Jumpstart HR Research › Work with us › For analyst relations teams
Working With Our Analysts
You manage a list of analysts. This page tells you what we cover, how to brief us, what costs nothing, what costs something, and where the line between those two sits.
Why we want to know what you are building
Our work exists to help HR leaders evaluate, buy, and implement technology with confidence and clarity — and to help them build organizations with the right balance of humans and agents. We cannot do that well without understanding what is actually being built. That is the whole reason we take briefings.
- Buyers turn to people they trust. At the Guided vendor review stage of B.R.I.D.G.E., HR teams look for help making sense of a crowded market. The better we understand your product, the more accurately we can help the right buyer recognize you when you are genuinely the right answer.
- We are after good matches, not broad exposure. A buyer who chooses well and adopts successfully is worth far more to you than a buyer who merely heard your name. Fit is the outcome we are optimizing for, and it happens to be the one that renews.
- Where your buyers actually are matters. The Five Workforces suggests most organizations sit earlier in the AI shift than the marketing around them assumes. Telling us plainly where your product helps today lets us point organizations who are ready for it now in your direction.
- Adoption is part of the story we care about. B.R.I.D.G.E. ends at Execution readiness because technology that actually gets adopted is the only kind that helps anyone. Whatever you have learned about how customers succeed with you is genuinely useful to us.
- We want to meet builders at every stage. Seed through enterprise, category leaders and the companies quietly doing something better. If you are building for HR, we would like to know you.
Our mission is a world where people are more excited about Monday than they are about Friday. That gets closer every time an HR team buys the right thing and makes it work. You are part of that, and a briefing is simply how we get to know your piece of it.
What we cover
We are an independent HR technology analyst firm. Our research follows the buyer, not the category map, which means we cover the places where HR teams are actually spending and struggling.
Talent acquisition
Sourcing, screening, assessment, and the hiring-confidence gap.
Payroll and workforce management
Including the PEO and employer-services channel.
Recognition and engagement
Especially at the frontline and deskless edge.
Compliance and HR services
Where regulation and tooling collide.
HCM platforms
Suite versus best-of-breed, and how buyers actually decide.
AI agents in the workforce
How organizations absorb agents, through the Five Workforces model.
Two frameworks sit under everything we publish: B.R.I.D.G.E., which maps how HR teams buy technology, and the Five Workforces, which maps how organizations absorb AI agents. If you want to know how we will think about your product before you brief us, read those two pages first.
How to brief us
Briefings are free and confidential, and the agenda is research. If there is a natural fit for working together, we may mention it briefly near the end — as an aside, never as the point of the call.
Book it
Thirty or sixty minutes, whichever the update warrants. No qualification form.
Send context ahead
Deck, roadmap, or a paragraph. We would rather read first and spend the call on questions.
Talk
Held under informal NDA. Nothing specific gets published without your sign-off.
It informs the research
What we learn shapes how we read the category. It does not become an article about you.
What to bring
- What changed since we last spoke — roadmap, pricing, packaging, positioning, leadership.
- Who you are actually winning and losing against, and why you think that is.
- The buyer problem you solve, in the words your customers use rather than your category page.
- Anything you want us to understand before we write about the category.
What we usually do not need
- The full demo. Fifteen minutes of product is usually plenty, and we will happily ask to go deeper if it is useful.
- The customer logo slide. We will ask about customers where it is relevant to what we are researching.
- A coverage ask. Briefings and coverage are decided separately, so you can set that part aside and just talk shop with us.
Free versus paid, stated plainly
You should not have to guess which side of the line something falls on.
Always free
- Research briefings, virtual or at conferences
- Being considered for inclusion in our published research and category coverage
- Reading everything we publish on the research hub
Paid
- Subscription and advisory retainer — standing research access, analyst hours, approved quotes, podcast slots, briefing priority
- Sponsored and commissioned research — landscape guides, category guides, insights reports
- Content marketing packages
- Product and market alignment and validation work
- Speaking, panels, and onsite analyst days
Getting on our radar between briefings
- Send news that is actually news. Funding, acquisition, a real product shift, a leadership change. We read it.
- Tell us when your data contradicts ours. This is the fastest way to become interesting to an analyst.
- Offer your customers for research. Not for a case study — for a survey, panel, or interview where they can speak candidly. We will sometimes ask you to forward a survey invitation to your client list, so your customers are represented in the findings and the sample reaches further. You control the send; we never take possession of the list.
- Subscribers get the research calendar, so you can time a briefing to a study rather than guessing.
If you are building the AR program itself
Separately from being an analyst you brief, we do a small amount of advisory for teams building their own analyst relations function from scratch. If you already have an agency or an internal owner running your program, this is not for you — and we will tell you so.
AR/IR program advisory
- Program review — an audit of your existing program and materials
- List refresh — who actually covers your category and who moves buyers, updated
- Analyst deck outlines and review — we tell you what we would want to hear, and what we hear too often
- Sample communications for briefings, embargoes, and follow-up
- A plan your PR agency or internal owner can run without us
- Starter kit if you are building from zero, including a session on how AR works in HR tech specifically
The part you are really asking about
Briefings and coverage are decided separately, and so are paid work and published research. Where a company shows up in our research is always earned rather than purchased.
Sponsored research funds the study getting made, not what it says. Survey data is reported in aggregate, every sponsored asset discloses its sponsor on the asset, and advisory work stays confidential and never becomes published research about you. The full policy is written down.
Questions AR teams ask us
Is a briefing really free, or is it a sales call?
It is free, and the agenda is research — we want to understand what you are building so our read on your category is accurate. We will not pretend the commercial side does not exist, though: if something we do could genuinely help you, we may raise it briefly toward the end of a virtual briefing. It is an aside, you are under no obligation, and at conference briefings we keep the conversation entirely to research.
Do you guarantee coverage if we sponsor something?
No. Sponsorship funds a study getting made and puts your name on it as the sponsor. It does not determine the findings and it does not buy you a mention in unrelated research. We are always glad to walk through exactly what a sponsorship does and does not include before you commit to anything.
Do you work with our competitors?
Probably, yes. We are an analyst firm covering a category, so we talk to everyone in it. That is what makes our read worth having. What protects you is confidentiality: what you tell us in a briefing or a retainer does not travel, and we never use one client’s information to advise another.
Can we quote your analysts in a press release?
Yes, with prior written approval, and it is included in the subscription. We will not approve a quote that says something we do not believe.
How do we get included in a landscape or category guide?
By being relevant to the category and by briefing us so we get you right. Inclusion is editorial. Sponsorship of a guide is a separate decision and does not determine who appears in it.
Do you need access to our customer data?
We never take possession of your customer list or your data. What we do sometimes ask is that you forward one of our survey invitations to your clients — so your customers are represented in the findings, and so the sample reaches further than our own network. You control the send, and responses come back to us in aggregate.
We already have a PR agency doing AR. Do we still brief you?
Yes, and plenty of our briefings come through agencies. To be clear though: if you already have an agency or an internal owner managing your analyst relations, we are not looking to compete with them. That is not our business. We are simply one of the analysts on your list, and we are glad to be briefed by whoever runs your program.
Show us what you’ve got
Thirty or sixty minutes, free, under informal NDA. Bring what has changed, what you are proud of, and where you are heading next.
Show us what you’ve got →
Looking at paid work instead? See everything we offer.
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