Greg Irwin  0:18  

Hi, everybody. My name is Greg Irwin it's okay, let's just jump right now. We have been hosting this series with Jacqueline and her team at HRchitect now for the better part of a couple years. Jacqueline, like, truly we consider you one of the one of the thought leaders, one of the true subject matter experts here in terms of HR technology, I'm gonna give my high level. And then Jacqueline, I'd like you to kind of kind of build upon it. So we, HRchitect is doing this with us for awareness, we are where research shop, we host 1000s of these sessions a year. But when it comes to HR tech, it's always with Jacqueline and her team. They help with selections, they help with implementations, they help with strategy. So here for awareness, we pick a topic, and we dig in. It's always more fun when it's really interactive. Always work. So don't be surprised if you're on the line. And I asked you a question, you know, shares deeper, as superficial as you like. It always makes it better when we can kind of hear what people are working on their successes. This isn't all about pain. This is about like, hey, we did it, it's killing it. It's easy. It's helping. Like that's that's kind of what we want to get at. As well as we've got a challenge. You know, here's what we're working on. We've tried this, we tried that not working as well as we hoped. Not all the answers have to come from HRchitect or me. I love it when we're on the line and someone shares have you tried this, or, Hey, I tried this. And here's what I learned. So we've got a chat window here on the side, please use it. It is really nice kind of sidebar where people can talk while the mainstream conversation is going on. And then lastly, everyone here has an interest in HR tech to some varying degree, use this as a networking word. So again, you do not have to connect with BWG or HRchitect, but you might find somebody else here who you think is useful, interesting, or you just want to keep a dialogue with, you can go to LinkedIn. Amazing that way. And if you'd like a warm intro, we're happy to help. So just reach back out to the team here. And we'll make those intro requests by that's kind of the setting the stage. Yeah, couldn't do me a favor, please give a little better intro on HRchitect, and then we're gonna get into the topics of some of the trends around HR tech.

Jacqueline Kuhn  3:18  

Fabulous. Thanks, Greg, thank you all for joining us on this lovely summer afternoon. At least this lovely up here in the Chicago area. HRchitect is a full service, human capital management, technology, people technology firm, we implement things and we help people figure out what they need to buy and implement. We do many other things in between. We are growing rapidly. Our growth has been really explosive in the past 24 months. Two years ago, we were at 32 employees, US and Canada. We're now close to 150, US and Canada. And yeah, it's just been explosive, because the demand for HCM technology has just gone out the roof. It's it's no longer an option. It's a necessity. And firms like us are really being able to benefit from that. And so my myself and my team, we help people figure out the market. We help people we study the market, we talk to the vendors, we talk to clients of vendors and we help folks figure out what's best for them, cut through the noise cut through the the marketing hype and really figure out what's best for them.

Greg Irwin  4:33  

Alright, so I've got my my, my first question, but what before I do that, I'm going to ask everybody, if you're on the line, go to this meeting, chat and drop in there. The one thing that you want to hear about not just from HRchitect, I might take it around the group and ask some others. So it could be you know, Global Payroll, it could be HCM stack, it could be recruiting, it could be talent, the more detailed the question, the better. So the more specific the question, the better. But it doesn't have to be it can be grand, you know, Hey, has anyone tried AI? Or, you know, for recruiting or whatever, whatever, wherever you want to go, but stop listening to me. Drop, drop your question into the chat. All right. Jacqueline, my first question. First of all, 32 people do 150 That is killer. That is amazing. Um, what are your clients asking you for? The Why do you need 150 people? Because what are all these companies coming to you to talk about? What are some of the big hitters

Jacqueline Kuhn  5:46  

it's, it's mostly to implement and support existing applications around UKG Ceridian workforce software, and some talent acquisition products, but it's really around the the core and really workforce management, our workforce management demand is, is really crazy, it's kind of hard to keep up with it. Because every one, not just your classic hourly manufacturing, or retail organizations, everyone is doing workforce management now. It's, it's kind of no longer optional. See, you need to know who you have and where they are and where they're working. So you can tax them and be in compliance. And in the global remote world that we're in today, everybody needs to report on where they're at. And many organizations have never done it before. And so our demand in that area is is huge. But it's really, yeah, implementing and supporting those those products that the support sides ramping up, because you can't find people to work in the positions to keep those systems up and running. So yeah, so that's really where we're that that demand has come from.

Greg Irwin  7:08  

Let me follow up. And by the way, thank you, Brenda. Jeff. John, these are good questions. This is going to help us out here. So keep them coming. Jacqueline workforce management. Why? So regulations have always been there? I'm wondering, are we talking performance session

Jacqueline Kuhn  7:27  

planning? Now we're really we're really talking the nuts and bolts around tracking time. And knowing where people are working, it's not about regulation. It's not about like the old line hourly regulations and FLSA. It's about am I working remote? Am I on site? What state Am I in? Where am I working today? What am I working on? Am I working on the right things? You know, the non exempt person cracking, they're working, where about where as in the past, no one focused or cared about it. Some of it is productivity, but a lot of it is compliance to the payroll, because you got to know where to tax somebody based on where they're working. And many organizations have never done that before.

Greg Irwin  8:17  

Is it? Isn't that compliance, that tax compliance? Or is it because as I hear it, I'm thinking, Wait a minute, managers not trusting remote employees and wanting to get better performance.

Jacqueline Kuhn  8:31  

It's both it actually is both. And it even kind of goes beyond that, though, if you think about so. Let's say especially in cities and states, where it's very easy to to live in one work in another offices in one, but I'm working from home and another and or people moving around, right? Like, you know, I I'm moving, or I have a summer home, and I'm now working for my summer home, which is different than my winter home. And I need to be taxed differently because I'm now working at a different place. And the only way to capture that is and to know where someone is working is really through time. The other piece of it is the time off component and a lot of compliance and equity in tracking time off in the past. Historically a salaried person usually just takes time off whatever no one cares, no one's tracking. But in the world of legislative compliance, and being fair, making sure that and you know when you when it comes to money, having to pay it out when somebody leaves really need to know what's on the books, it's a liability. So putting more rigor around that is really what's driving the interest in Workforce Management. But then the other piece of it is the workforce planning and knowing what you need, but that's a different piece of it. Yeah.

Greg Irwin  10:08  

I'm wondering, I mean, do you get much blowback from organizations trying to deploy this where employees are thinking, you know, too much oversight.

Jacqueline Kuhn  10:21  

Um, employees are not very happy when those kinds of things happen. But that's where the change management comes in, and really explaining that, you know, it's better for business, it's better for you, right? I mean, we, we all it's, it's very weird, because most companies have always had a policy that you're supposed to be doing this, but they didn't enforce it. And it's really now a matter of enforcing those policies that were already that were already there. We're not creating anything new. We're just really enforcing and finding a better way to track what we should have always been doing. So yeah, it's a big culture change. It's, you know, it's a natural part of the evolution of this work anywhere kind of workforce that we have today. Because as an employer, you are responsible, overall, for your employee, when they're working, where they're at what they're doing, et cetera. And this is just what people are now implementing things that and enhancing what they currently have. Because we've just not had the discipline in the past, particularly in the US. They've had this discipline in other parts of the world, the US has been very, very slack with the non exempt group and having to force them to do time,

Greg Irwin  11:47  

right. I'm going to put this to the group. So I'm guessing everybody here is a zoom Pro. In case you're not, there's a little smiley face reactions, just move your your mouse over the grid, you'll see a reactions click on that. And there's a raise a hand. That's kind of the orderly way, what I'm going to ask is, who here has a story about implementing workforce management? What's gone? Well, what hasn't gone? Well, what's a question? It's always more fun, when people can share a story. Also, questions. I don't want to ask all the questions here. It's gonna be it's gonna get really mundane. So I'd like to hear from you all. So and you'll have more fun with it'll be more interesting when you're when you're asking the questions I got. We have a lot of good ones here. And Aaron, thank you for yours on AI and recruiting and bias. That's going to be my next one. So we'll go through these questions. But before we do, raise a hand or jump right into the mix, unmute and jump in, who here has had an experience? Good, bad or ugly? With deploying workforce management? Employee time? You know, where they live? Where they work? Tracking and how it's gone? I'd love to hear your story. Oh, no, we're not going to I are angry to call somebody out. I think I have a feeling somebody has. Oh, Laurie, thank you. Totally bailed me out.

Laurie  13:18  

So currently, we use UK, G, which is formerly ulti Pro. And we've used that for quite a few years, I want to say it was back in maybe 2011. We implemented UK, G, it was not our first choice. But there are some there's a situation that happened, we kind of had to do UKG at the last minute. And we're now kind of assessing the UKG system and are looking at the landscape of can we find something better because although UKG is very robust, it is also quite expensive. And for us just using the core system for payroll and benefits and for time, it's I'm guessing that we're overpaying for for the UK G system and and I'd be interested, Jacqueline to hear maybe your perspective around. I feel like we're in this constant battle of being we're very conservative at my organization. We're 100 year old insurance company and we're very conservative. We love our compliance. But I think that we're struggling with balancing running a business with everything that we could be doing that just I feel like overly compliant. Is that even a phrase? And I do I think we got it. Yeah. And I Jacqueline, I would just love your perspective on how, how to maybe shift gears or as we're looking at a new age Try HR system? How can we make that shift? Because I have a few people on my team who I would love to give more meaningful work to. So they could have a bigger impact in the organization. But they're so heads down compliant. Reach out to Brittany, she moved out of state reach out to Greg, he moved back in the state. And there's, I'm not even sure where to begin. Sorry, that was a lot. Everyone

Greg Irwin  15:25  

was good stuff. How many? How many employees? Are you? All North America? Just give us the real basics.

Laurie  15:32  

So we are 660 employees headquartered in Colorado, but we are in 40 states.

Greg Irwin  15:45  

All right, Jacqueline, what do you think? Do they need UKG? Or can they simplify and, you know,

Jacqueline Kuhn  15:54  

so a couple of things, I will kind of put my foot out there. And we are UKG partner. So I will first of all say that. But I do bet that given how long you've been on the platform, you're probably paying more than market price, because each renewal term would be an increase and increase and increase and increase. So you're probably paying higher than market right now, I would almost guess that you are. The other thing that I would guess is, you probably haven't taken advantage of the system capability and enhancements that could make your folks lives better. What we typically see when someone is on an application for as long as you have been somewhere around year eight or nine, it's kind of become stagnant. And anything new that gets added doesn't get adopted. And, you know, four or five years ago, they put in place a lot of things that probably could help what you're doing right now. So now, I, what I would recommend really is kind of go at this as if you're and actually do a market scan with looking at vendors formally UKG will participate. And they will have to respond just like any other vendor as if you would be a net new sale for them. And you would go about looking at what are your requirements? How do you want to work in the future? And, you know, perhaps, doing an optimization of UKG might make sense. But perhaps there's someone else in the market that may make make more sense, the challenge you're going to have is implementing something new is gonna have a big price tag on it. And, and you know, will your conservative organization be able to stomach that price tag? But yeah, when you're on a product, as long as you have been, I absolutely recommend doing a full market scan, go go back to square one, what do you need today? How do you want to work, and then see what else is out there. And if you end up staying on UKG, renegotiate that term, write it, you know, every every term renewal a three or 5% increase, you are going to be over market at some point, and you probably are today, that would be my gosh, thank you,

Laurie  18:25  

I appreciate that. And we I feel like I continuously challenged my team of looking at the new UKG products and seeing what's out there. What always brings us up is coming back and saying it'll be an extra 20,000 And I'll be an extra 15 1000s Like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna you know,

Jacqueline Kuhn  18:47  

when you when you look at that, and then let's say, you know, at 600 employees, you're probably looking at Ceridian isolved, something like that. You know, okay, you have that, or, and or a $300,000 implementation of something else. Right. So is, you know, is it a 50,000 investment or, you know, but that's what really doing a full market scan will do for you is really understand what investment do you need to make to work the way you want to work? And what's the best option to do that? Because, you know, sometimes that $30,000 investment does make more sense, when you look at what the alternatives are.

Laurie  19:33  

Thank you. I appreciate that. Laurie, thank

Greg Irwin  19:38  

you, Jacqueline. We've got a whole list of questions here. Why don't we try and hack away at some of them? And it's, it's always better when we get the real voiceover. So I'm looking at Jade Jade question here of pros and cons of managed services for HR benefits payroll. I think that's a good one. because, you know, it's often hard to fully staff and really manage these. And I'm sure manage is one thing that everybody does evaluate to a certain extent. Jade, I don't know if you have any further context you want to add to that, and then we'll we'll get

Jade  20:16  

at it. Hi, everyone. Um, I have to say my question was a little biased because in my former career, this is kind of one of the things that I did when I just saw a lot of value add for my clients. However, I understand there's hesitancy so I just was wondering, from Jacqueline's perspective, what

Greg Irwin  20:36  

were her insight? Maybe? What do you think, Jacqueline. So um,

Jacqueline Kuhn  20:44  

the power around managed services is you don't have to go finding people. And hiring people and keeping them on staff is really tough. Right? I mean, that's, that's hard to do. And you're going to, you know, pay top dollar, I don't care where you are, who you're hiring, you're paying top dollar today, because there are very few people who really know how to run benefits, HR and Payroll. The con is, in order to do that, you have to have very standard regular normalized processes, no managed service providers going to take you on, if you've got an exception for every rule, they're going to want to make sure that you bought processes that can be executed in a way that is consistent, and that they don't have to call you for every exception. Oh, so and so wanted to do this, it's not in the rule, right? Because your managed service provider needs to be able to make it repetitive and repeatable in order for them to be able to support you. So if you're an organization that managers by exception, it's not really for you, because your managed service provider is not going to make those calls. You know, you're going to need people in those functions to do that. If you can standardize and if you have processes that that pretty much have, you know, you don't manage by exception you can you've got good rules in place. It can be a very cost effective and efficient way to to manage those operational aspects of your system.

Greg Irwin  22:27  

If it's okay, I'm going to keep bouncing around and I'd like to invite in Zara, Maddy, Zara, I was just reading on the side here. Some of your comments in terms of enterprise. HCM? Would you mind helping us give a little voiceover in terms of some of the challenges you've seen in deploying one doing requirements gathering? On the deployments?

Zara  22:54  

Greg, this is this is a great conversation, I would love to be more of a listener. But there has been, you know, past experiences and implementations of ATMs really starts with home. So not preaching to the choir. They're all experts here. But the biggest challenges that I've experienced during the study and understanding the requirements is, what is it all the modules that a client needs? And what are you looking for? What are you trying to achieve? All these big HCM products come with nine different modules, and some are third party some way at first parties, the workflows, the challenges that I've seen are three big I would group them in three big categories. One would be is understanding of what you're looking to do, whether it's replacing a product, how much data has been saved, what is your data assets look like? What's your general life library look like? The other thing is, you know, where's your executive sponsor sponsors, being able to tie in with the right management team of the vendor while you're sourcing or after implementation is a big plus for ongoing price negotiations and putting some escalations to place and then being able to have that conversation going, seen a big gap on that you implement in the vendor leaves? So what happens after that, you know, how, how well have you prepared? Because I feel like the journey starts at that time, where you have implemented and you see a vacuum. The third most important thing what I've seen is is training and marketing and communication. See it we implement all of these beautiful products. And then we look at the initial consumptions and measurements, but then we start looking at, you know, the retraining after we educate our clients enough or customers enough. Do we do the right marketing? Are we doing are we leveraging what we're, we have bought, do we need to get? Did we need to get less so having to let go is also okay, at times. So again, there's so much conversation We can have on this, but ATMs as on a product perspectives ready and UKG, Paylocity, all of these various products, they all have wonderful edge, you know, they all have their niche, but what are you looking to do? And then what is this? What is going to be making you success? And within a few months of your implementation, you have to see the results and the value proposition right from the get go. So those are the things and again, this is my favorite topics I have to tell you.

Greg Irwin  25:29  

I'm gonna go I'm gonna layer on one more. What's one new capability? So you said, Look, you have to do real requirements gathering, I get that. From your perspective, what's one real capability that if implemented, well could have a major impact on HR operations, HR performance, what's 111 area that you would have this group pay a little extra time extra attention to?

Zara  25:57  

Okay, I would say clean data. So what you put into system is what you're going to get out of, so having your policies in place and having your your people data in place, you know, being able to have that cleanup done prior to dumping data, and then cleaning up. It also depends on the agile and implementation style that a client wants to adopt. And the other other big one, I would say is integration. So being having a cognizant, you know, keen focus on what's internal, what's what's integrated, versus what's a lot of things we think that yeah, it has it, or integration is there, but what type of integration does the client have? The product has, or workflows overall, the workflow itself the integration of the workflow from get go, is I we found that as a key success criteria

Greg Irwin  26:48  

greenstuff czar really appreciate it. Thank Thank you. Thank you. Let's keep going. Good questions all around. Let's go to let's go. Alright, let's let's not skip AI, Aaron raised it earlier, AI in recruiting, managing bias, and making sure that we're cognizant and control, you know, recognizing bias and managing bias. Jacqueline, I'm gonna come to you with this. Ai. To what extent are you seeing a red Floyd, particularly here for recruiting and how people manage it?

Jacqueline Kuhn  27:27  

Yeah, so AI in recruiting has gotten probably the most publicity and notoriety because it's someone trying to get into an organization and fit, you know, wanting a fair chance at at making that happen. Alien recruiting is, is very efficient, as long as you have clear job requirements. If you have clear job requirements, and you leverage the AI properly, it is not by us, it's not going to be bias. If it's strictly about skills, abilities, you know, job requirements, when you start getting into requirements that say I have to have this kind of education, or these universities or things that might actually limit the pool as to who might have had access to that that's when bias can slip in. But if you're really just looking at at skills and abilities, AI in recruiting works really well. I will tell you that and now I will backpedal and say however, the OFCCP if you are a government contractor and have to comply with OFCCP, the OFCCP has yet to last AI as a valid non bias tool for screening. They will if you know, you may be using it, you may not get challenged, you may not be challenged. But if you get an audit and you're challenged, you better have something else to go by to say why you hired that person or why that talent pool was what it is because the OFCCP has not bought into AI as being completely on bias. But if you're working with the right data, if your requirements are what they are, you know, in general, it's going to be no more bias than human. Right where AI though, where I want to take the ai ai conversation is where HR leaders want to take it and where it's not working today. And that's in succession planning, and finding and developing people and understanding who your next best leaders are. Because that's really where it's failing. That's really where it's just not working.

Greg Irwin  29:55  

Right. Can you think you may have a story there? Have you seen a company try and use it for succession planning.

Jacqueline Kuhn  30:04  

We've seen many try it. And particularly with the one product eight fold, which is probably more advanced than many others. But the challenge with AI and succession planning is, it's only as good. And I'd love How's Ira talked about the data, because it's only as good as the data that you have that makes people successful for a job. Just because one person was successful for another job with their profile doesn't mean the next person with that profile, same profile is going to be successful. And it's actually proving the very opposite, it's less about what you may have done in the past. And it's more about what can you do in the future? And right now, none of the AI is looking at, what What might your potential be in the future? Right? It's kind of looking at what have you done? What has this person done and matching it up? And so it's, it's, it's really interesting how the, how HR leaders are kind of going, Yeah, that's great. But I need something to help me understand. Can Sally and Sam, do the job in two years? And what's it going to take to get them to do that job in two years, if I want to promote them? And that's where the AI is not yet, living up to its promise in that whole development? How do you take the data and create a map, you know, create a prediction plan, create a training plan, that will tell you how to go from A to Z, there's just not enough data points for that to really be working on it.

Greg Irwin  31:57  

Hey, Steven, we saw I saw your hand up, jump right in please.

Steven  32:02  

Yeah, I was gonna say I'm the AI for recruiting, we're kind of looking at it on three points. One is around text to apply. So using natural language to ingest and make that application process easier, faster, get them in the pipeline, and then around scheduling. So again, kind of in that text message platform, that seems to resonate a lot better with younger people. And also we have a lot of frontline workers that work better. So, you know, AI, per se, it's adjusting times. We're looking at a couple of tools with that. And then also, we're looking at a couple tools around answering team member questions in that application process in the recruiting process. So right now our recruiting admin spend a lot of time answering the same question, what are benefits, when is my start date, all of these things that are kind of pretty standard, where we're hoping to leverage some technology to automate and take that workload off. But then that same time, kind of, to your point, avoiding any of the bias questions or regulations and concerns, because we're really just automating

Greg Irwin  33:13  

manual work. So I think the key question is, how's it worked? Has it helped reduce your time to fill?

Steven  33:21  

We're looking at to us we haven't looked at or done anything at

Greg Irwin  33:25  

all. We're so where do you stand? Like, how many openings? You know, what's the what's the fill rate? Like? What's your Is this a critical issue? Or, you know, obviously, it's something you're putting your you're prioritizing for your time?

Steven  33:39  

Yeah, so we have 10 people in recruiting the run about 200 average openings at any given time. 1500 Plus fills a year. So the volume is the, you know, justify some spend.

Greg Irwin  33:55  

Yeah. biggest question on these that I've always had is, is it? Is it introducing non qualified candidates? Is it really just, you know, distracting you with, you know, non serious candidates? What do you what do you think it's a good question.

Steven  34:13  

So we're in the distribution. So warehousing, distribution is kind of our main business. One of the pain points we see is on the warehouse and delivery driver space. It's hard to get people to apply directly through, we use workday, directly through that, because there's been more steps versus tools like, indeed, where they can literally check a box and apply it to 10 jobs and one minute. So reducing that friction for direct apply would be advantageous because right now, if they wouldn't click Apply, and indeed, and we have to go manually add their candidate record to our ATS, and we'll go through that way. So

Jacqueline Kuhn  34:57  

I have I have a hack for you, Steve. Then, great. Have you heard of jobs sync? Jobs Sync has a middleware that takes that indeed quick apply and translates it into an application in Workday, or any other HCM or ATS.

Steven  35:18  

Thank you all to check it out. Yeah.

Greg Irwin  35:23  

Jacqueline, or anybody, I'd love to hear experiences good, bad or ugly for AI in recruiting, whether it's easier application, if it's, I mean, I've heard about some companies that were doing the first line interviews through a chatbot. Just for our initial screening, I've seen I've seen lots of them. Jacqueline, you've seen a lot more. And I bet this group has seen a lot more.

Jacqueline Kuhn  35:51  

And many more stories. We have, we have a client who has multiple different brands in their portfolio, and they use an AI assessment to paradox Alec can use it by name, they use paradox as their assessment tool is their AI assessment tool. And they're, they've been quite successful with it because again, they're focusing on the requirements for the job. And it, you know, comes out with with a probable score of of meeting the requirements for a job and that gets a recruiter out of the middle, the middle part of actually having to do that, where where we're actually seeing AI be even more successful, are those front end sourcing tools that are building top of funnel, right that are saying, okay, you know, the fetchers and those things of the world where it's like, okay, this is what you're looking for, we're gonna go or towel ru back in like Stevens, we're towel ru would be one of those. This is what you're looking for. We're monitoring the behavior of people who are like what you're looking for on the internet, and we're gonna funnel them into you. Right, it's really using AI is that spider for for volume hiring, we're seeing a lot of really good success stories using AI for that, because that's, you know, job boards are may not be as successful as they have been the indeed quick applies to challenge. But this these, these tools, really literally go out and find the people who might be looking for a job but might not know about going to job boards, they may be just doing Google searches for things. And so they're trolling internet traffic to pull in candidates into your top of funnel for you to then decide whether or not you want them. Those I see are really successful at bringing the right candidates in to your funnel.

Greg Irwin  38:00  

Thanks, Stephen had a follow up here his job saying part of indeed or is that a third party tool?

Jacqueline Kuhn  38:06  

third party tool. Excellent. Excellent.

Greg Irwin  38:11  

Thanks, Jacqueline. Thanks, Stephen. Curious anyone else had success or, or a story around trying to deploy some of these ai ai services and I see I've missing the name here. Sorry, I'm trying to Oh Gerrish. Ai Chatbot. An AI chatbot for HR employee center. Jacqueline, I'll start with you. But I would love somebody to share, share a story. Maybe Mark, maybe this would be the opportunity to get yet get you in the mix today. On any AI services you get you guys have seen the, but maybe Jacqueline, you start us off?

Jacqueline Kuhn  38:54  

Yeah, HR chatbots. The most successful ones that I've encountered are those around factual questions and typically, like during focal periods of time, like benefit, open enrollment, right, you know, what has changed? What's going on? HR, HR, chat bots, you know, answering how to questions is, is really where I see them being deployed successfully. Anything beyond? How do I do this? Where do I go? What is you know, anything that requires what I would call tier two or tier three kinds of thinking? I haven't seen any success in an HR Chatbot. It's pretty pretty good at hitting that tier. One question of you know, I have a pretty basic question, and I just need a pretty basic answer.

Greg Irwin  39:50  

Do you think there's promise in kind of the evolutions here of GPT and feels like open AI chat GPT connect Is there a lot and learn kind of basic understanding? Yeah, what's the future you see here for these chat bots? Um,

Jacqueline Kuhn  40:11  

I absolutely think that there is a future as they become more intelligent. The the trick, and anyone in HR always knows this. The trick is, what are they really asking for? Because the question doesn't necessarily get to what they're really asking for. So you may go to HR and ask a very good example is, how much time? Do I get off? For the birth of a child? Yeah. Okay. So that that might be a basic question, and you come back with an answer. But the real question might be, I'm going to have a baby, what do I need to do? But the employee doesn't necessarily know to ask a bigger question. They're just concerned with the time off, but there's so much more that might need to happen and, and the chats are not yet or not yet sophisticated enough to, to then go back and say, Well, wait a minute. Maybe you also need this. I mean, they'll eventually get there. But it's really having that conversation, that someone with deep domain expertise, would know what that next question is, if you're, you know, in that HR role, so it's gonna, it will take a while. Only because humans can't be programmed to ask questions, the way a chat GPT would want to hear them.

Greg Irwin  41:38  

Yeah, I also assume it's got to be can get pretty dangerous, in terms of the kinds of answers that you want to be providing employees? Yeah. I interesting. Mark, we bring in, yeah.

Mark  41:55  

So one of Jacqueline's points earlier, top of funnel, so like they're using paradox to top of funnel so they have worked a recruiting. But paradox is really doing the majority of lift and shift for getting candidates into and through the first part of the hiring cycle. So, you know, they're, they're seeing a massive amount of cost reduction, and getting people into the, you know, into the flow, finding people who match, you know, you know, you may have 3000, people who apply for a position, but only 15 of them actually match. And so you don't want a human being going through 1500 applications. And most of the applicant tracking systems aren't real good at really, you know, they, they can kick most of them out, but they're not real good at actually finding, you know, the gems and the and the stuff. So paradox has been a huge help just to name a product that is using. And then to kind of counter what Jacqueline said the actual, there's a product, Lina AI, and it actually does counter your question with additional, hey, what about this? Or what about this? And so now that that's, again, up to the intelligence of the HR person who set it up, that's only as smart as that person who knows that? Yeah. If you're asking about, you know, what kind of benefits are associated with having a baby? Are you having a baby, you know, click here to go to the repository of information around having a baby, right. And so, but that is actually something that their chatbot does, which is follows up with, you know, links to the knowledge base, or links to additional questions that come back after your question. But again, it's only as intelligent as the person who originally programmed it. But it gets smarter and smarter through the natural language processing and three additional things. And it'll suggest additional updates or additional changes to its set up. Once you know, you're going through all of the the usage of it, you know, so the more you use it, the smarter it gets, but you still have to be smart enough to leverage what it suggests to use, like, Hey, we're seeing this pattern, it's seeing this pattern. Do you want to employ that? Do you want to link to you know, you want to put an article here, you want to put a knowledge base here, you want to link it to a PDF? What do you want to do?

Greg Irwin  44:28  

So really interesting. I mean,

Jacqueline Kuhn  44:32  

could you put the name of that product in chat mark? I've never heard of it. So I'd love to explore that more. Thanks.

Greg Irwin  44:39  

Yeah, this is so Mark. I'm curious. What are you working on? What What am I? Yeah, I mean, I these are weird. Slow. To these tools sound great. Yeah. I'm not sure this is where your, your your time and energy is. I'm wondering what are you and your team Working on to one of the improvements you guys are working on.

Mark  45:03  

So skilling upskilling is really, you know, so that, you know, the companies is focused on doing workforce planning and trying to decide we're kind of in a shopping mode right now looking for workforce, you know, better workforce planning, that's kind of a manual process today. And then, you know, Skilling and upskilling. And, and, and, of course, you know, automating that, and allowing, one of the interesting things I have seen in the chat GPT world is, you know, because of PII data, you don't want to expose your core jewels, your your company's crown jewels of PII data to the large language model. But there's some tools that are out there that kind of put it in a vault, and then leverages the large language models, to not expose your data to it. But to still leverage the capabilities of chat GPT. So that you get that benefit without exposing your your PII data. So it's kind of a best of both worlds. And so there's some mediary products that are out there that kind of insulate and isolate your PII data, so that you can go in and bounce it off. The other thing that I've seen is, you have to make sure that the, the queries that you do are based on your part of the world, because, you know, say you're looking at skills, you're looking at jobs, they're not the same all the way around the world, the skills are different, you know, project management is different on one side of the planet than it is on on our side of the planet, you know, it's called prints too. And so, you know, you would, you would ask different questions, and you want to make sure that you're locating that data to your part of the world, not just the world, you know, and that's the problem with having the entire internet at your disposal is trying to limit that stuff.

Greg Irwin  47:03  

I've got so many questions, I'm gonna I'm going to try and limit it to one. I'm also going to remind folks, you can all y'all shouldn't be asking questions. So you can be polite and put it in the chat or raise your hand. Or you can just jump right in because, you know, a little bit easier that way. Mark, I've got to ask aren't so workforce planning? Is that going to sit within workday? Or is that going to be a third party service? So

Mark  47:32  

GM uses workday. We use success factors. at GM Financial, I work for GM Financial, a subsidiary of GM. And so our need Yeah, you know, we're we're kind of trying to decide, do we want to put it inside of there's a great bolt on for success factors that allows you to do workforce planning, do your org chart management, do your workforce planning, it's, it's a phenomenal tool. But then, you know, there's the department that wants it is, you know, is our compensation department. And so they have kind of, you know, there's there's kind of the politics and the things like that. So we're going through those decisions and thinking about things.

Jacqueline Kuhn  48:19  

I have a, I have a tool suggestion to look at, if you've got comp involved. I don't know if you heard of chart hop. Never heard of it. Chart hop is a third party workforce planning tool that also has a comp module, and also has some performance related to making job moves, etc. So it may end up being bridging the gap from I think I know the product, you're, you're talking about the other one, the SAP partner, but um, yeah, you might want to explore chart hop. They're out of the Netherlands originally, and they've got some really good new technology.

Greg Irwin  48:57  

Cool. So, folks, we're about 10 minutes out. And I always think this is kind of make or break time. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I think we've covered a lot. We've kind of been all over the place, but I think it's all been great. So let's kind of let's focus here for 10 minutes, I'm going to call out Brenda, Brenda grills. I'm going to call out at Pat Garcia. And we're going to come to you because I want to hear some stories and hear some thoughts and we haven't gotten involved yet. So I'm putting you on deck. And for the rest of you please, if you have a question, now's a good time. If you want to do follow up as I said at the beginning, that's the whole reason that we put together this series, we really believe that HRchitect is the best and you should set up time and chat with them because it's always easier to kind of get into the weeds of your specific situation and this is great general information and high level and we always cover a lot but you know you'll get a whole lot deeper. Oh with, you know, with the specific conversations. Okay, let's go. Strong finish. Brenda, nice to speak with you. You were actually first one on the call here. So the early the early early bird catches the worm. Would you give a little intro to the group?

Brenda  50:18  

Absolutely. I work for which is a global law firm, headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. And we're around 4000 employees. We are also a UK GE shop. And we have been since 2000. And I couldn't agree more with Jacqueline as what she said, I'm this was way before my time, I've only been there for years at this point. But they've implemented this system, it's gone. And it's sad. And it's just become dormant at that point, until I came along. And then again, I agree with some of your other participants here, too, we are very slow to change. If anybody's ever worked for a law firm before. I think our average worker is about 75 years old, if you want to know the truth of the matter. So those partners are sticking around for a very long time. So you know, if it works, they don't want to hear about, you know, anything new or, you know, even upgrades at that point. But they're coming around, I've proposed several new things to them. Integrations was one that we just struggled with, they've never had an integration to a vendor, for example, no, none of their medical vendors, none of their, you know, their fidelity, so forth and so on. They have all done that by hand forever. So we are implementing all types of things at this point and showing them what automation can do. We do struggle with the global system, UK, GE does offer that global key, we do not have it. And I have not sold them on that yet. I do keep all the global people in the UK, GE so it's trying to shove a square peg into a round hole at this point. So those are some of our struggles at this point. So it's really just introducing these things to the right people and know your audience and trying to share with them that the benefit outweighs the cost. And so that's kind of the struggles we're having here.

Greg Irwin  52:25  

Where's the best to fish? I mean, those integration sounds pretty basic. That sounds pretty slick, pretty square and clear in terms of way to improve the team. But global system, I don't follow up. Where's what's the operational efficiency you're looking for? In terms of managing globally through UK jl?

Brenda  52:48  

Actually, right now, the only reason that we have the global employees in the US, UK, G is for headcount purposes. And for compensation, we don't use the compensation module. But for our compensation person, they keep track of the individuals and their salaries through UKG. At this point, right now, like I said, I there's no places for addresses, of course, the you know, the functionality is the same in US versus International. We have 40 different sites in an international world we have from Middle East, to Asia, to Australia, to the UK to Europe, the whole gamut of locations. And so we don't have their payrolls in UKG. So for us to be able to report off of what is a salary cost at this point, I can't even do that, you know, I'm pulling from six different more than six, but heads just gives you an idea, six different systems in order to get one answer. So I think just the automation of that in itself, and having the one system of record would serve us all, a great deal of benefit. 

Greg Irwin  54:09  

It sounds so much like Lori's story here, in terms of, and they came up from someone else as well, the idea that you've got this system, and it's deployed and it's just kind of air and yes, it gets old. And, and it is hard to sell leadership on the idea of why you need to refresh this and why you need to save somebody's time. Because one thought could be all right, like if I go and deploy these new things, it's gonna cost me $20,000 more a year, whatever, the 50,000 more a year. Today where, you know, the team is executing it, and it might be mundane work, but they're doing it and it's not costing me anything. So I think the challenge is how do you demonstrate that the effects efficiencies that you gain, yield organizational productivity improvement, not just, you know, not just time saving for the administrators.

Zara  55:09  

Exactly. And the decisions that were made in 2000, we're probably made with some thought, and some direction. But that isn't the way things are any longer. And so they're still following the same rules they did in 2000, on creating a job code, like putting a location attached to a job code, those kinds of things have long been gone, your system will provide you what you needed to information wise without doing those type of things. But it's just the mentality. And I'm not sure how you change that yet. That's where I'm struggling.

Greg Irwin  55:43  

You got to prove it with stories. Yes, I agree. I agree to Jacqueline, because Jacqueline, this is kind of a key one. Like, there's so many companies sitting on old systems, and they're working fine. How do you prove that operational efficiency drives overall performance, overall organizational performance?

Zara  56:06  

Can I throw something in real quick, Jacqueline, before you do? You know, UKG offers a three P process and they come in and they evaluate your system. And I absolutely would love that to happen. Because I think with that evaluation, I would have some type of ammunition, for lack of better words to go forward with saying, we can improve these processes, we can improve this, and so forth and so on. And, you know, a new system doesn't improve bad processes. So I definitely have to get that mentality across to them as well. But this three P process was like around $28,000. And I haven't been able to sell that to them yet, either. I love UKG. I don't want to go off of UKG. But I want to utilize it to its fullest.

Jacqueline Kuhn  56:53  

Yeah, we. So we, we have a lot of clients that are in Brenda's shoes. And one actually was a law firm a global law firm Go figure. The story was almost identical to yours. So yeah, the, the, the challenge is to basically catalog everything that people are doing around the system that is outside of the system. And when you have an application, and you're using Excel for the primary processing, and then it gets into an application, that's really, that's really what you're saying the value Hey, guys, the value is we are not using what we bought for lots of various reasons, let's, you know, undertake a project to make that happen. But that that absolutely is material to how business is being run because it's a compliance risk to start doing stuff in spreadsheets, and then getting it in to the application, its efficiency and effectiveness. What aren't you doing? What's being missed? What errors are being made. I mean, there's all kinds of things particularly when it's around, you know, payroll, HR benefits. But the, the really important, the really other thing is to, to kind of gets do some research, and really say, hey, you know, we spend $25,000 Now to do this, or we spend $150,000. Now to look for look at replacing it, right? So because in the world today, you you're not going to be able to continue operating like you were 20 years ago and finding people to do those jobs, right, it's going to cost you more. And so it's really about building the case, to the partners, because at a law firm, everything's got to go through partners, right? And partners are really only interested in billable work and how much money you're spending against my billable work, right. I mean, I know how that works. And it's really about building that pace to say, hey, we spend this little much now to know really, what's important to us. Otherwise, in a couple years, we're gonna have to spend a lot more. And you have to kind of have to put it in in dollars and cents, particularly in a law firm because you got to have partners to agree on and partners don't want to give up cash for operational stuff.

Brenda  57:21  

Thank you. You're absolutely correct. And in working for a law firm, it's a little bit different. I don't have one guy I have to sell this to I have 550. Guys, I have to sell this to So you're absolutely right. Thank you.

Greg Irwin  59:50  

We're top of the hour but I called out Pat earlier. So Pat, I'm going to give you the closing comments here actually second, the last one is Jacqueline, Jacqueline has the has the wrap up. Any any comments you want to share with the group before we wrap

Pat  1:00:05  

up? Interestingly enough, we are currently with UKG. We have all its bells and whistles, except for benefits prime, I feel that we shouldn't have to pay to enhance our benefit enrollment. I don't know why. Because we have all the bells and whistles, why can't we just get upgraded, because I know that their core benefits enrollment is old. If it's not, to me, I don't like the employee experience to where I know, benefits prime would probably provide a better employee experience. Interestingly enough, our financial team, our accounting team, is actually in the process of implementing Workday for financial reporting, and so forth. And accounting. We just saw a demo of Workday last week. I'm hesitant to say, hey, let's jump on board. But I know they want to create the synergy. And I know that's what I'm going to be facing in the next year or so looking at truly all systems, but I believe we're going to be actually forced to go to workday because of our financial.

Greg Irwin  1:01:28  

Bad Thing.

Pat  1:01:30  

True, true. But you know, a demo is a demo to where they're going to show you everything that hey, look at this is what it can do. But they don't tell you everything in between. Yes, arch in our company, we actually, when we went live with UKG, it was actually eight years ago, this month. And we actually did purchase everything upfront. But we were gradual in our rolling out of each system, whether it's recruiting, benefit, enrollment, onboarding, and so forth. The last product that we got was Document Manager and HR assist, or people assist. And those have worked really well. But again, we were slow and rolling in that because we wanted to make sure that we set up up to where it makes it gives value to the employee and also the manager, and also our team as a whole the HR team. So it's interesting, listening to all the UKG people here, and it was really useful for me to hear this because of what I faced in the next year, or two or three. Just looking at different systems.

Greg Irwin  1:02:46  

Excellent. Well, let's keep we'll keep the dialogue going. And that's my follow up, which is, let's use this community as an opportunity to support each other learn, and, and kind of grow. Jacqueline, what's your what's your closing comment for the group? I guess

Jacqueline Kuhn  1:03:04  

what the the closing comment is really about not being stagnant. Right. You know, in sometimes, sometimes it's easier to move forward. By doing something little like we talked about a job sync or a chart hop or something small that can add on that adds a big impact to move your organization forward. Oftentimes, when we're on these platforms, and they're good UKG is a really good platform. I lots of clients have been successful on it. But sometimes it takes an external product and there's a big marketplace around UKG, right to just give it that extra kick that you need to refresh your entire stack. So you know, I always say don't be afraid to look at things that could potentially add and bolt on to what you're currently using to the global thing, keep an eye out for Ingenta for immitis. The UKG acquisition of immitis is now top of mind and that's the Global Payroll providers. So UK, G will become even more global based on this acquisition. And so you know, that's something to really keep on the radar to see how that progresses moving forward, because that will definitely change the whole footprint of UK G with this with this acquisition, but just keep keep looking for things and looking for solutions and bringing them up because you know, it's kinda like the old saying throw something on the wall until it sticks. When you find the thing that your organization is going to rally around. It will really make a difference.

Greg Irwin  1:04:48  

Great stuff. All right, we'll wrap it up here. Thanks, everybody for taking time sharing and engaging and we look forward to to connect Thanks everyone. Have a great day.