Published: Sep 24, 2019Time to read: 8mins Category: Insights

‘Up and Running in a Couple of Weeks’: PeopleFluent Expands to the Mid-Enterprise HR Software Market

Up until now, PeopleFluent’s best-of-breed HR software solutions for performance, succession, compensation, recruitment and learning have been aimed largely at enterprise organizations. These companies typically have over 5,000 employees, large HR teams, and often have sophisticated and complex talent management needs.

Today, we’re expanding these solutions to suit mid-enterprise companies that have 1,000-5,000 employees.

PeopleFluent understands that mid-size enterprise organizations have their own unique needs and strategies. Through a robust set of user-friendly administrative tools, our solutions have the flexibility required to adapt to those unique needs and strategies.

PeopleFluent’s mid-market talent management software benefits include:

  • Accelerated time-to-value, affordability, and delivering quick ROI
  • Built for rapid deployment and ease of use
  • Experienced design with best-practice configurations
  • Implementation and use in weeks, not months
  • Sophistication with the depth of capabilities

Here, PeopleFluent’s Managing Director, Stephen Bruce, explains the expansion into the mid-enterprise market, who would benefit, and how.

Q: Why has PeopleFluent entered the mid-enterprise HR software space?

Stephen: For mid-enterprise organizations, there hasn't really been a vendor specializing in their specific needs. Mid-enterprise companies, in general, have all of the same levels of sophistication and complexity but have constrained resources (in budget and staff) to really support those needs. For example, an organization that has 2,500 employees may have global locations, staff and highly-complex roles in a competitive market that requires very specific hiring needs, skillsets, training and talent strategies. These mid-size organizations need software to have the depth of capabilities to meet those unique and complex talent strategies but that’s also easy to use and can be rapidly deployed and administered by smaller HR teams.

The challenge for mid-enterprise organizations is that if they go with an enterprise-level solution, it requires:

  • a significant implementation effort that consumes a huge amount of time and resources from an HR team that has other responsibilities,
  • an immense level of training for everyone to use the applications, and...
  • it’s costly to administer, deploy and update to adjust in response to business change.

Another challenge for mid-enterprise organizations is that the alternative to enterprise applications are small-market solutions, that:
have light capabilities that require customers to conform their process to the software,

  • lack the talent functionality to meet the needs of the business, requiring manual processes (often in Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel) that task HR further, limiting the effectiveness of the HR team, and...
  • have, within the capabilities that do exist, limited configurability. This forces HR teams to decide whether to deploy certain features ‘as is’ or simply turn off those features altogether.

Q: What sets PeopleFluent’s mid-enterprise HR software solutions apart?

Stephen: What makes our mid-enterprise solutions unique is that HR processes can be pre-configured to best practices. We're deploying a pre-configured environment out of the box where a customer could literally be up and running in a couple of weeks.

This allows an organization to tailor the software to their unique needs as they go. Anyone can be out of the box and running with performance management, succession planning, compensation, recruitment, and learning in just a few weeks. Considering that it typically takes organizations several months to deploy equivalent solutions, this is nothing short of immense.

Q: What are the complexities of having a smaller HR staff?

Stephen: If you're a large enterprise company, you’ll likely have an entire HRIS (Human Resource Information System) team whose sole purpose is just to maintain all of the data and systems that are required. But in mid-enterprise organizations, you may have an HR person or even someone with shared responsibilities overseeing these same HR systems.

When you think about the level of effort that a large enterprise needs to support, maintain and configure the solutions to meet their complex, ongoing business changes, it's understandable that they would select a sophisticated product aimed at a large enterprise. They have the resources to address that. But in the mid-market, they don't. A single HRIS person isn’t going to have the ability to handle all of the complexities of a very large, complex enterprise application and rollout.

Another challenge for the mid-enterprise HR person is working with several different point solutions. Trying to bolt all of these point solutions together is going to be even more difficult for a single HRIS person to manage and maintain. More importantly, it'll be almost impossible to train all your managers and staff, because they're typically only using these products based on cyclical talent events. This could be a succession planning exercise, a performance evaluation process, setting goals, a merit increase process, setting bonuses or tracking some form of long-term incentive.

Or, it could be as simple as creating a new requisition to replace an employee. These processes can also be seasonal, so new managers will be trying to learn the process, system and philosophy of the talent process all at the same time. Ultimately, managers aren’t in the system every day. Therefore, you need HR software that they can easily access, is quick to understand and is intuitive to use.

Q: What support is offered with the mid-enterprise products?

Stephen: Because mid-enterprise organizations lack a dedicated internal function to manage HRIS, we’re bundling together our premium support and managed services offerings to assist. Here, we bundle together 40 or 80 hours a year as part of the software subscription price, where customers can call us to assist them in system configurations or other administrative changes.

Let's say that after deployment, an organization wants to change something, maybe modify a succession slate, performance plan or create a unique way to drive calculations for a bonus plan. While the HR team can easily make these changes itself, this managed service offering allows them to outsource some of these changes to PeopleFluent at no additional cost. 

Bundling in managed services as part of the subscription means you can call us up and leverage the deep product expertise available on the PeopleFluent team to make rapid changes to your talent processes—sometimes in a matter of just a few hours. This way, you get all of the benefits of having an HRIS team like the large enterprise customers do.

Q: So how would a small organization with a very small HR team find this useful? How would these solutions save them time and money?

Stephen: Let's say you're 1,700 employees and you have an HR team that’s going to administer the solution. As a cloud-based application, there’s no software to support or maintain. You'll literally load in your data and start using the HR software right out of the box, with a product that will allow you to immediately address and automate manual processes that your organization is doing today. 

Most organizations are doing some form of performance management, some form of compensation etc. These are predominantly done manually through Excel or Word and you're tracking and managing this manually. For your smaller HR team, you can shift from the back-end administration of these processes to being more of a business partner and be out in front with the customer to be driving better talent decisions.

Even for small organizations that have deployed a few point solutions, mid-enterprise HR solutions offer a huge time-saving opportunity. Instead of having to manually load records into most of these cloud-based tools or do data loads, you can set up a data feed out of your HR system. You won’t have to administer all of these different systems. More importantly, you're not going to have to spend as much time training your people or manually pulling data out of each of these disparate applications and aggregating them together to form your overall talent view.

We believe that this really is the future of how organizations will operate—a blend of phenomenal user experience and amazing feature capabilities. Because organizations need both. You no longer need to either sacrifice capability for experience or experience for capability—we offer the best of both worlds.

Q: How are the solutions sold?

Stephen: All products can be sold as standalone solutions or bundled for our various customer types and their diverse needs. These bundles take into account organization size, organization requirements, and challenges the customer is looking to solve.

Learn more about our mid-enterprise HR software solutions from PeopleFluent.

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