If you have been asking what people analytics is, and whether your organization still needs a team dedicated to it, the answer has shifted in the last two years. Cole Napper, author of People Analytics: Using Data-Driven HR and Gen AI as a Business Asset and Chief People Intelligence Officer at HRBench, joined Joey Price on Joey’s HR Lounge to make an uncomfortable argument. People analytics has become a commodity. And when something becomes a commodity, it stops being a value-add function.
What replaces it, in Cole’s framing, is people intelligence. Here is what that means, why the shift is happening now, and what it changes for HR leaders at organizations of every size.
What is people analytics?
People analytics is the practice of using workforce data to make better decisions about hiring, pay, performance, retention and workforce planning. It draws on HR systems, payroll, engagement surveys and business results, then turns that raw material into evidence a leader can act on. Some organizations call it HR analytics or workforce analytics. The labels differ. The job is the same, which is replacing gut feel about people with something you can defend.
For most of the last decade, people analytics lived as a specialist function inside HR. That structure is what Cole believes is now coming apart.
Why people analytics became a commodity
Back in 2022, Cole gave a deliberately provocative talk at an invite-only people analytics conference under the title “Is people analytics a luxury we can’t afford?” The timing mattered. The era of near-zero interest rates was ending, and companies were starting to question the speculative functions they had built during the boom.
His position then, and now, is that people analytics undeniably creates value, but practitioners have to prove it. The gap he saw was not technical skill. Most analysts could handle the data science. What many lacked was the business acumen to connect their work to outcomes leadership actually cared about.
The correction that followed was blunt. Some of the largest companies had built people analytics teams of 300 people. As Cole put it on the episode, it was hard to imagine what 75 people would do, let alone 300. Those teams were doing everything under the sun, some of it valuable, some of it not. The reckoning that followed made the profession leaner, and in his view, better.
The Tree of Value: four disciplines becoming one
One of the most useful frameworks in Cole’s book is the Tree of Value, which began as an article and now anchors his third chapter. The tree has four branches:
People analytics
Workforce planning
Talent intelligence
Behavioral science
Each branch arrived from a different origin story, which is precisely why they struggle to collaborate inside the same organization. Each one tends to believe it is the one true function that knows the way. What connects them is a shared trunk, and what feeds them is a shared root system: the value of human capital and labor data.
Cole’s newer argument, which he is developing into a manifesto, is that those four branches are collapsing into one. Not four disciplines coordinating better, but a single intelligence layer drawing on the wisdom all four have built over the last hundred years.
From people analytics to people intelligence
People intelligence is the name Cole gives to that layer, and it is in his job title at HRBench. The distinction he draws is worth sitting with. If people analytics is now a commodity, value has to come from somewhere else. Part of it still comes from the data. The rest comes from the intelligence built on top of it, delivered to organizations of every size at a price point that makes it accessible rather than exclusive.
He also points out where the word intelligence comes from in most companies. It comes from business intelligence, a term he jokes has little to do with business and even less to do with intelligence, because in practice it means dashboards and reports. The other lineage is the intelligence community, where signals, human sources and geospatial data are synthesized into a single briefing for a head of state. His provocation is simple. What would change if your leadership team had that quality of intelligence about their workforce?
What happens when the talent you analyze is not human
This is where Joey pushed back on the model. His view is that we are not going to live much longer in a world where the only talent you analyze is human. Agents and increasingly autonomous software are doing real work. If that is true, the people function becomes a work function, and the tree grows a branch nobody planned for.
Cole agreed, and named the version he has been working on: people intelligence on one side, work intelligence on the other, where work includes both humans and technology. Then he identified the blocker, and it is a measurement problem.
There is no equivalent way to measure human work and technology work today. A leader trying to decide whether a problem calls for deploying people or deploying technology has no shared unit of comparison. The command center that would make that decision possible does not exist yet.
Why small and mid-sized companies matter most in this shift
If you run HR for a small or mid-sized organization, you likely have a one-person analytics function. Or a zero-person one. That has always been framed as a disadvantage. Cole’s read is the opposite.
HR needs are roughly equivalent at every company size. Hiring, pay decisions, compliance, retention, planning for next year. What differs enormously is the staffing you can put behind those needs. And if AI proves as transformative as its advocates claim, large organizations start operating like medium ones, medium ones like small ones, and small ones like startups. The lean end of the market stops being the exception and becomes the model.
That makes technology leverage a requirement rather than a nice-to-have. Connected systems, so the data is in one place. A small set of numbers leadership and the board actually act on. The ability to answer a workforce question without losing a week to spreadsheets.
The measurement problem has an ethics problem underneath it
The most sobering stretch of the conversation is about what building that measurement system might require. Cole wrote a short fiction piece in December called The Camera, about a company that buys a tool which sees through walls, reads biometrics, tracks whether you are paying attention, and feeds it all back into the operating model. It pings employees when a bathroom visit runs long. It suggests you seem a little down today and might consider being happier.
It reads as dystopian. His point is that, aside from seeing through walls, all of that technology already exists. The only things standing between an organization and that future are will, knowledge and budget. Which raises the question he keeps returning to: do you have to build a soft dystopia just to get equivalent measurement between humans and technology? He calls it an area rife for regulation, and it is hard to disagree.
For what it is worth, Cole ends the conversation optimistic. His grandparents went from horse and buggy to the moon landing inside one lifetime. He thinks we are due for a stretch of change that rivals it.
Yes, but the case has to be made in business terms. The argument on this episode is not that the work stops mattering. It is that the basic capability has been commoditized, so value now comes from the intelligence layer built on top of the data rather than from having an analytics team at all.
What is the difference between people analytics and people intelligence?
People analytics is the analysis of workforce data. People intelligence, as Cole Napper defines it, is the synthesis layer that draws on people analytics, workforce planning, talent intelligence and behavioral science together, and is designed to inform decisions rather than to produce reports.
Can a small company do people analytics without an analyst?
It can, and increasingly it has to. The practical starting point is connecting your existing systems so workforce data lives in one place, then agreeing on a small number of measures leadership will actually use. That is a technology and governance problem more than a headcount problem.
Need help making sense of your own workforce data?
Jumpstart HR helps small businesses, startups and nonprofits build HR operations that hold up under scrutiny, including the reporting your leadership team and board rely on. Get in touch to talk through what that would look like for your organization.
Most quarterly HR updates get ten minutes on the agenda and about four minutes of actual attention. Headcount went up. Engagement scores are “steady.” Turnover is “in line with industry.” The CEO nods, checks their phone, and moves to the revenue slide.
The problem usually isn’t the HR team’s performance. It’s the metrics on the slide. A CEO doesn’t want to know that HR is busy. They want to know what HR’s work did to the business this quarter, and most HR reports never actually answer that.
Below is a working list of the metrics that change how a CEO listens to an HR update, organized by what they actually reveal: growth, people, cost, and risk.
Metrics That Tie HR Directly to Growth
These are the numbers that connect people decisions to revenue and output. If a CEO only remembers one section of the deck, this should be it.
Revenue Per Employee
This is headcount growth measured against what the business actually produced, not just how many people got hired. A CEO tracking this number sees whether the org is scaling efficiently or just getting bigger. If revenue per employee is flat or dropping while headcount climbs, that’s a staffing or productivity conversation worth having before the next budget cycle, not after.
Quality of Hire
Cost per hire tells you what recruiting spent. Quality of hire tells you what recruiting delivered. It’s usually built from a mix of 90-day manager ratings, first-year performance scores, and retention past the one-year mark. A recruiting function that fills roles fast but keeps producing 6-month replacements isn’t actually saving the company money, no matter how good the time-to-fill number looks.
Internal Mobility Rate
The percentage of open roles filled by internal candidates. A low number here usually means one of two things: the company isn’t developing talent, or it’s developing talent and then watching it leave for the next role somewhere else. Either way, it’s a growth constraint hiding inside a people metric.
Metrics That Reveal What’s Really Happening With People
Engagement scores alone tend to tell a CEO very little, mostly because a single number averaged across the whole company hides more than it shows. These metrics get more specific.
Regretted vs. Non-Regretted Attrition
Total turnover is a blunt instrument. Splitting it into regretted attrition (people you didn’t want to lose) and non-regretted attrition (people who needed to go, or whose exit had no real cost) gives leadership a much sharper read. A company can have high turnover and still be healthy, if the people leaving weren’t the people it needed to keep.
Manager Effectiveness Score
Most employees don’t leave a company. They leave a manager. Pulling manager-specific data from engagement surveys, 360 reviews, or skip-level check-ins turns a vague “culture problem” into a specific, addressable one: which managers, on which teams, and what’s driving it.
Absenteeism and Unplanned Leave Trend
A slow, steady rise in unplanned time off is often one of the earliest signs of burnout, disengagement, or a team that’s quietly struggling. It typically appears in workforce data long before it shows up in exit interviews. As more organizations invest in employee wellbeing platforms to identify these signals earlier, it’s also worth understanding which solutions actually deliver value. Jumpstart HR’sWellness Technology Market Landscape 2024 research provides an independent look at the wellness technology ecosystem and what HR leaders should consider before investing in new tools.
Metrics That Show HR Is Managing Cost Responsibly
CEOs read every function through a cost lens eventually. HR is no exception, and metrics here build the credibility that makes the growth numbers land harder.
Cost Per Hire, Broken Down by Channel
Not just the average number, but the split between referrals, job boards, agencies, and outbound sourcing. This shows the CEO exactly where recruiting dollars are working and where they’re being wasted, which is a much stronger conversation than a single blended figure.
HR Technology Utilization Rate
Companies routinely pay for HR software that half the team never logs into. Tracking actual usage against license cost turns “we bought an HRIS” into “we bought an HRIS and it’s actually being used.” Running new tools through a structured evaluation before signing, like theHR Tech Buying Diagnostic, tends to prevent this problem before it starts rather than catching it a year into a contract.
Overtime and Contingent Labor Spend
A steady climb here often means the org is understaffed in a specific function and quietly paying a premium to cover it. It’s usually cheaper to fix the staffing gap directly than to keep absorbing the overtime bill.
Metrics That Protect the Business From Risk
This is the section CEOs care about most once they’ve been burned by it once. Nobody wants a compliance surprise turning into a legal one.
Open Compliance Items and Time to Resolution
Not just whether the company is compliant today, but how many known gaps are open and how long they’ve been sitting there. A rising backlog here is a preview of next quarter’s risk, not last quarter’s.
Pay Equity Ratio
Comparing compensation across gender, race, and role at the same level catches problems while they’re still a spreadsheet fix, not a lawsuit. Most companies that get burned by pay equity issues had the data to catch it months earlier and never looked.
A fast way to see where these risk gaps sit across the entire HR function, not just compliance, is a structuredHR Risk Assessment. It scores ten areas of exposure in about four minutes and ranks them by urgency, which is a useful starting point before building out a full metrics dashboard.
What to Leave Off the Slide
A few numbers that HR teams love and CEOs mostly ignore: total training hours completed, number of job postings published, headcount by itself with no context, and single-point engagement scores with no trend line attached. None of these are wrong to track internally. They’re just not what earns HR a seat at the strategy conversation, because none of them answer the question a CEO is actually asking, which is what changed and why it matters.
Building a Dashboard That Actually Gets Read
The pattern across every metric above is the same: pair the number with the decision it should drive. Revenue per employee without a staffing recommendation is trivia. A pay equity ratio without a remediation plan is a liability sitting in a slide deck. The CHROs who hold a CEO’s attention aren’t the ones with the most metrics. They’re the ones who show up with four or five that map directly to a business decision, quarter after quarter.
Building that kind of dashboard from scratch, especially without a dedicated HR analytics function, is where most teams get stuck. If that’s the gap right now, Jumpstart HR’sfractional HR consulting team can help build out reporting that’s actually built for the CEO’s attention span, not just for HR’s own recordkeeping.
Ready to build a metrics dashboard your CEO will actually read? Book a free consult with Jumpstart HR and let’s map out what belongs on your next quarterly deck.
FAQs
What HR metrics matter most to a CEO? Metrics that tie directly to revenue, cost, or risk tend to hold a CEO’s attention longest. Revenue per employee, regretted attrition, cost per hire by channel, and open compliance items are a stronger starting point than broad engagement or headcount numbers alone.
How often should HR metrics be reported to leadership? Quarterly is the standard cadence for a formal CEO or board-level update, though risk-related metrics like open compliance items are worth tracking monthly internally so nothing sits unresolved for a full quarter.
What’s the difference between a vanity metric and a decision-driving metric? A vanity metric describes activity, like the number of trainings completed or job postings published. A decision-driving metric describes outcome and points to a specific action, like a rising regretted attrition rate that signals a retention plan is needed on a specific team.
How can a company build an HR metrics dashboard without a dedicated analytics team? Start narrow. Pick four or five metrics tied to current business priorities rather than trying to track everything at once, and build from there. A structured starting point, like an HR risk assessment or a fractional HR partner, can help identify which gaps to measure first.
Every HR leader has sat in that meeting. You raise a concern about turnover, or a compliance gap, or a broken hiring process. Leadership nods politely. And then the conversation moves on to something that “actually” affects the business.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: the people in that room aren’t ignoring you because HR doesn’t matter. They’re ignoring you because you haven’t given them a reason not to.
Influence in HR was never about having a seat at the table. Titles get you the seat. What keeps you there, and what gets people to actually act on what you say, is something else entirely: the ability to walk in with data, a framework, a plan, and a number leadership can’t argue with.
That’s the gap between HR that gets talked over and the one that gets listened to. And it’s exactly the gap Jumpstart HR was built to close, through its fractional HR consulting on one side and its independent research arm,Jumpstart HR Research, on the other.
What Actually Makes an HR Leader Influential
Influence isn’t a personality trait. It’s a track record.
The HR leaders who shape decisions instead of just implementing them tend to share a few habits:
They speak in business outcomes, not HR jargon
They bring a recommendation backed by data, not a gut feeling
They flag risk before it becomes a headline or a lawsuit
They understand the HR technology landscape well enough to push back on a vendor pitch
They make compliance part of the strategy conversation instead of a footnote to it
They give managers tools to lead, instead of policing every decision after the fact
None of that happens by accident. It happens because someone did the research, built the framework, or ran the numbers before the meeting started. Most HR leaders are stretched too thin to do all three at once. That’s usually where influence quietly stalls out, not because the leader lacks the instinct, but because they lack the bandwidth.
Why Experience Alone Doesn’t Cut It Anymore
A decade of HR experience used to be enough to earn credibility in the room. It isn’t anymore.
Today’s HR leaders are expected to have a point of view on AI adoption, multi-state compliance, workforce planning, HR technology spend, and employee experience, often all in the same quarter. The pace of change in HR tech alone makes it nearly impossible to stay current while also running day-to-day HR operations.
Because the research team sits inside a firm that’s actively consulting for hundreds of companies, the findings are grounded in what’s actually happening on the ground, not in what a vendor’s marketing deck says. Most HR technology advice online is paid for, directly or indirectly, by the company selling the software. Jumpstart HR Research holds a firm editorial line: the analysis isn’t for sale, and it doesn’t change based on who’s asking.
How Jumpstart HR Helps HR Leaders Build That Influence
This isn’t a services list. It’s a system, and each part of it solves a different piece of the credibility problem.
1. Turning Gut Calls Into Evidence-Based Decisions
TheResearch Library gives HR leaders something most of their peers walk into meetings without: independent data they can point to. When you can say “the market data shows X” instead of “I think X,” the conversation changes. It’s the difference between an opinion and a citation.
2. Giving HR Leaders Frameworks Instead of Generic Advice
Anyone can offer an opinion. Executives trust frameworks because frameworks are repeatable, and repeatable means defensible.
Jumpstart HR’s research team built two of them.B.R.I.D.G.E. is a free six-gate diagnostic (Business problem, Requirements, Internal alignment, Decision criteria, Guided vendor review, Execution readiness) that scores how disciplined your HR technology buying process actually is and flags where shelfware risk hides before a contract gets signed.The Five Workforces maps how deeply AI agents are woven into your organization’s day-to-day work, so you can talk about AI readiness in specific, structural terms instead of vague ones. Both take a few minutes to run, and both are laid out in more detail in the freeTwo Frameworks, One Story guide, built for HR practitioners rather than vendors.
3. Helping HR Leaders Execute, Not Just Strategize
A good idea that never gets implemented isn’t influence. It’s a memo nobody reads.
This is whereJumpstart HR’s consulting services come in. The firm has been running fractional and project-based HR for growing companies since 2011, covering compliance, employee handbooks, recruiting, onboarding, performance management, and leadership coaching. For companies without an HR team, Jumpstart HR effectively becomes the HR department. For teams that already have HR but are stretched thin on execution, Jumpstart HR plugs in for leave administration, employee relations investigations, recruiting overflow, and comp benchmarking, so the strategy doesn’t stall out waiting for hands to execute it. Popular starting points include thePrepaid HR Consulting Package and theFlexible HR Support Subscription.
4. Helping HR Leaders Get Ahead of Risk Instead of Reacting to It
Influential HR leaders are the ones who flag the problem in the planning meeting, not the ones explaining it after it becomes a legal issue.
TheHR Risk Assessment is built for exactly this. It’s a 4-minute self-assessment that scores 10 risk areas across the HR and recruiting lifecycle, ranks your flagged gaps by urgency, and comes with a results review from the Jumpstart HR team. It’s the fastest way to walk into a leadership conversation with a ranked list of what to fix, instead of a vague sense that something might be wrong.
5. Becoming the Advisor Leadership Actually Calls First
Put those four pieces together and the pattern is simple: research gives you the data, frameworks give you the structure, consulting gets it implemented, and the risk assessment keeps you ahead of the next problem. That combination is what turns an HR function from a service desk into a function leadership consults before making decisions, not after.
What Influential HR Actually Looks Like Day to Day
It’s easier to spot than it sounds. Influential HR teams:
Flag business problems before they show up in an exit interview
Use workforce data to back every major recommendation
Tie HR initiatives directly to company goals, not just HR goals
Build stronger managers instead of solving every people problem for them
Evaluate new HR technology with an actual framework, not a demo and a gut feeling
Treat research and measurement as ongoing habits, not annual projects
None of this requires a bigger headcount. It requires better inputs and a system for turning them into action.
If you’re ready to build that kind of HR function,book a free consult with Jumpstart HR and let’s scope exactly what you need, before any paid work begins.
Final Thoughts
Research without execution changes nothing. Execution without research is just guessing faster.
The HR leaders who build real influence are the ones who bring both to every conversation: the data to back the recommendation, and the follow-through to make it real. That’s the model Jumpstart HR has built its entire practice around, pairing independent research and proven frameworks with hands-on HR expertise, so HR leaders walk into every room with something leadership can’t wave away.
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Signals from an exclusive room, and what they mean for the people who have to buy, run, and answer for HR technology.
UKG spent a day with analysts laying out where the company is headed, and I was in the room. I have followed this company closely for years, so I am not interested in recapping the agenda. What I want to do is share the news and the signals that caught my attention, the moments that tell you something real about where the workforce technology market is going and what it means for your next buying decision.
Three conversations stood out. One from Jennifer Morgan, CEO. One from Suresh Vittal, Chief Product Officer. And one from the team behind UKG Ready, the product built for less complex organizations under 1,500 employees. Each spoke to a different person in my audience, and each carried a signal worth acting on.
Before I get into them, a word on how I read announcements like these. At Jumpstart HR Research we study two things: how HR teams actually buy technology, and how organizations are absorbing AI into the workforce. The first has a framework we call B.R.I.D.G.E. It is the path from a stuck, overwhelmed buyer to a clear one. Here it is in full, because the rest of this read leans on it.
B.R.I.D.G.E.
The step
What it means
B
Business Problem
Define the real operational problem before you evaluate any vendor.
R
Requirements
Separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves.
I
Internal Alignment
Align your stakeholders before the demos begin.
D
Decision Criteria
Create weighted evaluation criteria early.
G
Guided Vendor Review
Limit evaluation to three to five aligned vendors.
E
Execution Readiness
Assess implementation and adoption capacity before signing.
B.R.I.D.G.E., the Jumpstart HR Research framework for how HR teams buy technology. The order matters. Skipping a step is how buyers end up with shelfware.
The second framework, the one we use for the new hybrid workforce, is about how AI agents actually enter an organization. I will bring it in where it fits. For now, hold one idea: hybrid no longer means remote versus in-office. It means humans working alongside agents, and the question that matters is how deeply, and how governed.
Jennifer Morgan set the altitude, and two signals stood out
For your CEO and your board
Morgan’s job is vision, and she delivered it. Two signals inside her vision are the ones I would carry into a boardroom.
The first is how hard UKG is planting its flag with the frontline. The framing was direct: roughly 80 percent of the global workforce does not sit at a desk, and the other enterprise giants, ADP, SAP, Oracle, Workday, built their platforms for the other 20 percent. I have heard UKG tell a version of this for years. This was the most confident version yet, and it is now the spine of the entire company strategy. The signal for you is a gut check. If your workforce is hourly, shift-based, and on its feet, UKG is building directly for you. If your people are mostly salaried and on laptops, that same story is a sales position, not a market truth. Know which one you are before you let it shape your thinking.
The second signal was a “workforce problem inventory” so complete it is worth borrowing. Morgan walked through the operational complexity UKG solves for: fluctuating demand, last-minute call-outs, union rules, multi-state compliance, multi-currency pay, quiet quitting, the disconnect between managers and the frontline. It is one of the cleaner statements of the modern workforce problem I have seen a vendor make. Use it the way you would use any vendor’s problem list, as a mirror rather than a checklist. Walk through it, and circle only the three or four workforce problems that are costing you real money this year. Those become your Business Problem. The rest is noise dressed as urgency.
Her strongest move was a simple one: what we said last year, and what we delivered or the “say-do ratio”. UKG has been shipping, not just talking, and that earns the right to be taken seriously on the rest. For a buyer, this maps cleanly to the front of B.R.I.D.G.E.
B.R.I.D.G.E. step
What Morgan’s signal gives you
Business Problem
A ready-made problem inventory to use as a mirror, not your requirements.
Internal Alignment
The 80/20 framing forces the first alignment question: are we a frontline focused organization?
Guided Vendor Review
lear positioning against the enterprise giants tells you when UKG belongs on your shortlist and when it does not.
Suresh Vittal showed where the money and the risk actually live
For you, the HR and people leader
If there was one conversation to internalize, it was Vittal’s. The product roadmap is where vision turns into your invoice and your risk, and he was refreshingly clear about both.
The signal that matters most is how UKG is structuring its AI into three tiers, because that structure is your future cost model. Embedded AI is baked into the application and included in the price. AI-native assistants help a user finish a defined task and are priced per employee per month. Agentic products run a complex task end to end and will eventually be priced on usage and outcomes. I know Bryte well, so the embedded layer is familiar territory. What is new and important is UKG drawing a hard line between what you get for free, what you rent every month, and what will one day be metered by result. Read that ladder as a buyer. It is the shape of your spend for the next three years.
The second signal was the agent results UKG put forward: 50 percent fewer unfilled shifts, 88 percent shorter time to hire, 70 percent fewer HR tickets, 75 percent shorter payroll processing. Some of these agents are live today, others are still early access, and UKG was honest about which is which. The numbers are real claims worth respecting, but they are ceiling numbers. The buyer’s discipline is to ask for the median customer result and for two references your size who went live in the last six months. The distance between a vendor’s best case and your actual case is exactly where implementation projects quietly fail.
The deepest point Vittal made was about the moat. His argument is that any competitor can license the same underlying AI model, but none can license UKG’s two decades of punches, paychecks, and schedules. That is true, and it is the most credible thing said all day. But more data and better results for your specific company are not the same sentence. The moat only helps you if it is full of organizations that look like you. Make them prove the data density in your industry, your states, your size band.
This conversation is really about the workforce you are about to become. Here is the lens that fits.
The New Hybrid Workforce
Where Vittal’s roadmap takes you
The watch-out
The Augmented (everyone has a partner)
Embedded UKG Bryte, the help you do not have to ask for, woven into the workflow.
Shelfware. A long agent list is a long list of things to pay for and never adopt.
The Delegators (people direct small teams of agents)
Rubber-stamping. The day your team stops checking because the agent is usually right is the day compliance risk returns.
Two of the five workforce archetypes we track. UKG is building most directly for the Augmented and the Delegators.
The UKG Ready story named a market almost no one serves well
For the most overlooked leader in HR
This was the conversation my small business and lean-HR audience cannot afford to miss, because it was built for them, and almost no vendor builds for them.
The signal here is a market truth that does not get said often enough: organizations in the 75-to-1,500 employee band carry enterprise-grade complexity long before they have enterprise-scale teams. A 90-person multi-state manufacturer faces the same compliance exposure as a 500-person health system, but with a fraction of the HR capacity to handle it. UKG sized this as roughly a 13 billion dollar underserved market. If you live in this band, you feel this every day. Hearing a vendor state it this precisely, and then build for it deliberately, is the news.
The supporting signal was a clear-eyed segmentation of the small and midmarket space, the recognition that very small, small, and midmarket organizations are not one market but three, each with different compliance loads and platform needs. Use that to locate yourself honestly. Where you actually sit should decide how much platform you buy. It is the fastest way to stop yourself from purchasing enterprise architecture you will never grow into.
The proof point carried real weight. UKG customer Drake Waterfowl consolidated seven systems into one, accelerated payroll processing by over 97 percent, and pulled turnover down from a staggering 347 percent to double digits. That last number deserves a careful read. A 347 percent starting point tells you how broken things were before implementing UKG solutions, not how much improvement you should expect. Your result will track to how broken your own starting point is.
There was also an implementation claim worth flagging: go-lives up to 80 percent faster through AI-assisted configuration. For a lean team, faster implementation is real money. The phrase “up to” is still doing heavy lifting, so the move is to ask what the median customer actually experiences before you build a plan around it. This is Execution Readiness, the step most buyers skip and the one that decides whether any of this works.
B.R.I.D.G.E. step
What the UKG Ready signal gives you
Requirements
The segmentation helps you size what you actually need, so you buy depth, not overhead.
Decision Criteria
UKG customer, Drake Waterfowl’s results are criteria fuel, once you adjust for your own starting point.
Execution Readiness
The 80-percent-faster implementation claim is the headline. Test the median, not the ceiling.
What it all means
Pull the three conversations together and one picture forms, and it sits squarely on top of the two things we study.
On how HR teams buy: UKG built a day designed to be entered from the top, with vision and AI. You should enter from the bottom, with your business problem, and climb. Morgan handed you the problem inventory. Vittal handed you the cost ladder and the agent claims. The Ready team handed you the segmentation and the proof. Take them in the order of B.R.I.D.G.E., problem first, criteria next, readiness last, and you run the evaluation. Take them in the vendor’s order, and the vendor runs you.
On the new hybrid workforce: UKG is not talking about where people sit. Their entire bet is the human-plus-agent workforce, and they are betting it arrives through the system you already own rather than the tool an employee quietly downloads on their own. For most organizations the honest reality is a blend: augmented in operations, delegating in HR service delivery, and running a quiet, ungoverned free-for-all somewhere in marketing where someone is already using AI with no oversight. UKG can govern the first two beautifully. It does nothing about the third. Naming that split, and deciding to govern it on purpose, is your work. No vendor does it for you.
Every tool a team buys lands them in a workforce, and every workforce they want drives the next thing they buy.
That loop is the whole game, and UKG understands it as well as anyone in this market. The work on your side is not to be impressed by the day. It is to weigh the moat with clear eyes, separate what is free from what you rent from what you will one day be metered on, and decide which workforce you are actually trying to become. Then, and only then, sign.
Research Meets Reality. That has always been the whole point.
In this episode of Joey’s HR Lounge, Joey Price sits down with Ashley M. Anderson to unpack how diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are evolving in today’s political and business climate. As organizations face increasing pressure, many HR leaders are being forced to rethink how DEI fits into strategy, compliance, and long-term business outcomes.
This conversation goes beyond surface-level talking points to explore what’s changing, what’s being rolled back, and what HR leaders need to do to stay credible and effective. From navigating political tension to aligning DEI with measurable business impact, Ashley shares a candid perspective on where the function stands today and where it’s headed next. If you’re an HR leader trying to balance people, performance, and pressure, this episode offers a timely and grounded perspective.
🔑 Topics Covered
– The current state of DEI in HR
– How political pressure is shaping workplace decisions
– Where HR may have overcorrected or underdelivered
– Making DEI sustainable and aligned with business strategy
DEI in HR, diversity equity inclusion, HR strategy, HR leadership, future of HR, workplace inclusion, HR trends 2026, organizational culture, HR podcast, Joey Price, Ashley Anderson HR, business strategy HR, DEI backlash, HR leadership development
Talk to any recruiter today and one theme consistently surfaces: volume.
The top of the hiring funnel has changed dramatically. Job postings that once attracted a manageable number of applicants now regularly generate hundreds. In some cases, thousands. At the same time, recruiting teams are expected to move faster than ever.
The result is a tension many talent acquisition leaders know well.
Hiring teams want speed. Candidates expect fairness. Recruiters are asked to deliver both.
As someone who studies hiring technology through my work with Jumpstart HR’s research practice, interviews industry leaders on the Joey’s HR Lounge podcast, and explores these themes in my book The Power of HR, I hear this challenge constantly from talent leaders.
They are not simply looking for more automation.
They are looking for clarity, control, and trust in the tools that help them make hiring decisions.
That challenge is particularly acute at the screening stage of hiring.
And it is precisely the problem that new tools like Indeed’s Smart Screening are attempting to address.
The screening problem most organizations are facing
Early-stage screening has quietly become one of the most complex steps in modern hiring.
Historically, recruiters would review resumes, evaluate screening questions, confirm qualifications, and decide which candidates should move forward. That process required time, but the volume of applications made it manageable.
Today, the math has changed.
Employers routinely receive far more applications than recruiting teams can realistically review in detail. At the same time, business leaders expect open roles to be filled faster, not slower. We’ve found in our own research that 40% of companies are still struggling to find talent with the right skills.
During conversations with employers while developing Smart Screening, Indeed found that recruiting teams frequently describe feeling overwhelmed by the surge in applications and the operational effort required to review them.
This creates a difficult balancing act for talent leaders.
Move slowly and risk losing strong candidates to competitors. Move quickly and risk overlooking qualified applicants or introducing bias into the process.
Many technology solutions have attempted to address this challenge, but they have often struggled with a trust problem.
One common concern from recruiters is that screening algorithms operate as black boxes. Candidates receive scores or rankings, but hiring teams cannot easily understand how those decisions were produced.
When recruiters cannot explain the logic behind a screening tool, adoption often stalls.
The question many TA leaders are asking today is not whether technology should assist screening. It is how to introduce technology without losing transparency and accountability.
A shift toward configurable screening
Indeed’s Smart Screening tool approaches this challenge with a different philosophy.
Rather than functioning as an opaque scoring engine, the system is designed to allow employers to define how candidate evaluations occur.
At the center of the product is something called the Smart Fit Score.
Instead of automatically determining what makes a candidate qualified, the system allows hiring teams to specify the rules that shape the score. For example, employers can define criteria such as years of experience, required certifications, or specific qualifications that influence how candidates are evaluated.
Those rules become part of the scoring structure, and they are saved so organizations can review how decisions were configured later.
From a talent leadership perspective, that distinction matters.
It moves screening from a mysterious algorithm to something closer to a structured evaluation framework.
During a briefing with the Indeed product team, one analogy that resonated with me was thinking of the system as the teaching assistant rather than the professor. The employer defines the rubric. The technology simply applies it consistently.
For organizations that need both efficiency and auditability, that approach offers a compelling balance.
A consolidated view of candidate information
Another design element of Smart Screening focuses on reducing the operational burden recruiters experience when reviewing candidates.
The system produces a candidate summary page, which consolidates several pieces of information into one view.
This can include:
Information from the job description and screening criteria • Candidate responses to additional recruiter questions • Documentation of certifications or licensure uploaded during the application process • Bot mitigation signals that help detect fraudulent or automated applications
This summary provides hiring teams with a structured snapshot of how a candidate aligns with the role.
Instead of piecing together information from multiple sources, recruiters can review a consolidated profile designed to support faster evaluation.
Indeed reports that early employers using Smart Screening have seen reductions in time to hire of roughly twenty percent, along with strong recruiter satisfaction with the summary interface.
For organizations where hiring speed directly impacts operations, those improvements can be significant.
Built to support existing hiring workflows
One of the lessons many HR technology vendors have learned over the past decade is that new tools rarely succeed if they force recruiters to abandon established workflows.
Talent teams already rely on applicant tracking systems, collaboration platforms, and scheduling tools. Introducing additional systems often creates more friction rather than less.
Smart Screening attempts to address this challenge by embedding screening insights directly into existing hiring infrastructure.
The tool also includes integrations with workplace collaboration platforms such as Slack, allowing hiring managers to receive application notifications and review candidates in the tools they already use.
For talent acquisition leaders evaluating new technology, this “fit within the workflow” approach often determines whether a tool becomes widely adopted. Our research shows that over one-third of companies report adoption as a major challenge. In fact, almost half of companies aren’t fully utilizing their current recruiting technologies.
Responsible AI and hiring accountability
Any technology that assists with hiring decisions inevitably raises questions about fairness and bias.
That conversation has intensified as artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in hiring workflows.
Indeed emphasizes responsible AI practices within Smart Screening’s design. According to the company, its internal Responsible AI team evaluates models for potential bias prior to release and monitors how the system operates once deployed.
The system also moderates how employers configure screening prompts. If instructions that could create problematic outcomes are entered, moderation mechanisms prevent those configurations from being saved.
Additionally, Indeed has indicated that it engages with regulators and policymakers as conversations around AI governance in hiring continue to evolve.
For HR leaders, these safeguards represent an important shift in the HR technology landscape.
The focus is no longer simply on what hiring technology can do, but how transparently it operates and how responsibly it is deployed.
Where structured screening may create the most impact
Tools designed for structured, high-volume screening are particularly valuable in industries where hiring speed and credential verification are critical.
Healthcare organizations often need to confirm certifications and licensure before candidates move forward. Allowing candidates to upload documentation during the application process can reduce administrative delays.
Retail and hospitality employers frequently hire at scale and must evaluate large numbers of candidates quickly, especially during seasonal hiring periods.
Manufacturing, logistics, and public sector employers face similar challenges when recruiting for operational roles that attract large applicant pools.
In these environments, standardized screening frameworks can help ensure that candidates are evaluated consistently while still allowing hiring teams to move quickly.
Why better candidate screening improves the future of work
Technology conversations in HR often focus on efficiency. Streamlining processes and increasing efficiency is the overwhelming top priority, cited as a primary goal for companies using HR tech by 81% of buyers, according to our Insights@Work research.
But the real goal of hiring technology should be something deeper.
Better hiring decisions create better workplaces.
Through my work advising organizations, researching HR technology, and hosting conversations with talent leaders across the industry, I’ve come to believe that the hiring process shapes more than just recruitment metrics.
It shapes how people experience work from the very beginning.
My personal mission has long been to help create a world where people are more excited about Monday than they are about Friday.
That vision begins with hiring.
When screening processes are transparent, candidates feel they have a fair chance to be evaluated. Recruiters regain time to focus on the human side of hiring. Organizations move faster toward building teams that actually fit their needs.
Tools like Smart Screening represent one effort to bring more structure, transparency, and accountability to one of the most challenging stages of hiring.
And for talent leaders evaluating hiring technology today, the question is not whether screening will become more automated.
The real question is whether the tools we deploy will make hiring clearer, fairer, and more effective for everyone involved.
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