One week before the yearly HR Technology Conference starts in Las Vegas, ADP decided to hold it first ever Innovation Showcase, featuring key product innovations in a live, interactive webcast. The timing was impeccable - not to far and not to close to the HR Technology Conference casting its shadow next week - and garner the appropriate attention. For instance enough time to get a blog post in - wait a minute... but when a vendor has 620 thousand clients across 125 countries - the industry and influencer community does pay attention. ADP raised that attention even more with claiming 300 thousand clients and users in the cloud.
On the day of the event, ADP released 4 press releases on the same day, centering around the release of their recruitment product, which was the biggest news in my view, it equally showed progress for its mobile application, a document management system fittingly called ADP Document Cloud and ADP Analytics and finally the opening of an Innovation Lab in Silicon Alley in New York city.
Recruitment
Which vendor is not building or re-inventing recruitment? Well ADP is, too - and the new application looks good and seems to be easy to use and make a recruiter more productive. Tony Marzulli hit all the right strings and cords to play the social recruitment game. As with any first new release of course - we will have to see first customer references and see what's next on the road map - and both was not shared (yet).
In general my concern on recruiting is for all vendors is that they are more or less re-building ATS for the cloud, added some social, sprinkled maybe with some talent pool and CRM here and there etc. Nob vendor seems to be re-thinking recruitment from the ground up - which is a missed opportunity for a generation of talent management system. But certainly ADP cannot be blamed for this - a few years ago no one would even have expected any talent management products coming from the company. And there are some suggestions on how to make talent management more interesting in combination with talent management, as I blogged here before.
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| ScreenShot from ADP Innovation Day Webinar |
ADP also provided the necessary mobile capabilities for the mobile recruiting side - demoing a nice candidate application, including step wise increasing self presentation to the ultimate recruiter.
And it's a nice capability that ADP can use its research arm to create interesting surveys, that can yield even more interesting results - like that companies with more than 1000 employees plan to increase hiring by 34% in 2014. And that 18% of the US workforce may retire in the next 5 years, creating a massive opportunity for recruitment.
Mobile
Not surprisingly ADP did ship mobile paycheck and related information to a mobile device first. But it has extended the scope way beyond this in the latest release - and it's a fine mobile application. Smart to allow the download of the full version with a demo mode - a good move to get an application go viral and massively adopted.
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| ScreenShot from ADP Innovation Day Webinar |
And ADP has now brought a similar clean UI to the table, smartly leveraging large screen estate while re-using code constructs (three mobile screens next to each other form the tablet screen factor) - a good example for re-using components.
ADP Document Cloud
It was good to also see some of the less prominent and talked about functions being featured, too - with ADP Document Cloud, that you could call an embedded box-like lightweight document management system on the user side - but with the necessary controls to keep confidentiality and fiduciary obligations for users on the back end.
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| ScreenShot from ADP Innovation Day Webinar |
Personally I thought ADP was at its best pitching this product - it seems to be very near and dear to the traditional position of the company, for obvious reasons. But ADP delivered a clean and well integrated product that is easy to use. And on the benefit site ADP equally hit the benefits side well, e.g. that ADP Document Cloud can be part of a desaster recovery and redundancy strategy.
ADP Analytics
Well ADP is not the first vendor to step into the analytics marketing trap, calling reports and dashboards analytics, that are not real analytics (as discussed here). But the product provides the basic reporting and charting tools needed. The visual capabilities are pedestrian and surely need and can be improved.
It was good to see that the product has some alert and sharing capability, which are the next step to make reporting / dashboarding more actionable.
Little nugget...
During the presentation the team referred to that there was now one ADP and that all application access is happening via APIs. That by itself is a major feat for a vendor of the size and the number of products like ADP. And it is a key enabler for e.g. mobile and tablet functionality.
But it also bridges historical disconnects the company would have e.g. between its North American and other international geographies, as these were run on separate products. As a benefit of executing the API strategy it's now the first time that ADP customers can have a global HR record. We are sure many ADP clients will welcome that to the fullest.
MyPOV
Good to see the progress by a vendor like ADP investing into the right technologies successfully and making a bold move to grow beyond the payroll domain and legacy. If the products and capabilities shown at this innovation day will be enough to win substantial non payrill business - only future can tell.
We certainly want to see many more innovation showcases to come.
You can see the Storify tweet collection here.
And you can see the recording of the event here.
