This episode features an interview with William Tincup, President and Editor-at-Large of RecruitingDaily.com. William is a writer, speaker, consultant, and investor at the intersection of HR and technology. He has spent the last 20 years studying all aspects of HR and talent acquisition, including practitioners and the tech that serves them. In this episode, Amanda sits down with William to discuss the excessive amount of tech in HR, user satisfaction versus adoption, and why the ROI of tech is flawed.
This episode features an interview with William Tincup, President and Editor-at-Large of RecruitingDaily.com. William is a writer, speaker, consultant, and investor at the intersection of HR and technology. He has spent the last 20 years studying all aspects of HR and talent acquisition, including practitioners and the tech that serves them.
In this episode, Amanda sits down with William to discuss the excessive amount of tech in HR, user satisfaction versus adoption, and why the ROI of tech is flawed.
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“What I learned when I was studying user adoption years ago, is the game isn’t adoption. We think it is, it's a false signal though. The game is user satisfaction. How do we get users to actually fall into love with software? So on the way, we have to get people to use it, check. We’ve got to communicate, we've got to do all the things we've talked about. We’ve got to get them to use it. Once they use it and they consume it, and they're utilizing it, they're going to have questions. But, there's this moment in which they come over and they love the software. And it doesn't have to be perfect software. People think when I talk like that, they're like, ‘Oh, well there's no software that's perfect.’ I’m like, ‘It isn't about being perfect.’ It's about them understanding how to use the software in such a way that they know that this software helps them be successful and they can't imagine life or their job without it. And it's user satisfaction. You're beyond adoption at that point. You've crossed over into real, true user satisfaction, user love.” – William Tincup
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:07): William explains why there’s too much tech in HR
*(13:22): How to drive tech adoption through training
*(20:02): How long it takes to successfully roll out new tech
*(30:45): William explains RecruitingDaily.com and his role there
*(44:11): Segment: Getting Tactical
*(44:49): William explains why ROI of tech is flawed
*(55:59): Amanda and William dive into mergers and acquisitions
*(01:10:03): Segment: Asking For a Friend
*(01:10:21): What the future of HR tech will look like
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Links:
Connect with William on LinkedIn
Listen to The RecruitingDaily Podcast
Listen to The Use Case Podcast
Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn
Amanda Berry: William, thank you so much for joining me today. I am excited to talk to you about HR technology and all the ways it's helping or hindering us. I think we'll dive into that. Let's start with an HRD Connect article you wrote titled, “I Want Less Tech: Overcoming the HR Software Adoption Obstacle.”
Amanda Berry: I think a lot of our listeners, whether you're in HR, IT, or even internal comms, can understand that sentiment. You say in that article that HR practitioners feel there's too much HR technology or that they can't drive adoption. So let's start there. Why do they think that there's too much tech in HR?
William Tincup: First of all, thank you for having me on the show. It's an absolute pleasure to be a guest. Two things, I went to a bunch of conferences in the spring. So probably six in a row, I mean, they're all HR tech related. So Unleash, Transform, you know, SHRM, SHRM Tech, SHRM Talent, all that stuff. And a theme that kind of developed over all of those for me is people would seek me out.
William Tincup: One way or another. And then they basically say, Hey, what about this? I've got this problem. An overarching theme for all those conversations was I just want less. I just, it's overwhelming. We'd be in an expo hall with 300 vendors. They're all selling really cool technology, but it's just like the sentiment from practitioners was.
William Tincup: It's great technology. When I look at the demo, I love it. Don't want to add another thing to my team. I don't want to add another thing to me. I could probably get the money, but I don't even know if it's a great use of money and it's just this feeling of kind of being overwhelmed simultaneously with.
William Tincup: Wondering, am I getting all out of the technology I already have? I found it kind of ironic that they're at a tech conference. So that was the fun part for me. I'm like, you're at a tech conference and you want less tech. You can be at a car show. Like, why are you at a tech conference? If you want less tech.
William Tincup: But once I started kind of peel the onion to understand that it isn't less tech, they want to be assured. That the tech that they have is working for them rather than against them, or working as in usage, as you mentioned with adoption, they're unsure. And in that, and unsure creates that anxiety of yes, new tech, great, fantastic, AI, cool, got it.
William Tincup: Do I need more tech in my life? And I think that sometimes as consumers, we run into this too. Like I think pre show we were, we were joking about zero inbox and folks that have inboxes with a lot of emails. I, I think that's the same thing with tech as it relates to like HR and recruiting. That they vacillate between not having enough or the right tech.
William Tincup: And then. Periods where they can't do demos, they just shut down because it was just like, I have the budget or I don't have the budget. That's pretty easy to kind of figure out. The other is, is does this actually solve the need that we have? So I think the things, first of all, one is the feeling of less is more.
William Tincup: And the other is, is, okay, the adoption of what we've already spent money on. There's no worse feeling for a practitioner than the feeling of I went to bat. We bought this, we won't use brand names, but we bought like an engagement software platform. It was. really beautiful. Everyone loved it. Everyone said they were going to use it.
William Tincup: We went through the implementation and no one's using it. That's the worst feeling for a practitioner is they went to bat. They got the money. They built the business case. Everyone said they were going to use it and then people don't use it.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. They spend all this time working probably with IT. Yep.
Amanda Berry: Doing a rollout, a communications plan, training people how to use it. Is it because it's almost like this Dr. Frankenstein's where you have all these different pieces and they don't really talk to each other and then you have to log into this for one thing and then this for another and this. From an employee perspective, that is not a great experience.
Amanda Berry: But what, what is the, the, the gripes or what are some of the things that they're saying about the all the too much tech?
William Tincup: You've touched on one of the things that the integration part used to be kind of the biggest issue. Consulting firms would come in and basically help integrate larger technology point solutions and kind of make that work.
William Tincup: Now the market has actually kind of adopted a lot of API strategies to where the data isn't as bad. The logins aren't as bad. It still happens that someone has to log into the time and attendance thing. They have to log into the payroll. That still happens, but it was worse and it's better. It's still to your point for employees.
William Tincup: If we think about the employee experience, software is never factored in. To their overall experience, we think about their experience, like, how are you doing with your boss or your coworkers? Are they playing nice with you to get the benefits? Yeah, you get the benefits. Do you enjoy work? Are you getting some type of fulfillment?
William Tincup: Like But never in that, that schema are we saying, Hey, do you like the technology you use? Are you using the technology that we have? Like, it's never a part of EX, the employee experience.
Amanda Berry: Which for someone like me, because I, I'm a remote worker, that is my, that is how I experience being an employee at my company.
Amanda Berry: That's right. Is through technology. That's right. Yeah. Why are leaders struggling to drive adoption?
William Tincup: You'll love this. So. You'll love this and hate it simultaneously. It's in no one's job description. So go and look at a head of HR, go look at Indeed, search for CHRO. Or head of HR, director of HR, manager of HR, or even some of the specialized positions, director of compensation.
William Tincup: Nowhere in those position descriptions would say technology adoption. Nowhere. So if it's not in your job description, which means that it's not tied to your pay in any way, shape, or form, what's the incentive? Outside of this technology helps me do my job. Now that's different. Like you could see, I could see, especially like in recruiting, this technology that we're using is sourcing specific sourcing technology.
William Tincup: It actually helps me do my job. I'll log into that because it helps me do my job, which helps me as my KPIs. Helps me to get my bonus. Makes sense, but in most people's job descriptions, it's just, it's not mentioned. And if it's not mentioned, it's not measured. If it's not measured, then it's left to the human to then make the decision of whether or not they want to, or don't want to, and you get to discretionary effort and sometimes then it's, then it becomes a game of, will you spend your extra time of work?
William Tincup: Learning a new technology and learning how to make that technology work for you. And most people, especially post pandemic, most people won't do that. So technology adoptions are super low.
Amanda Berry: Why do you think that most people won't do that? Is it just because they're not getting paid for it? Or they're already overworked?
Amanda Berry: Or a little bit of everything?
William Tincup: Yeah, both. The thing is, is most people's jobs are unwinnable. Like when you get right down to it, very few jobs in corporate America are winnable games. They're very, oftentimes the goals aren't reach goals. There are unattainable goals. And so people feel like they're already defeated before they start.
William Tincup: And oh, by the way, oh, we're switching performance management systems from one to another. And by the way, now you have to do reviews and a new technology that you have to learn. Again, well, why you? Yeah. It's not just the HR leaders. The company itself has not made the business case for why it's important for employees to care about the technology.
William Tincup: Yeah. It's depressing when you hear it like that, right?
Amanda Berry: It's, it's pretty depressing. Yeah.
William Tincup: I don't want this, I want the phone call to end now. Please stop. It hurts.
Amanda Berry: I'm going to go downstairs so I can cry for a little bit. I've never really thought about it that way. You know, someone who's done, does internal comms, you think, well, we just didn't, we didn't do X.
Amanda Berry: We didn't know why I've never once thought about it as well. It's not in my position or this constant switching. I mean, I think, I mean, that's something I've seen in multiple organizations I've worked out where you start. But this product, and then six months later, they roll in this one, keep that one for a year, year and a half, and then they go back to that one, or they move on to a new one and there's not a lot of help on how to use it.
Amanda Berry: It's just like, no, it's so user friendly. You should be able to log in.
William Tincup: Yeah, it's so super simple. It's like Google. Yeah, you just go into a super simple. It's like, yeah, it's not like Google a B the thing that people don't get. I mean, comms gets it because when you talk to people in communications that have that background, they understand, okay, we need to communicate the, why we got to communicate the, how there's, how they break it down because they're trained in order.
William Tincup: So like there's an audience. They're going to receive these series of messages and they need to understand and want this change. So how do we convince them from not wanting to change to wanting this change or understanding why we made the change, etc. Like comms people get it. It's the folks that are on the receiving end of that message when it comes to things like training.
William Tincup: Or what we don't factor in typically is like, okay, take a comms technology. You've worked in it for seven years. You know how to make this thing bend, you know, it's almost like the matrix. You can make this technology, do whatever you want. You're competent, you're confident, like love this technology. And all of a sudden the company decides to use a different technology.
William Tincup: And if they don't do it to hurt you, they do it thinking this is a better technology. The other one we've used, it's good, but not great. This one over here, it's absolutely great. See, it's not great to you. And it's not great for you. Because you were competent, confident, and you love the prior technology.
William Tincup: And the executives don't get that. It's lost on them that someone would actually, once they're good at a technology, and they really, really understand it, they don't want to change, even for a superior technology. It's like that, that change, the delta of change, the way you did it, the way you will do it, that delta has changed.
William Tincup: It's too overwhelming. I got to relearn all the things, all, I got to run reports differently. Like again, it's not in my job. That's not my job. My job is actually, in that case, write communications, et cetera, et cetera, plan all these other things that are laundry list of expectations and your job description.
William Tincup: Technology adoption is not one of them.
Amanda Berry: What does that look like if someone's like, Hey, I've been working in this system for seven years and now you want me to change, but I know, you know, if I'm that person that my workload isn't going to change while I learn it, and I'm going to make mistakes in it, very likely 100%.
Amanda Berry: So I would think, is it, I need to be trained in it and my, my workload has to like pull back for just, I don't know, a couple of weeks, a month, I don't know, until I'm really proficient in it. What does that look like? How do we drive adoption?
William Tincup: Training. Like it's a relentless pursuit of training. So it isn't one dimensional, like you're learning styles, learning differences.
William Tincup: So everyone learns differently. I like technology to be trained on technology in the sense of, I want to get in. And then I want someone to ask, answer questions for me on what happened, reading, watching a webinar, reading a PDF. I don't learn that way. Yeah. So everyone has a different learning style and we also have learning differences.
William Tincup: Like dyslexia, dysgraphia, and all types of things like that. So those are never factored in. So there's that. Most people, most software companies think of training as either the software is so easy, which whenever you hear the software is so easy and intuitive, you automatically. No, it is not easy, and it is not intuitive.
William Tincup: There's no software in the world that is that intuitive where someone can have no knowledge, get in, use it, and be a power user. Yeah.
Amanda Berry: Sounds like the people who are like, My dog is the sweetest thing. He won't bite. You get bitten. I've worked with like to roll out a different, let's say different kinds of software or updates on, you know, Macs and getting that information from IT and there go.
Amanda Berry: They'll just need to hit the install and restart. And I think about like people in my life who are not tech. Literate at all. And I'm like, we need to walk them through, whether it be with a video and a sheet where if they don't want to watch the video, they can go step one, click on the little thing in the top left corner and it shows in video and in pictures.
Amanda Berry: But I feel like sometimes that training is really lacking.
William Tincup: So communicating the crux of this is you've got to communicate the change. Why, how, when, where, all that, all of those things, you got to answer those questions, whether or not they've been asked or not, you've got to answer them for people so that they, the change, then you've got to train the heck out of them.
William Tincup: Right. And then what we often don't do is again, like you said, which is a great idea, roll back a little bit of their work, set some of those expectations like, Hey, listen, we get it. You've got to spend two hours a day learning this new technology. So first of all, cool. Do that. Cause you're going to be better.
William Tincup: You're going to love it. Once you get on the other side of it, the learning curve, you're going to love it. We know it. So we'll just kind of work with you on that. The other thing I'd say is certifications. Having people test out so that you know, that they understand the technology. Cause it's real easy for an employee to then say, Oh yeah, got it.
William Tincup: 100%. I have no idea how to log in, but it's easy for me to communicate. Oh, yeah, no, got it.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, absolutely. Leave me alone now.
William Tincup: Yeah, I'm good. It's harder to pass certification tests on that technology. So that actually gets people, which gets you to the next thing is incentives. So why not actually pay people?
William Tincup: Okay. So, hey, listen, for the first 50 people that get certified in this new communications technology, we're going to give you an extra day off. Or a bonus, whatever, you know, it doesn't have to be much. People like get into this, like, well, we got to give away cars. I'm like, no, this isn't that this is basically making sure that they understand the importance that you as an organization have placed on.
William Tincup: We've made the decision that this technology is business critical. And if it's business critical, we need to wind back some of your job. We need to give you time in order to be successful at learning this. We want to incentivize you and we're going to train the heck out of you. Now. You have a chance doing that you have a chance of adoption.
William Tincup: You really do. But if you don't have incentives, and you don't help roll back some of their work, and you haven't communicated, and you don't train, and you don't certify, it's a strategy based on luck. And hope. Yeah.
Amanda Berry: And it sounds risky. Like you said, like, no, I got this. You know, if you're one of those employees, it's like, no, no, I can log in.
Amanda Berry: I got my login from IT. I got this. I'm good. And then you go in and you're, you're not doing. what everyone else is doing, or you're putting something in wrong, you're inputting something wrong, you can really cause some downstream impacts.
William Tincup: Oh, yeah. We spent money as a company, right? So this is a utilization of capital.
William Tincup: We decided to spend money in a certain way with the best intentions. This software will help us get from A to B, like, okay, everybody's on the same page. It's just like, it's the cliff of the, all of that thoughtfulness. Of how we selected the software and why it's going to be business critical. It's like, then the job's over.
William Tincup: It's like the job isn't over for anybody. The job actually just started and it's a relentless communication strategy. It's a relentless training strategy. It's a relentless kind of pursuit to get more and more people using the technology. Cause if you get more people using the technology, you'll actually get the value.
William Tincup: I mean, of any technology. Actually, any HR recruiting technology, if they're using it and they're in there because they'll teach each other to, Hey, did you know that there's a hack that you could do this? Oh, I had no idea. That's what you want, is you want them so excited where they're actually teaching each other.
William Tincup: But you gotta get them excited. You gotta get them into it. They've gotta see that this actually helps, makes my life better.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. It's interesting, you just said something that, that really piqued my interest. You said, Yeah. You know, you spend all this time, well, I'll just summarize, you spend all this time sort of getting it implemented and leading up to and working with IT and connecting systems and all this other stuff.
Amanda Berry: And then it's like, go live day. We are done. Like, we did it. Everyone's high fiving themselves in the room. But that's, that is really just step one of, so. Like, in your mind, and I ask this for a lot of things, even in my personal life, like, how much time should people be focused on that second step? So step one is at the organization, getting connected and flipping on.
Amanda Berry: Step two, which is now that training, that certification, that getting people together, answering questions, producing work. How long do you see, on average, that takes to roll something out successfully?
William Tincup: About 18 months, year and a half, if you do it well, you, it's a kind of a relentless pursuit. You almost never stop communicating and you never stop training because you have new employees that come in.
William Tincup: You have, you're always kind of thinking about training because you want the utilization. It's like getting a new car. I remember a hundred years ago I had a BMW and they offered for my wife and I to come in to get trained. It's a X6, so it's like a SUV. And we didn't do it. So we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Amanda Berry: It's a car. Got it. It's a car. Gas, brakes, steering wheel. Got it.
William Tincup: Let me see. I put it in, I put it in drive and it goes. Yeah. All right. Thanks. Yeah.
Amanda Berry: I know how to run a car. I know how to drive a car. I took a class when I was like 15.
William Tincup: But you know what? We had that car for a decade and there were things in that car I never knew how to use.
William Tincup: Because as a man, this is actually part of my gender. I would not ask for help and I wouldn't ask for directions. And they offered it like they said, Hey, listen, you come in. It takes three hours. We'll show you everything. You can literally do anything with the cards. It's a work of art. You could do all kinds of fun stuff.
William Tincup: Softwares like that, like you can do crazy, amazing things with it, but you've got to want to, the company's got to incentivize you in a number of different ways and just make sure that they're supportive of not just the outputs of your job, but the way in which you go about your job, the process, the technology, et cetera.
William Tincup: So there's a lot of respect there that needs to be probably paid attention to by everybody. But software is one of those things like the car, you've used it for a while and you feel like, yeah, I'm pretty, yeah, I kind of know this. There's so much more to the applications that we have access to than our understanding.
William Tincup: They're far more deeper and broader.
Amanda Berry: I just want to back up a little bit. How should leaders of a company go about finding technology that works? Because we just gave the example of this person who's been working on this system for seven years. It works perfectly. They know how to use it. This is going to cause a disruption.
Amanda Berry: They may not use all the features. They don't even know they're, so that's what the trainings for. But. What happens between person using it, loves it, and this new thing, like, how are they making these decisions and how can they be ensuring that they're making the right decisions?
William Tincup: Oh, now you've touched on something that will really depress you.
William Tincup: Most of the time, they're not factored in. Most of the times, HR technology is bought by CFOs. Okay. That will never log in to the HR part of the software. And so it's basically given to you and told, and you're told to, okay, you have, and we won't say brand names, but you, we bought this, here it is, you have all the things.
William Tincup: Go be successful at your job. We've given you the tools and resources to be successful, and the truth is, you didn't have any input. It's just like anything else. Again, when you buy a gift for somebody, you've got a chance of them being really excited and happy with that gift. More often than not, they look at that gift and go, these people don't really know me.
William Tincup: Or if you give them cash, it's like, some people get offended by that. I'm like, but cash?
Amanda Berry: You didn't put any effort into it. Anyone can give cash. It's like that Seinfeld. Anyone can take reservations. Anyone can give cash. That's right.
William Tincup: It's exactly right that. So the decision has been made without them. And CHROs don't like that.
William Tincup: None of the people on the HRTA side love that technology is bought for them. They want to be a part of the purchase. They want to be a part of, okay, first of all, do we need to change communications, employee communication software? First of all, is there a legit reason to change software? And if the answer is not unanimous, we need to double click on that.
William Tincup: Like, why isn't it unanimous? If everyone says, yeah, all my friends are using this other thing, we're using 1980 software. Okay. Everyone says the same thing. Yeah, we should start looking. There's. Easy ways to go about that process, peers, peer reviews, software rating sites, talking to people at conferences, just talking to your peers, finding out what they're using.
William Tincup: They don't care. Like you have peers that do the same job at another company. It's not competitive. What are you using? Oh, we're using this. Does everybody love it? Everyone loves it. It took us about six months to get everybody to love it. Once everyone got really, really good at it, can't imagine life without it.
Amanda Berry: Ideally, what does that look like in a room? Is it all the stakeholders making this decision? And not just, I mean, you gave the example of CFO, but it's not just the CFO. It's the CFO, the CHRL, and a couple other like HR specialists or generalists. So that they can get in there and really understand it. And then maybe internal comms, if it's just to help understand why we're doing this, get them in there so they have to communicate, they understand the process.
William Tincup: The best way to answer that question is, who's using the software? Who's using the software? A hundred years ago, I did Salesforce. com implementations. And we realized very quickly that if the C suite didn't log in, it wasn't active in Salesforce, the implementation wasn't going to go anywhere. It was dragged on and it was just going to not go anywhere.
William Tincup: If the C suite actually got in there and used it and ran reports and talked about it and talked about the importance, everyone got on board fast. Like it was a smooth, easy implementation because everyone could see that it comes from the top. This isn't just one of these things. They want us to use it and they're going to manage us, et cetera.
William Tincup: They're using it. They're using it to build the business. You know what? I'm going to get in, I'm going to get on board. What I think happens in HR tech, if done well, is you actually start at the bottom. In, insofar as, what will the users actually use? What do they need? What's missing? So then you can kind of build a case around what's being done well, what's not being done well, what's being used, not being used, et cetera, but build it from the user base and find out from them if there's even a change that needs to happen, or is it just, do we need to actually have more training?
William Tincup: Like people will switch. And they'll go from, let's say, one provider, one payroll provider to another payroll provider. And it's like, I can't remember the stats on divorce rates, but it's, it's one for the first divorce. And it's a much higher rate for the second divorce. Because a lot of people bring the baggage of the first divorce into their second marriage.
William Tincup: Right? That's the same with technology. Horrible analogy. But, the idea is If you didn't use all the functionality in this application, why would you switch to another application? You're just going to do the same thing.
Amanda Berry: And I think there becomes this like, well, this is the fourth software that I've seen implemented in six years.
Amanda Berry: So I'm really not going to put a lot of stock into this because we're going to have another one soon.
William Tincup: For a lot of employees, especially longer term employees, we've seen this show before. Yeah. So everyone's going to get hot, bothered, we're going to have a big hurrah, there's a party, some champagne, the whole bit, and in six months people won't care.
William Tincup: And I don't really have to learn this. A hundred percent.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, it'll be gone soon. I mean, I think I've had that attitude at some places.
William Tincup: Who hasn't? Who hasn't? I mean, again, again, if you're not using the software you have, why wouldn't you feel that way? When it's being switched out. And again, most users are just, they're recipients of that change.
William Tincup: They're not active in any way, shape or form. Their opinions aren't factored in. That's where this should come from is a groundswell. It should come up and say. We need this to be successful at our jobs and in building a business case around that and in making sure that the current technology doesn't do that would be first and then if it doesn't, okay, now we've got a legit reason to actually move from one to the other and we've got everybody with us.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, as you were saying that, my, my thought has been, I mean, back in the old days when I would go to implement or look into new intranet software or platforms, I would do a needs gaps analysis. What do you need? What are you missing? What's nice to have? What do you have to have? And I would do that by department and you know, you can't, now you can't please everyone, but there's some big ticket items that people have to have in some big gaps that I'm seeing themes across departments.
Amanda Berry: Are people not doing those anymore?
William Tincup: Dunno. No, it's just, it's again, things move so fast and the sales teams for most HR tech and recruiting tech play, they don't like selling to HR. So they'll sell to people that control the budget, CEO, COO, CFO, sometimes the CHRO, but more often than not, they don't like selling to HR.
Amanda Berry: Is it because they don't have the money?
William Tincup: The perception is, is that they don't have the power, which is incorrect. They do, of course they have the power, but the thing is, is. Most C H R O's don't log into the software that they purchase. So, it gets back to that salesforce. com analogy. If the C H R O isn't logging into the payroll system, or the engagement system, or whatever the bid is, if they're not logging in, then it's not really that important.
William Tincup: And so you've got to have a leader that understands what the people want that needs analysis and understands the gaps and what we have and don't have a need and all that stuff. And also says, Yeah, this is a part of my job. Part of my job is actually the log in and to understand what they're going through so that a I'll have empathy, but be also understand where their job needs to change.
William Tincup: Around the technology, that's actually, it's not just logging in for logging in sake. It's actually an understanding for a payroll clerk, you're spending three days of your life double checking X, Y, and Z. I had no idea. I just thought you went in on Friday and pushed a button. I had no idea that that went on.
William Tincup: The higher you go up in the ladder, the further they get away from the actual use of technology.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, that's right. Let's now switch and understand a little bit more about you. I love that conversation. We're gonna continue it. Sure. But let's hear and understand more about you. You are the President and Editor-at-Large at recruitingdaily.com.
Amanda Berry: What is recruitingdaily.com?
William Tincup: So Recruiting Daily owns two media sites. Basically, HCM Technology Report, which covers from a media perspective, it covers everything from sourcing to outplacement. So the entire spectrum of HR and recruiting. Recruiting Daily kind of starts at sourcing and ends at onboarding.
William Tincup: HCM Technology Report is more of a news site. It does a great job of analysis of things that are happening in the news of people, process, technology acquisitions, funding, stuff like that. Recruiting Daily is more of a user generated content. We do a lot of training and events. But basically it's a media company.
William Tincup: Like think of horrible analogy, but TechCrunch for talent, of course, not with the same brand recognition or a lot of the other stuff, but basically that.
Amanda Berry: And you said you're president editor at large. What is your role?
William Tincup: I'm more or less a spokesperson. So at this stage of my career, I do a lot of podcasts like this one, but I also create a lot of podcasts content.
William Tincup: So I talk to a lot of leaders. Both practitioners and vendors, and I speak at conferences. I'm kind of our official person that gives quotes and things like that for news outlets. So, I don't do a lot of the operating part, which is good because I've done it several times in my career and I, it's not, none of that's fun for me.
William Tincup: I like this role where I get to actually talk to people every day. Kind of like yourself, I get to talk to people every day. And I'll look at my calendar, there'll be seven podcasts. Oh, my God, that's for someone else looking at that outside looking at it and go, Oh my God, like how I look at podcast as continuing education, like I'm going to learn something from this person, this guest that I have on, I'm gonna learn something.
William Tincup: I get the chance to learn something in this conversation. So it's not work for me now for other folks that aren't used to talking a lot like that listening and doing this, it would be really hard. But like, I love getting in front of an audience. And speaking about things that affect practitioners, things that are affecting vendors, et cetera.
William Tincup: Like, I just love that. I love doing that, and I've been doing it for a long time.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. Well, you're, you're really great at it. I tell you, I've been looking forward to this since I met you a couple weeks ago, maybe, so. Very kind of you. Yes. Tell me about your career. Give me a summary of where you started and how you got to where you are.
William Tincup: It's interesting how the industry or how someone that doesn't know me would look at my background and. think something's important when it wasn't really that important. So I have a bachelor's in art history, a master's in American Indian studies, an MBA. And most people would look at the MBA and say, Oh, MBA.
William Tincup: Impressive. Yeah. MBA was basically a, it was an exercise in Two things, understanding how to ask questions and also what kind of paradigms are there always and what paradigms are coming. But it was easy. Like my art history degree, on the other hand, memorizing 15, 000 works of art, not easy. But I learned the history of the world through the lens of art.
William Tincup: That's tough for everybody. It was tough for me to be tougher, but I use that more than I use the NBA. And I have since I earned the NBA, like nothing's changed. I earned the NBA to basically legitimize my arts degrees. Right. So I worked for Sam Walton back in the eighties at Walmart. I directly worked for Sam for almost two years and I learned more from him and more, and again, I was young, really young and impressionable.
William Tincup: I learned more in that experience at Walmart than I have at. Most of my employment, like things that I still think about today, go back to Sam's rules. What did you do at Walmart? One point I was a store director, co director, store director, I had my own store. I was assistant manager, I was the youngest assistant manager in their history.
William Tincup: So I did all kinds of stuff at Walmart. Like the famous one, I guess, would be, I think it was, it was an Odessa. Sam comes up to me and I'm running like six departments. One of them's furniture at Walmart. You have lamps. Back then lamps would just be on an aisle in boxes. I reorganized the department. I put them on the back wall and I put green felt up the entire wall, all the way up to the ceiling.
William Tincup: And I put shelving units and I lit the lamps. So I put them, I plugged them all in. So like when you walked in the store, it was like looking at the sun. It was so bright. Like I just did it on a weekend. I didn't ask my store director, store manager. I just did it. I'm like, so Sam comes up to me. I didn't even know he was in town.
William Tincup: Comes up to me, he's like, hey, my first name is Jeffrey. He's like, Jeffrey. Mind you, my ears are pierced and I've got long braided hair. So I am not the prototypical Walmart old boy network, et cetera. I don't look like they do and I don't talk like they do, et cetera. So he walks up, he said, Hey, Jeffrey, what's, what's, what's, you know, what's going on?
William Tincup: I was like stuttering. What, what, you know what? I don't understand. And I looked down my eyes and I said, Sam. Who's gonna buy a lamp in a box and I and I curse like that because that's how I talk So he looks at me. He looks at the wall And he looks back at me, he goes, you're right, who buys lamps in a box?
William Tincup: I said, you got to feel it. You got to see it. You got to put your hands on it. You got to understand what's going on. And it's experiential. I didn't say the word experience, but you got to experience it. You got to touch it. He calls Bentonville. So he literally leaves me. He goes, I'll be right back. Takes off, goes, talks to the store director, calls Bentonville, and they fly the entire furniture department.
William Tincup: So all the buyers, all the people that manage furniture for all at that point, probably 1, 500 stores of Walmart and Sam's, they fly them down to Odessa, Texas, and they're there in like two hours. So like private jets, so they're there and they're definitely not happy with me because I didn't follow their little plan.
William Tincup: They're all modular. I just wouldn't do whatever that, what I wanted. And Sam standing in front of me goes, look at this. I want this in every Walmart. Inside of a month, figure it out. I don't know how it happens. That's why you're all here. That's why you get paid, figure it out. I want this in every Walmart.
William Tincup: And that was like 87, 88. So it's like, he could have easily, I mean, he could have fired me. I mean, if we want to be serious, I mean, he could have easily just said, Hey, you get a module, you follow the model, your job's to follow the module. Just do what the module says. These are smart people back here that have thought this through.
William Tincup: You just do what they say. He didn't do that. He looked at it, heard me and he did, he never cursed around me. So I didn't, I don't even think he did curse. So of course I'm cursing like a sailor and he. Was absorbing all that, and he's absorbing all this lamp and me and explaining how like, dude, seriously, like you want me to, you want me to push sales and lamps.
William Tincup: I can't sell a box of a lamp. Okay. It's just, that's not going to work. And I experimented in such a kind of high school ish way that he's just like, you know what? I'm going to get the other people down here and we're just going to make this happen. And it did.
Amanda Berry: I feel like what we talked about earlier, when we started this podcast, this relates to that, right?
Amanda Berry: People buying this, buying the lamp, right, are using the HR tech. They need to be able to get their hands on it, see it, feel it, right? It's an interesting theme. Think about it, right? You wouldn't just say, I need a couch, pick any couch that you want. Send your spouse or your partner, pick any couch. Do you want to go there?
Amanda Berry: You want to sit on it? You want to say, how would this look in the living room? Does this work with the TV that we have? We'll have this for a decade.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's expensive.
William Tincup: Yeah. Same with software. Yeah. It's, we need the freedom to experience it and go, you know, I thought I wanted the banker's lamp and then I saw it.
William Tincup: I pulled out the chain. Yeah, that's not me. Yeah. I don't want the banker's lamp. I thought it would be me. I thought it would be on my desk. But that's just not me. I like this modern lamp that has kind of a tilt and has this kind of halogen bulb. Like that's, I like that better. You can't make that decision when you're in software and you're buying software, you gotta let people try it out.
William Tincup: It's like the best software companies create a sandbox. So before you even buy, sometimes they'll just create a sandbox and say, let your users, let them loose. Let them go check it out. It's all got, it's got dummy data in it. So they're not going to hurt anything. They're not going to do anything for the company or whatever.
William Tincup: And you haven't made any purchases. Just see if they like it. If a company does that, they know that their software is good. And they know that once the employees get in and bounce around and try stuff that they're going to go, yeah, this is so much better than what we have. Like when I bought my mini, this is a fascinating kind of buying experience.
William Tincup: So. I go to the mini dealership with my youngest son because I just wanted to go do donuts in the Six Flags parking lot. For anybody out there, I, I didn't have any intent on buying a car. I wasn't even in the market or even thinking about buying a car. I just wanted to go do donuts in someone else's car other than mine.
William Tincup: So I, I get a Mini Cooper, get my driver's license, insurance, Henry and I, we go to Six Flags and we're just burning up the tires, just going, doing donut, doing circle eights, doing the whole bit. He's having a great time. I'm having a great time. Two hours later, I come back with the car. It's dusty, you know, the whole bit.
William Tincup: And the guy's like, what'd you think? I said, you know what? I really, I actually really liked it. He goes, why don't you keep it for a week? And I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, I mean, you won't really know if it fits your life until you go get groceries, or you pick up the kids from school, or you do this, go do that.
William Tincup: And if you feel like you want to buy one, okay, we'll figure it out. I took it for a week and then I came back. I'm like, I want to buy with this. He goes, okay, now go home and I want you to build this PDF. I want you to go on the site because everything on a mini is completely personalized. You can make one mirror red and another one green.
William Tincup: Like the whole thing is absolutely customizable. And so he sent me home to then go build the thing and it emailed him the car. And then I came in, signed some paperwork, and they built the car. Wow.
Amanda Berry: And that, there's the lesson for people out there about tech, giving people a chance to destroy it, if you will.
Amanda Berry: Like you, like you said earlier, break it, you know, I want to try to get in there and break it.
William Tincup: If you allow users the freedom. to try something instead of, again, instead of Moses coming down from the mountain and here's your software. Good luck. Have a nice day. If you allow them the opportunity to get into something before it's bought, to then see what they like and what they don't, they can actually ask really intuitive questions like, Hey, this is really good here, but it doesn't have the reporting or the insight over here.
William Tincup: So are we willing to make that swap? Whereas executives, they wouldn't even have thought that thought. Whereas users, if they jump into it, they will, they'll think about that stuff.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, it would be very interesting to do that, or a company. I'd love to see a company that says, OK, HR, you're coming in here, we're going to put you down with like, you know, an account, first of all, it's a CSM or somebody who knows the software.
Amanda Berry: We're going to give you some training, we're going to spend a couple hours, and then the next day you're going to do a different software, and then you all have to sort of rank them and pick the one that you think fits the needs.
William Tincup: That's a software company that bets on themselves. They believe in themselves.
William Tincup: They don't, it's not a, we'll sell it and if they use it, great. If they don't, great. Those are, there's a lot of companies that are like that, in all of software, not just in HR. The better ones, and I think the ones that have customers for life, are the ones that do it as the way you think, is they're in it with the customer.
William Tincup: They want to make sure, what are you, are you getting everything out of it? We just released this new report, or this new functionality, let me make sure you understand all the things you can do with this. They're excited about it. And they know that it can be life changing. All this technology can absolutely be life changing in the right hands.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. And it can really impact overall business, like recruiting or anything. It can really, really have some real noticeable impact.
William Tincup: Well, that's the idea of the business case, right? So the business case that people build, that's the idea. They're building a business case for the utilization of capital.
William Tincup: We're saying we want 300, 000 for this thing. Here's how it'll pay us back and how it'll forward the initiatives of the business. That's the essence of a business case.
Amanda Berry: Let's move into that. Let's move into our next segment, Getting Tactical.
Amanda Berry: Because I want to talk about now the ROI, right, and how that probably starts in the business case. Here's the return on investment we expect. If you've done your due diligence, let's say in a perfect world and you had HR sit down and try all of these techs out, they make the decision and then you get it.
Amanda Berry: But, or you're writing the business case, let's talk about the ROI, because it feels like a very flawed system because none of that stuff really happens. Can you explain why you think it's flawed? Because I've seen that come up in some of the interviews you've given and some of the stuff you've written.
Amanda Berry: I wonder if you could walk through that.
William Tincup: So the first thing that's flawed about all business cases related to HR and TA tech is that they, the assumption is that they're going to have 100 percent adoption. So start off with the math is automatically flawed. If you want to make that right, which is there's a way to do that.
William Tincup: Either you do the work and you time, money and energy and you create adoption, which by the way, adoption, usage, consumption is absolutely something you can manufacture. It's a symphony. You can make it happen. You just have to be thoughtful. Time, money and energy, right? So you got to do that. So if you're not willing to do that, then take the number that you have in your business case And punish it by at least 50%, probably more like 75%, being honest.
William Tincup: That way it's going to be a longer payout. It's going to take you longer to then get to a true ROI return on investment. But it's more accurate because if you're not willing and able to actually do the hard work to create, manufacture usage and adoption. The, the math is always going to be wrong from the jump.
Amanda Berry: Is, so that creating a manufacturer adoption, is that basically what we've been talking about this 18 months, you've got training, you've got certifications.
William Tincup: Incentives. You brought up a really, really great point in terms of dialing back work, work, work. Whatever those things are that you do on a weekly basis, we've got to create time for them to be trained.
William Tincup: And it's something of a training, like, okay, you got an hour of training and now you know the software. You Right.
Amanda Berry: But that's honestly like what's happening. And then on top of that, you're trying to learn your job, you're trying to learn the software and then you're doing this like piece of work. It's unhealthy.
William Tincup: It's unhealthy. It's not sustainable. And oh, by the way, you're not going to be successful because one or the other, either your personal life or your professional life, something's going to suffer. Yeah. Because you're not going to be able to be great at the job that they're paying you to do and learning this new software and having somewhat of a.
William Tincup: Balance life.
Amanda Berry: And your productivity dips, right? You're a satisfaction with your job is dipping. Right. It's actually just hurting the company by not doing that. You don't feel like you could win.
William Tincup: Yeah. Like, everyone wants to feel like they could win. Like, I can attain this goal. Yes, it's going to be hard.
William Tincup: Yes, you know, okay, I'll have to overcome some obstacles. I get it. But I can attain it. When you realize as an employee that you can't attain it, your motivation for everything goes out the window. It's actually a reason for why people look for new jobs, is they get so demotivated. And it's like people don't think about software in that way.
William Tincup: Like, you know, they think of it, again, it's Google, it's intuitive, it's easy.
Amanda Berry: Or it's a tool. Yeah, it's just a tool you're going to use. Doesn't really matter. Doesn't matter.
William Tincup: Why do we buy it then? So when someone says that to me, I'm like, fair, cool. Why do we spend money? Like, why didn't you just give us bonuses?
William Tincup: Yeah. Like, that's a horrible use of utilization of capital. If we just bought it for giggles, give me the money. Yeah. Give me a Christmas bonus. Put the money in my pocket. So it's either critical. And it's actually going to help you do your job or it's not, and if it's not, why'd you buy it?
Amanda Berry: Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things when you're writing the business case and internal comms is explaining doing that.
Amanda Berry: Why are we doing this? Why are we asking you to change? They have to back that up by going, this is so important. We are going to make sure you have 15 hours of training. We're going to give you time to do four certifications that we'll pay for. You'll be able to sit down and all this other stuff.
William Tincup: Yeah. I was an employee,
William Tincup: I hear that message from comms. I feel like. Okay, I got a chance. Yeah, I got to get my head in the game. But I also feel like they care about my success. You know what I mean? Like, you just went through kind of a plan and said, Okay, we're going to do this, this, this, this, this, and this for you. It's like, okay, as an employee hearing that, it's like, Okay, I can make this work.
William Tincup: It'll be hard. I'll have to learn some new things, but you know what? I have the time. I have the time. They're making space. They're making space for me. And boy, for the folks listening to the podcast, very few people actually do that. Very few people, they'll wait until the end and go, I don't understand why we didn't get adoption.
William Tincup: Or they'll switch systems thinking, because it's easy to blame software. Yeah. So it's easy to blame, you know, that engagement software. You know, I was never really for it. It was terrible. I don't know why we bought it. It wasn't the software. Yeah. It was the lack of tactical things to get people to fall in love with the software, use the software.
William Tincup: When you spend the time and the energy to do all the things that we talked about, plus people love their software. Like they think of it as, I can't imagine doing my job without this software. And then it isn't even software anymore.
Amanda Berry: It's like their job. Yeah, you don't think about it as a tool to do your job.
Amanda Berry: The tool is your job. That's right. And it's fun. And you enjoy it. Yeah, you enjoy it.
William Tincup: So how do we get to a point where what I learned when I was studying user adoption years ago is the game is an adoption. We think it is. It's a false signal, though. The game is user satisfaction. How do we get users to actually fall in love with software?
William Tincup: So on the way, we have to get people to use it. We gotta communicate, we gotta do all the things we've talked about. We gotta get them to use it. Once they use it, they consume it, and they're utilizing it. Okay, they're gonna have questions, all that stuff. But there's this moment in which they come over and they love the software.
William Tincup: And it doesn't have to be perfect software. Like people think when I talk like that, they're like, Oh, there's no software that is perfect. I'm like, it isn't about being perfect. It's about them understanding how to use the software in such a way that they know that this software helps them be successful.
William Tincup: And they can't imagine life or their job without it. And it's user satisfaction. That's, you're beyond adoption at that point. You've crossed over into real true user satisfaction, user love.
Amanda Berry: What do you think about this? Let's say you implement technology. Half of the HR team uses it and they love it. Do you, they're just like, this is amazing.
Amanda Berry: I can't believe they're looking around. I can't believe some of you aren't using this. I feel as if that alone, like if you pick a technology, That, again, really helps and creates a really high satisfaction among people using it. That spreads. Have you been seeing that when it comes to tech?
William Tincup: Yes. And then, and again, that can be manufactured.
William Tincup: You get the people that fall in love with something and they're just like, Oh my God, this is so great. There's an adoption curve in all technology, but let's just say HR technology is early adopters, kind of on pace or mainstream and in late. Well, the folks that are laggards are usually the people that are really in love with the old software or they're resistant to change, or they just don't see the why, why are we doing this?
William Tincup: So you pair. The people that are early adopters, that really love it with the people that are laggards. So you put the people that are really, really pro software, whatever that is, with the people that are really, really kind of against it, and you create buddies. And what happens in that is the people that are laggards, not only just see the excitement, they actually see the potential of the software.
William Tincup: And all of that negativity that was there just goes away.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. Because it doesn't, some of their arguments don't really hold water when they have someone go like, no, no, no, it works this way and this way.
William Tincup: It doesn't give us near the insight that the last tool does. It's like, well, let me, okay, let me show you this.
William Tincup: It's like, yeah. And it's like, oh, I didn't know that it did that. Well, okay. Well, that's cool. Let me show you some other things. You can manufacture that, but it's got to be thoughtful. You got to actually think like, okay, we're going to have some people that are going to resist change. We're going to have some people that have just.
William Tincup: Love change for change's sake. And the people, why don't we pair them up? Once we identify those, people want to make that about age. And it's, it's actually from my own research, it's not about age. Gen X, we think Gen X, oh yeah, Gen X is awesome with technology. No, they're not. My son spoke to the American Legion yesterday.
William Tincup: And so he had to set up a projector and his laptop. And literally was staring at me the whole time. Like, what should we do here? I'm like, you don't know how to set up a projector? It's like, I don't understand what, you know, how this, you know, and then what do we, and how does the screen like, and I'm thinking that I'm laughing to myself thinking that, you know, of course.
William Tincup: There's no generation, you know, we want to think, oh, yeah, older people, they hate new technology. No, that's not true. We want to believe in that narrative, but it's not true.
Amanda Berry: Well, you wouldn't believe that because it's easy. It's just easy to be like, well, the older people don't like it.
William Tincup: Get off my software.
William Tincup: Yeah. The bit is in humanity, some people, they can consume change at a different pace. The ambiguity and change doesn't create anxiety. It isn't something that's a barrier, and there's people that any change in life, it creates anxiety. Yeah. And that, again, it isn't gender, it isn't race, it isn't age, it isn't any of those kind of tropes that we'd like to roll out there.
William Tincup: It's just some people are really, really, they can consume change. They just consume it, and some people can't consume it as fast. So knowing that and buying software is a game of, okay, how do we game this? How do we pull these people together to get to a shared outcome?
Amanda Berry: Yeah. It's like the old school change champions.
Amanda Berry: I was talking about needs gaps analysis, which nobody uses now. I go back and I think we used to use change champions, right? You pick out the people in the company who are very excited, almost literal cheerleaders. Everyone knew and people liked him and say like, I'm so excited about whatever, switching to Mac out of, off a PC or vice versa.
Amanda Berry: And you know, they would be just out.
William Tincup: That's what their role was. Yeah. There were advocates. Guy Kawasaki was an advocate for Apple for years. Yeah. That was his bit. Like he was just everything Apple put out, he'd test it, he'd see it early, he'd test it. He'd talk about the pros and cons. He was very realistic in kind of his evaluation, but he loved Apple.
William Tincup: He loved everything that came out of Apple. And again, there's people in your organization, there's people in your department that are those people. They're just built that way. Identifying those folks and then basically getting them on board with the decision. Getting them on board with the plan, the change plan, getting them on board with why this is happening.
William Tincup: And you're arming them with all the things that they need to then go out and help sell this to the rest of the team. Yeah.
Amanda Berry: I want to talk about something. You wrote an article on HR tech and MNAs, mergers and acquisitions. I've said on this program multiple times, mergers and acquisitions is one of my sore spots because as an internal comms person, I've worked at companies where they bring you in day one and you're ready by the time the merger or acquisition happens.
Amanda Berry: And I've worked at companies where the day before they're going. Oh, this announced going out tomorrow. We need your help setting up an intranet site. We need documents. And I'm like, are you kidding me? And so reading that, like it sort of brought back a little like PTSD from when I haven't been like equipped to do my job really well.
Amanda Berry: But I love that you take this. Because that's kind of one of the biggest rubs for me. And you use an example of like payroll, I think, in that article. But I remember I was working on a acquisition and I found out the night before and I'm holding a thousands of questions. And I'm just like, this isn't gonna get done.
Amanda Berry: But I know one of the rubs was they got paid. Once monthly, we got paid every other week. Nobody thought to even put a spin on that, or when are they going to get into the HR system to be able to update their address. So I'm wondering if you could talk about that, because I know this would be an issue for HR and internal comms.
Amanda Berry: If you would just maybe talk a little bit about that article, and what HR and IC needs to know when it comes to mergers and acquisitions, because this is just, this is kind of a different side of the coin, right? The adoption of technology. Right.
William Tincup: It's change. My finance professor when I was in, in B school said, there's no such things as mergers and acquisitions.
William Tincup: It's just acquisitions. Yeah, that's right. We play nice and say it's a merger, but at the end of the day, it's an acquisition. Yeah.
Amanda Berry: One company is taking over the other. That's right.
William Tincup: Yeah. Sometimes it's the reverse. The company, this has happened in our industry where the company that's being acquired.
William Tincup: Takes over the other company, strategically, like that was on purpose. Somebody's accounting system wins, somebody's payroll system wins, but what's not modeled well enough for me in all of the transactions is the people side, not just the soft stuff about people. Like, do we have enough people here and there and that type of stuff.
William Tincup: It's the actual people's strategy. Okay, who's running the people strategy? How are we going to communicate in a unified way? What is that message? And then looking at all the tech, the entire, all the technology that one company has, all the technology that the other company has, how do we mirror this? Do we run them separate for a year and just, we won't do anything systems wise.
William Tincup: We'll just try to get the team on board and maybe start mirroring the best process wins and then giving into technology, okay, best technology wins and do that. But it's the actual planning part and the communication of that plan that I find lacking. I don't think acquisitions are great. For users, so I've on record for, I'm saying that I think they're horrible for users.
William Tincup: So if you're a user, just a user of technology, you just, okay, you know, now we went from this software to this software and I'm just dropped off in the deep end of the swimming pool. Good luck. That again, I mean, we were talking all this about time about buying software and an acquisition. They don't do any of that stuff where I'm training or it's just, we have a new technology.
William Tincup: Here's what it is.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, that's why I kind of see this as like the other side of that coin. Company A might have to just sort of start using a technology because Company B acquired them and they say, well, this is the one we're using, but almost not taking a step back and going, okay, we need to understand now the needs and the uses of Company A before we throw them on a Company B software.
William Tincup: If the folks that are listening are in M& A, consultants that put these deals together, they're smart. These are, these are really very smart people. Make no mistake. These are smart folks. I think it's putting that plan together because you're looking at the market and saying, okay, our features don't overlap, our markets don't overlap.
William Tincup: From a business perspective, putting these two companies together makes absolute sense. And it should be done. Okay, fantastic. I think letting each company kind of understand that, okay, we're not doing anything different other than selling to each other's customers and product wise, figuring out how to product our features, how to actually assemble those things, etc.
William Tincup: In HR, recruiting, Let things be as they are and understand people, process, and product. So what do we have from a team perspective? Do we have some real leaders? Okay, if not, let's go get a leader. Okay, so you go through all the people stuff. Then you go through our process. Like you look at something like onboarding.
William Tincup: How do you onboard? This is how we onboard. Okay, cool. So we onboard. What technology do you use? What technology do you use? And you basically start asking the question. It's not about who wins. It's about which is the best technology for the new co.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, and can you, like, even process, like, can we take some of your ideas and some of Mark's because together we make a better process.
William Tincup: It's an openness in that M& A between people leaders that say, okay, it doesn't really matter. We get to use all of, all the technology you use. We can use all of it. It doesn't really matter. We can use all your process. It doesn't matter. But let's look at it objectively. And then say, NUCO, what's the best thing for the NUCO and the users of the technology of NUCO, and then make decisions based on that and it's ego.
William Tincup: It's a bunch of things. When you acquire a firm, you just assume everything that they've done is horrible and you're just buying their customers or technologies and some of their talent and everything else is throw, you just want to throw it away.
Amanda Berry: And I also think there's a part of that, I mean, that's probably part of ego where it's like work, why are you, it's just easier if we don't have to get disrupted either.
Amanda Berry: We only want to disrupt one of these two and it's not going to be us because we're buying you.
William Tincup: That's right. To the winner go the spoils. That's what goes on in, in mergers and acquisitions. It's thought of like that by, and we won't talk about the other departments, but in HR, you're right. It's like, we're not going to change.
William Tincup: You need to change. What about you? Why would we change? Our stuff is perfect. Never. And so, so the, but the idea is why would we move to your onboarding process? Ours is superior and we know it. And so some of that is just, it's, we know what we do. We don't really know how you do it. We would, that means we'd have to learn something new.
Amanda Berry: And we don't want to disrupt us. We just want to disrupt you. That's right. Yeah, and it'll make this easier when in reality it doesn't make it easier. It actually can make it much more complicated.
William Tincup: I think it's if you're trying to get the maximum value of an actual acquisition. This is something you think about.
William Tincup: It's like, okay, the people are so important to what we do. We don't need to rush into this. If we have five different payroll systems, all right, so what? We have five different payroll systems, if we can make it work for a year or two, great, and then start working together to then figure out, okay, where is it broken for both of us?
William Tincup: brokenness in recruiting, okay? We have brokenness in retention, okay, let's figure that, let's solve the algebra for both of us. And it's pulling the, again, kind of meritocracy. It's pulling the best ideas together, the best technology together, and it isn't personal. It isn't ego driven, it isn't personal, and you're doing the best thing for NewCo and the users of the technology.
William Tincup: Yeah.
Amanda Berry: You have a better, you have an online onboarding module. We don't do that. That's right. So our remote employees are kind of SOL. That's right.
William Tincup: Yeah. We FedEx them a book. Oh, okay. Yeah.
Amanda Berry: We had them sit through a two hour meeting about the history of the company.
William Tincup: Another Zoom call. That'll help them.
Amanda Berry: But we have no training on our tools and systems, you know, which the other company does and Yeah.
William Tincup: If we want to get the maximum value for the lawyers and the, uh, all of the private equity folks that are listening, if you want to get the maximum value, you actually don't mess with HR and recruiting and you let it roll. You can fix all the product stuff, sales stuff, marketing stuff, all that stuff, fixable.
William Tincup: Again, do whatever you want to do, but with people just let it roll and then let the leaders kind of figure out the synergies and figure out what works and what doesn't and what needs to be shifted and culturally things that need to change where somebody's got better policies over here about hybrid work.
William Tincup: This company doesn't have great policies around that. Like, you know what? That's a good, that's a good policy. Let's do that.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, let's do that. I mean, I feel like some of the mergers and acquisitions, well, honestly, just acquisitions, you're right. It was very much like they had someone come in, get them to the day up and then kind of just felt, it almost felt like they just stepped away and like dropped a huge bomb and, you know, 4, 000 people's lives and then just stepped out.
William Tincup: Well, they don't get paid for that. No, not to be too cynical about consulting, but they're not paid to do that, the change. They're not paid to do that. And truthfully, then you get into the really, really cynical stuff around finance. They want to see the cost savings. So, we're putting company A and company B together.
William Tincup: Clearly, there's going to be overlap. They want the overlap gone as fast as possible. Immediately. And we don't know enough about either of these organisms. to make that decision.
Amanda Berry: That's right. Or the people, you know, the day to day workers. We don't know enough about them.
William Tincup: Yeah. So, I think, again, you can make an acquisition, and there are great examples in our industry where acquisitions have been done really, really well.
William Tincup: But it's, there's just a thoughtfulness that goes into the process around people. Because, again, like, if we're talking about manufacturing plants, That's one thing. We've got a plan over here. It's 150 years old. We've got a new one over here that's all robotic. Okay, which one should we, which one should we use?
William Tincup: Okay, we know that decision is going to be pretty easy to kind of make. All right. But when we get into the really into the weeds of HR and it's like, Compensation strategies and where we get comp data, both internal and external comp data. One of those two firms has a better process. Just believe that they're not equals.
William Tincup: They're not Twinkies or number two pencils. They're not equals. One of them has a better process, probably a better team and a better technology. And those can be different things like this team over here, superior, this process over here, superior, this technology. Actually, that one's superior. That can happen.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. But it doesn't feel that that's what happens. It feels as if company being acquired, their stuff gets swiped out and they have to come into company. Yeah. Yeah.
William Tincup: If you're a Star Trek fan, it's the board. You have to comply. You have to change in order. That's it. Cause you just have to comply. And I think that's forced down people's throats.
William Tincup: I also think that's why they don't retain a lot of that talent. Like I look at acquisitions and if you can't retain the talent, what did you buy? Yeah, that's right.
Amanda Berry: And it's expensive to replace talent. I actually wrote a piece for our blog on Simpler. com about the cost of not bringing in internal comms because a lot of it can be frustration, right?
Amanda Berry: They don't know when they're getting paid. Am I going to lose my acquired paid time off because I was told I can keep it, but your company doesn't do that. Am I going to just have to start from scratch? Bringing in and helping people understand what you're doing can save much more money than
William Tincup: Yes. It's absolutely critical because, again, it lessens the anxiety.
William Tincup: It's already emotional that you're either acquiring someone else and you're feeling, oh my God, this is great momentum, or you're being acquired, which is a different feeling and everyone's wrought with anxiety. Yeah. It's not needed. Like, you can, like, this is solvable. It's just people not thinking about enough and having enough empathy about all of their employees.
William Tincup: And time off is a great example. Y'all zero it out at the end of the year. For the first two years or year, whatever the time period is, nothing changes. What you have, don't worry about it. Yes. What we'll do is we'll figure out how to adjust and make it good for everyone. We'll get everyone whole. Which should be the overarching communication, so we're going to make everybody right.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, we're going to do what we can to make everyone feel whole.
William Tincup: Right, right. And again, that anxiety goes down. Now I can get back to work because all of that anxiety is in the way of me doing Job. Yes. Job, job.
Amanda Berry: My real job. Oh my gosh. I could talk about mergers and acquisitions for hours. I have such strong feelings because like I said earlier, I've been involved like, Hey, I think we're going to do this.
Amanda Berry: I'd sign an NDA. I'm involved. And then I've had that broader than day before. I'm like, how are we going to be able to communicate
William Tincup: this? It's a lot of moving parts. So what everyone listening, we understand how difficult it is. Yeah. Yeah. Like. That's been covered. The complexities of an acquisition. I can't even imagine all the facets.
William Tincup: We're talking just really very narrowly about how do you ensure success for people and get the best outcome? Again, if you're doing this acquisition, you're doing it for a reason. So what are you doing for the people and how can you be thoughtful for the people? That's going to take the leadership of the C suite, the board, it's specifically the people leaders.
William Tincup: Checking their egos at the door.
Amanda Berry: Taking the time to, to review everything, make thoughtful decisions, and communicating, and communicating in. William, let's move into our last segment, asking for a friend.
Amanda Berry: What does the future of HR tech look like? If you could look 10, 15, 20 years ahead, what should we anticipate?
William Tincup: Well, outside of the, all the scary stuff with AI and things like that, let's put that on a burner for just a second. Think to ourselves, we're not replacing humans with computers. Tasks that we probably didn't need to be doing are going to be able to be done better.
William Tincup: And that's not going to start overnight. And again, people say AI, that stands for artificial intelligence. It's artificial for sure. It's, it's not intelligent. And it's not going to be intelligent for quite a while. Now, the thing is, is what it can do is it can learn faster than we can learn. So the upside is there.
William Tincup: And I think so. So I look at the future of work and the future, the way that we think about work is we think of how do we bring the human Back to the center of being able to bring data to our disposal to create insightful decisions. Be thoughtful. We can use data. Instead of using our gut, our instincts, our experience, we can use data.
William Tincup: And again, we might not always get it right, the data might not always be right, but a data driven decision is better than a hunch. Yeah, a gut feeling. A gut feeling. So, the thing is, is what that changes is it changes every facet of work, where you don't have people doing kind of the remedial task. If you're an actuary, you're working with actuarial tables, or you're a comp person, you're looking at comp, there's software right now that can go through and see the inequities.
William Tincup: And show you the pay gaps and say, show you pay compression issues. You don't have to be in Excel, trying to figure that out. That's a waste of your time. That's a waste of your intellect. You're already given so much intellect a week. It's an allotment. So you've given so much intellect. Now with technology and the way that the future of work looks like is that intellect is going to be used in a more human capacity.
William Tincup: So take recruiting, you can automate a lot of stuff in recruiting, but what's great for recruiters and hiring managers is you can actually spend more time with candidates because you're not doing all this other stuff that you had to do. You can actually just. Talk to the person and say, what are you trying to achieve?
William Tincup: Let's get out of the, I'm going to sell you a job and you're going to buy a job stuff. Like, what do you want to learn? Like you can really get to know candidates. You can't do that when you're spending 90 percent of your week doing tactical stuff that you shouldn't be doing. So, as we look at the future of work, we look at technology, AI, and natural NLP, natural language process, machine learning, etc.
William Tincup: Taking over more of those remedial tasks, and we shouldn't be emotionally hurt by that. We should actually be Elated, that's happening because it gives us back our time, because just, again, always so much intellect, so much time in a week, et cetera. So it's an exciting, I mean, it's exciting time. It's also scary for a lot of people because it's like the beginning of the internet.
William Tincup: There was an internet before the commercialized internet. So the people that worked in library sciences at the University of Minnesota knew the people at library sciences at Stanford University. So they would connect each other over message boards. The commercialized part of the internet, when sports people created AltaVista and different browsers and things like that, it became scary for a lot of people.
William Tincup: It's like, what is this thing? And what's it going to do? Yeah, it's going to get rid of the yellow pages. Okay, that's gone. It's going to get rid of classifieds. Yep.
Amanda Berry: Done. Well, and for people, that was scary, you know, like, how am I going to find people's phone numbers? Find a business? How could I possibly go on the internet and find, uh, someone who can repair a clock for me?
William Tincup: It was terrifying. And, and so living through that experience is a lot like what we're going through and about to go through with AI. Yeah. It's understanding and kind of being at peace with it and going, it's going to change things. Okay. Yeah. The things that we don't need to be doing. Great. Take them, oh, robots.
William Tincup: Yes. Take those away from me. We shouldn't be fighting that. I had, uh, Chet GPT write my obituary the other day, so. That was interesting. It was really dark. But basically I said in 500 words or less, write William Tinkoff's obituary. And it just is with great sadness. It's instant. Yeah. Oh, and it just, he is survived by his wife, da, da, da, da, du, Yeah.
William Tincup: So I went and woke up my wife, I'm like, hey, listen, when I die, all you gotta do is just type in this, like, here's the prompt. And she's like, that's dark. I'm going back to sleep now.
Amanda Berry: What I've learned from chatGBT is when I first started using it, it was like, holy smokes, this is insane. And I still have that feeling.
Amanda Berry: But now I'm like. But I've really got to check what it's written. For listeners who haven't tried using it, the first few times you use it, it's like mind blowing. Yes. But now I'm like, all right, I'm going to use it, but I'm really going to have to like read and read. I mean, because it does get things wrong, it uses, I've had it used wrong, like pronouns, I've had it say crazy things.
Amanda Berry: And I'm like, all right, I don't like sort of blindly trust it like I did the very first time I used it. But it's still cool. It's a huge time saver. It's like having a, the first time somebody drives a car, you have to sit there and be with them because they have the concept, they've sat through the coursework at their high school or whatever.
Amanda Berry: But you have to really keep an eye on it.
William Tincup: I think it was Reagan that said, trust but verify. Yeah. Right? So I'm not a big, huge Reagan fan, but that thought is actually a pretty good thought because the intelligence part of AI, it's not. There, we'll see it in our lifetimes, we'll see this stuff doing, I saw a bit earlier today about drone racing, the three best drone racers in the world came together and an AI drone was born.
William Tincup: It beat all three of them. It learned all the things that they did from all their previous races, consumed all that data, and it drove a drone faster, better than they did.
Amanda Berry: Wow. They used their own stuff against them.
William Tincup: I mean, yeah. And again, so you think about something like that, now that's intelligence.
William Tincup: That's legit. In people, in the worlds that we play in, yeah, not so much, yet.
Amanda Berry: William, this has been amazing. You are so great to talk to. I would love to do this again if it were possible. This has just been amazing. You are very fun to talk to. You have a lot of good insight on, I mean, more than HR tech, we haven't even touched on the other stuff you're, you're, you know, insightful on, but want to think about bringing you back.
Amanda Berry: But before I let you go, let our listeners know where they can find you in case they want to reach out.
William Tincup: I'm really easy to find on the internet. My email's out there, my phone number's out there, just go to Google. I mean, I'd say it's intuitive and easy to use, but putting my name in there, you're going to pull up all kinds of stuff.
William Tincup: So you can just put in my name and cell phone or email and it'll pull up. Happy to have anybody reach out.
Amanda Berry: Great. Thank you so much for joining me today, William. This has been so, so amazing. I really appreciate it.
William Tincup: 100%. Thank you for having me on.