as broader HCM areas ranging from employee experience, learning management, workforce management (WFM) to payroll management and learning. We have also done research on the employee experience and candidate engagement. Our continuous research and analysis of the market for business applications and technologies guide our comprehensive approach to this Value Index.

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Value Index research, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Learning Management Value Index 2023 is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research. Drawing on our Benchmark Research, we apply a structured methodology built on evaluation categories that reflect the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to learning management vendors supporting the spectrum of organizational learning. Using this methodology, we evaluated vendor submissions in seven categories: five relevant to the product experience ﹘ Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability ﹘ and two related to the customer experience ﹘ TCO/ROI and Validation.

Having recently completed the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index for Learning Management Systems (LMS), I’d like to share some of my observations about how the market has advanced since our assessment three years ago. 

A decade ago, organizations were sold on best-of-breed technology stacks. In the world of human capital management, that meant a separate system for each of the myriad processes that make up a worker's life span with a company. The approach seemed to make sense because a single system cannot be the best at everything, can it? Is it realistic for a single provider to create the most advanced applicant tracking, onboarding, learning, payroll, compensation, performance management, succession planning, benefits management and off-boarding system – all in one platform. And so, individual process owners purchased the software that would perform its single task better than every other system, and the Monster Stack was born.

Recruiting is hard. The best candidate often isn’t even actively looking for a new role, and yet recruiters are expected to find the perfect match of skills, experience and fit at exactly the right time and somehow convince that individual to leave a familiar role and work community to join a new organization. Those who are already in the market have gone to considerable lengths to ensure their credentials stand out from the competition, from creating new resumes to forging new professional contacts to honing their interview skills. Organizations would do well to remove as many barriers as possible to ensure the top end of the candidate funnel is open and welcoming to as many qualified applicants as possible, and yet many times the process itself is so daunting that candidates will self-select out in favor of easier paths. Creating a positive and engaging candidate experience is critical to hiring success. The following are five strategies employers can use to ensure they don’t lose the best talent to a competitor’s simpler, more engaging recruiting process.

Compensation management is the practice of strategically aligning worker pay with job roles, responsibilities and organizational objectives. It involves setting pay levels to ensure employees are adequately rewarded for their work while considering factors such as external economic trends, internal equity, budget constraints, tax regulations and compliance requirements.

In January of 2020, I was head of product innovation for a newly launched product in the human capital management technology space, targeting high-volume hiring. We had big ambitions for that year, tied to product development and sales, all documented during our annual goal-setting and performance review process. And then the pandemic hit, and everything changed overnight. Everything, that is, except for my annual goals, or those of my team, which had already been set in stone. When the annual review process came around, nothing we’d set forth earlier in the year was even applicable. How is a leader to evaluate and make compensation recommendations for a team member based on completely outdated criteria?

Ventana Research recently announced its 2023 Market Agenda for Human Capital Management, continuing the guidance we’ve offered for two decades to help organizations derive maximum potential from workforce- and people-related technology investments and initiatives. In crafting this Market Agenda, we focused on three critical themes top-of-mind for both HCM vendors and buyers: Organizational resiliency, employee engagement and utilizing digital technology to derive deeper insights into the state of the workforce so that leadership can take action to promote retention and growth.

As the world of work continues to evolve, so too must the way organizations evaluate talent. Traditional evaluation criteria like education and prior job titles still have a place in hiring, promotion and succession-planning processes. However, organizations that consider transferrable skills first have the opportunity to screen in talent that they may not have otherwise considered, creating a substantial advantage in the proverbial war for talent.

Since its inception, HCM software has upended how people interact with their workplace. Paper resumes have given way to online applications. Physical time clocks have largely disappeared in favor of apps or clocks housed within a point-of-sale system. Even benefits enrollment has entered the digital age, adding tools like decision-support modeling to help enrollees determine which of the myriad offerings will better fit their specific circumstances. This digital transformation does more than just improve productivity and drive compliance. It helps to create an experience for workers that can build trust and engagement. In our research, 64% of organizations indicated that delivering a superior employee experience is a top priority. We assert that by 2025, two-thirds of organizations will require artificial intelligence (AI) in all HCM and adjacent systems to curate personalized experiences for all workers to drive engagement, productivity and retention. UKG, a company founded in 2021 by the merger of two HCM technology giants, Ultimate Software and Kronos, excels in this arena.

The pandemic years saw an exponential rise in organizational investment in digital learning, and for good reason. With in-person learning no longer an option, organizations were forced to quickly adapt to the changing world of work in order to ensure workers were prepared with the knowledge and training necessary to operate in ways they had never before seen. Beyond operational imperatives, organizations have turned to digital learning systems to find new ways to track and bolster productivity, sentiment and engagement of the workforce. This serves to protect the investments made in hiring, onboarding and upskilling or reskilling talent by mitigating risk and regrettable attrition as well as helping employees along a career path that is achievable and desirable for the employee and strategically advantageous to the employer.

It has been three years since Oracle hosted a CloudWorld event live in Las Vegas, and it is clear the time has not been wasted. With 12 new releases since the last event, the Oracle human capital management product team has made significant advances in both product and service. Three areas of note: Oracle HCM’s continued focus on personalization of experience, meeting the HCM needs of the healthcare industry and advancing the Oracle Cloud Recruiting offering.

Some weeks back I published my thoughts about the traditional applicant tracking system and how that technology is no longer sufficient to support organizations’ complex recruiting needs. This is particularly true when trying to take a one-size-fits-all approach to hiring processes. Having identical hiring processes and requirements for professional hires as for low-complexity, low barrier-to-entry roles will inevitably result in lost candidates, frustrated recruiters and hiring managers, and low application-to-hire conversion rates. It doesn’t have to be that way. The right technology can support a hiring process that is purpose built for the segment it is intended to attract and hire.

The learning management system technology market has evolved dramatically over the past two decades. Learning management systems, now commonly referred to as learning experience platforms, are an integral resource for any organization concerned about productivity, organizational agility and operational excellence. These technologies enable organizations to demonstrate an investment in people, as the LMS not only facilitates regulatory and legal compliance and other forms of cost and risk avoidance but also improves internal mobility, career growth and the employee experience, leading to improved employee productivity, engagement and retention.

Payroll Management is one of the six major focus areas in the Human Capital Management research and advisory practice at Ventana Research. “Continuous payroll” is a hot topic in this area, with much discussion about the always-on nature of this enhanced payroll function and its related demands for supporting technologies. Advancements in payroll technologies and practices have paved the way for off-cycle payroll transactions and pay modes – like earned wage access, for example – to become the new normal. Injecting continuous payroll practices into global organizations operating in multiple countries, each with its own pay-related laws, regulations and customs, requires complex functionality that many payroll systems simply do not have. Managing global payroll requires expertly maximizing human knowledge and intelligent systems to meet both international and regional requirements.

People analytics enable organizations to gain data-driven insights that optimize the impact and value of the workforce. For decades, human capital management (HCM) leaders have been sold tools marketed as analytics that were no more than dashboards filled with nice visualizations of historic data with no context as to what each individual data point meant to their strategic objectives and initiatives. And yet, our recent Analytics and Data Benchmark Research shows that 83% of organizations indicate that dashboards are very important or are currently in use for analytics. A dashboard, while important for a snapshot view of key metrics, is not an analytics tool. Today, advances in technology allow systems to provide actionable insights into potential people risks or opportunities before it’s too late.

It has been nearly two and a half years since the world was thrust into one of the most dramatic eras of workforce transformation in the modern era. Organizations have been forced to reevaluate everything about the workforce, from the physical spaces in which work is done, to compensation, to non-traditional benefits and work/life enhancement offerings. Even so, many continue to struggle to attract and retain the right talent to support operational needs. As leaders continue to redesign how they look at their talent pools, they have come to rely on their technology stacks more than ever to inform and enable new processes and experiences for candidates and employees, and recruiters and managers, throughout the entire talent life cycle. We at Ventana Research assert that by 2025, two-thirds of organizations will expect full talent life cycle support from their talent platform to bolster and unify the experience for candidates, recruiters, employees and managers.

The applicant tracking system, for all its shortcomings, revolutionized the way people found and applied for jobs when it first hit the market in the mid-1990s. Electronic applications quickly became the norm, resume or application review became more accessible for hiring teams and compliance was much more trackable and achievable, thanks to streamlined application processes. Today, tracking and compliance aren’t enough to power the complex world of recruitment. The Great Resignation has made it abundantly clear that candidates expect the same type of consumerized experience in the hiring process as they do when buying anything at all. To win or keep the best talent, organizations must make the hiring process personalized and enjoyable, and a traditional ATS simply cannot support that mandate.

I spent years in the talent acquisition space, and I think that at least several months of that time – cumulatively – was spent just trying to get people to calm down. Talent acquisition is a critically important business process, but if I had a dollar for every time I had to remind someone that there really are no recruiting emergencies, I’d be a wealthy woman.

In my more than two decades in the world of human resources and human capital management technology, I have never seen a topic become so completely ubiquitous so quickly as has employee experience. This is great news from my perspective. As I addressed in this recent analyst perspective, market factors have forced organizations to acknowledge the tremendous bottom-line value of an engaged workforce, and that engagement is wholly dependent upon an employer's commitment to providing a personalized, well-rounded experience.

Compensation management is a key talent management process involving all workers and managers within an organization. Determining and providing the appropriate compensation for each person — whether it involves base pay, merit pay, or variable pay and incentives such as bonuses — is critical to being able to attract and retain productive members of the workforce, including full- and part-time employees, contingent workers and contractors. The complexities of compensation often prove to be a core challenge for human resources departments as they strive to keep the organization productive, satisfied and motivated while ensuring equitable and defensible pay practices across the entire workforce.

Personalization is everywhere, from clothes that are selected for us and delivered to our homes, to the ads we see, to the movies we stream. It’s no surprise that employees expect that same level of curated experience in the workplace. And yet, evidence abounds to the contrary. The proverbial black hole of recruiting is still the bane of existence of everyone who has applied for a job online and has heard nothing back. Companies still tout “self-directed career advancement” as a positive quality while employees don’t even know what opportunities may be available to them and long for guidance and support. Benefits departments offer subsidized childcare, while offering pet insurance would be more beneficial (and less costly!) for a forgotten portion of the employee population.

I am excited to announce that I have joined Ventana Research to lead our market coverage of our Human Capital Management expertise, including focus areas of Continuous Payroll, Employee Experience, Learning Management, Talent Management, Total Compensation Management and Workforce Management.