The HR industry expert, Josh Bersin, recently described how the multi-billion dollar HR software market is moving in a new direction (‘The HR Software Market Reinvents Itself‘). This will be of interest to anyone pondering how to grow an HR tech company.
Bersin is well-known for mapping and monitoring the development of the HR tech industry.
It would appear that we’re moving towards an era of ‘HR in the flow of work‘ and HR tools will play a starring role.
I was interested to note Bersin’s comments about the proliferation of HR tools:
“As organizations become more agile and team oriented, these tools are moving in a whole new direction. Now we need software that facilitates teamwork and agile goal management, helps people give each other feedback, and helps facilitate continuous performance management and self-improvement.
These tools are consumer-like, easy to use, and mobile by design.”
Josh Bersin
I recently spoke with a co-founder of one of these new HR tools – the tool is clearly ‘consumer-like, easy to use, and mobile by design.’
Meet AttendanceBot
Why base an HR tool an an instant messaging tool such as Slack?
You may not use Slack but millions of other people do and AttendanceBot is riding that rocketship as well as growing with the other instant
Advice On How To Grow An HR Company – Q&A With Kanav Abrol, Co-Founder Of AttendanceBot
During a very interesting discussion with AttendanceBot’s co-founder, Kanav Abrol,
- What does AttendanceBot do and why was it started?
- Do you focus on a niche within the market or do you serve all businesses (if so, how do you try to stand-out from competitors)?
- How did you get your first 5 clients?
- What are some effective ways you have acquired new clients?
- Any ineffective ways to find new customers?
- What content marketing have you done or will do to attract new clients?
- Any tips on interesting people, websites, tools, podcasts, or books to check out?
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If you work as a Human Resources consultant or in an HR tech startup in recruitment, training & development, employee engagement, HR consulting, employment law, employee outplacement – my HR marketing update will help.
Q1. What does AttendanceBot do and why was it started?
We had used many leave management systems and we noticed that the leave application and approval process was either on email or say on Slack and then the employees were going into the HR system to just record the already approved leaves. This was not only redundant and tedious, it led to non-compliance, meaning most people were not posting their leaves into the formal system of record. This led to incorrect data and leave records, safety issues, most of all, coordination problems.
Q1b. How do your clients feel about AttendanceBot?
The Aha moment really comes when someone uses the system for the first time and realizes how easy things can be.
No more emails, no more going to a calendar and putting a leave, no more filling out tedious time sheets every week, everything just happens seamlessly.
While the admins love the dashboard, the reports, the analytics, enforcement of company policies – to the end user the feeling is “it just works”.
What we are trying to build is not rocket science – it’s a back to basics thinking where everything just works. Back to building a more productive and happier workplace.
Q2. Do you focus on a niche within the HR market or do you serve all businesses?
While we initially focussed on the time-off management side of things, over time customers wanted a unified system that helped them track time for their hourly employees so that they could track everything in one place.
At this point, we are focussed on helping small to mid-sized businesses, manage all of their time and absence management needs right inside their favourite communication platform.
Q3. How did you get your first 5 clients?
We got the initial set of customers by listing in the Slack App store and other similar app stores.
Most instant messaging systems now have a marketplace that lists apps and chatbots that they support.
We were one of the early ones to leverage this channel.
Q4. What are typically the most effective ways for you to acquire new employer clients?
We are still focussed on acquiring customers through the app stores of the messaging platforms.
As we have grown, we have focussed increasingly on emails and ads to drive growth. The app store based growth is ideal because that channel is virtually free and therefore the customer acquisition costs (CAC) are negligible.
Channels like email and ads allow us to target very specific customers.
Finally, we do want to explore newer channels like conducting webinars, trade conferences and maybe even real world ads.
Q5. Any ineffective ways to find new customers? Why didn’t they work so well?
Well, I think most channels would work to a different extent.
One should explore each channel when the prior lower cost channel is saturated. In our case, all the channels that are now working for us, took a while for us to nail.
In the early days, everything from chat bot store install to emails did not give us sufficient installs and it was only after persistent effort over months that we were able to squeeze performance out of different channels.
So my advice would be, start with a few channels that you think suit your needs best and spend say 6 months fine tuning them. Don’t expect results from day 1 and don’t give up before you have given it a real shot. But then don’t be married to an idea as well because if something does not work with 6 months of focus and budgets, then it’s time to put it in the deep freezer and get back to it later.
No idea/marketing channel is bad, it might be too early in your journey to use it, it might be too expensive or it might not scale but if something has worked for others in your industry it might work for you as well.
You just don’t know yet.
Kanav Abrol
No idea/marketing channel is bad, it might be too early in your journey to use it, it might be too expensive or it might not scale but if something has worked for others in your industry it might work for you as well. You just don’t know it yet!
Q5. What HR content marketing have you done or will do to attract new corporate clients?
This is one of the channels that we have underinvested in so far but we want to focus a lot more on it in 2019.
Historically, we have done content in 3 ways – help and how to content on our help desk, having our own blog and guest posting on other major blogs.
I think while we have gained some readership on all of our channels, we have not
Therefore 2019 would be the year, where we really go out there to do a better job of content be it maintaining a consistent cadence of content to exploring newer channels like Quora and LinkedIn for publishing content to even using the more traditional social media like Twitter to build a more all-encompassing presence.
Q6. Can you share some tips on interesting people, websites, tools, podcasts, or books to check out to help grow a business faster?
Well, I don’t look at an HR business being fundamentally different from any other business so I take my inspiration from a broad set of podcasts.
The general ones like the HBR IdeaCast podcast on how to build an effective business; Business Wars by Wondery talks about competition, Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman for the talks about growing the business quickly; and How I Built This where host Guy Raz talks to founders about their start-up journey.
I feel looking far and wide, I am able to find more inspiration.
I feel that being too narrowly focussed on one’s own domain might put unconscious constraints on thinking that restricts you to the already known best practices rather than trying to think laterally to disrupt the status quo.
Next Steps
A fascinating conversation on developing an HR marketing plan and growing an HR tech business there.
I would encourage any person running a business in the Human Resources industry to keep Kanav’s advice in mind:
Start with a few marketing channels that you think suit your needs best and spend say 6 months fine tuning them. Don’t expect results from day 1 and don’t give up before you have given it a real shot. But then don’t be married to an idea as well because if something does not work with 6 months of focus and budgets, then it’s time to put it in the deep freezer and get back to it later.
Kanav Abrol
If you’d like to get in touch with Kanav, you can find him via the business website here: AttendanceBot.
For more tips and ideas, visit the blog to grow your HR business faster.
Remember to join my private HR marketing newsletter for consultants and tech companies in the Human Resources industry.
If you work as a Human Resources consultant or in an HR tech startup in recruitment, training & development, employee engagement, HR consulting, employment law, employee outplacement – my HR marketing update will help.
All the best,
