HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Bob Goodwin, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
The Power of Data-Driven Strategies with Kristen Boyle, PeopleInsight by HireRoad
Implementing an effective DEI strategy relies on a deep understanding of your organization’s current position, the required steps for progress, and a reliable method for ongoing DEI metrics measurement. In this HRchat episode, we discuss why the numbers should determine leadership direction. In light of recent changes, we also consider if now is the time to double down on demonstrating the need for the DEI data.
Bill's guest this time is Kristen Boyle, VP of Marketing at PeopleInsight by HireRoad, a leading people analytics solution. Kristen, joined the PeopleInsight by HireRoad team in January 2024 after serving as VP of Marketing at PandoLogic, B2B marketing lead for Amazon Ads, and climbing the marketing ranks at Indeed and Nielsen during peak growth periods. Kristen is a marketing strategist with a passion for insights-driven storytelling and leads the mission of telling HireRoad’s impressive story of growth and innovation.
Questions
- PeopleInsight by HireRoad has seen big changes at the leadership level over the past 18 months. What are some of the challenges and opportunities that come with a fresh leadership team?
- You believe that "a data-driven strategy is no longer optional... Anyone who is in the throes of year-end reporting knows what I'm talking about". What did you mean by that?
- In light of recent political decisions and the broader pullback on DEI efforts across industries, the urgency to back DEI initiatives with data has perhaps never been more critical. Why is NOT collecting (specifically) DEI data no longer an option? Can you share some ways PeopleInsight provides the DEI data that can correctly inform business decisions?
- What are some of the primary challenges your team has seen HR professionals face when adopting data-driven decision-making (and how does PeopleInsight help address them)?
- Why did HireRoad decide to publish The State of People Analytics 2025, and what do you hope readers will take away from it?
- The ebook mentions that only 22% of organizations rate their people analytics as “very effective.” What advice from the ebook would you offer to companies aiming to build a more robust data-driven HR function?
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Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom and visit hrgazettecom.
Speaker 2:Kristen, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the HR Chat Show today. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:I'm good, thank you. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for being my guest. So, beyond my wee introduction just a moment ago, why don't you start by taking a minute or two introducing yourself to our audience, telling them about your career journey and, of course, your role over at High Road?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. So. I really started at some of the bigger players, the industry giants Nielsen, amazon, indeed. I very much have a love for HR, hr audiences, hr technology and just all of the innovations there, so it's always been pulling me back and I really, at those bigger players, learned the foundations of marketing and of business and of SaaS model, so I've taken a lot of that. I have since become head of marketing at PandaLogic, which is programmatic recruitment advertising, and most recently, higher Road, Been here for a little over a year and it's been a really amazing journey. I lead the marketing team and we're just focused on building our brand and driving growth in the HR market.
Speaker 2:Okay, very good. So when I was doing my homework ahead of our call today, I was all over your LinkedIn and we'll have questions later on about some of your recent social shares and I was also looking at the Higher Road website and looking at the leadership team and it struck me that you all quite knew. In fact, Higher Road has seen some big changes at the leadership level over the past year, 18 months. What are some of the challenges and some of the opportunities that come with having a fresh leadership team?
Speaker 3:Yes, it really is a new team. I'd say yeah, 18 months is accurate really starting with John Fetterman, our CEO, who joined in 2023. John Fetterman, our CEO, who joined in 2023. He has a lot of experience leading and growing businesses as a CEO, but he had never come to HR tech until now, so he sort of surrounded himself with some HR tech experience. He brought on a chief product officer, chief revenue officer and myself, all of whom have had spent significant time in the HR technology industry. So he's surrounding himself with people who know the space and we've spent a lot of time.
Speaker 3:In terms of opportunities. It's exciting to kind of realign the business, realign the go-to-market strategy, but also a challenge right, there's a little bit of undoing what had been done previously. Historically, higher Road is a roll-up of it's under private equity. There's a little bit of undoing what had been done previously. Historically, higher Road is a roll-up it's under private equity. There's several entities and products that span the HR space recruitment, onboarding, learning platform and people analytics. Since John has come in and the new team, we've really reevaluated the space and we've doubled down on people analytics, as really our lead dog, people Insight by Higher Road is our people analytics platform that you know. We've sort of redirected the business to. You know, almost 100 percent focus on this product. We're really excited about it and the opportunity there.
Speaker 2:So a quick follow up to that what's the one thing, the top thing that you love about your job the most?
Speaker 3:I really love uh, you know startup mentality for sure. Every day is a new exciting challenge being thrown at me and I get to wear many hats, and that's my favorite thing, especially coming from large companies with, you know, for better or worse, many resources, so many different teams that you sort of stay in one lane as a marketer. It's been really exciting to wear all of the hats and really stretch my expertise in different parts of marketing.
Speaker 4:Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show.
Speaker 2:Very good. Thank you very much. As I mentioned in the intro, the focus of today's conversation is around data and why you've got to have a data-driven strategy, and there's basically no excuse for any more listeners. And you recently shared a post by Higher Road CRO Matthew O'Connor called Shifting the People Analytics Mindset from Nice to have to Must have, and you commented a data-driven strategy is no longer optional. Anyone who is in the throes of year-end reporting knows what I'm talking about. You said so on the back of that. Could you tell me what you meant by that? Maybe include mention of the legal and the reputational risks as part of your answer?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's funny because year-end reporting, the polls and just the time spent, I think it's relevant across all functions. Right? You know, I certainly was in the middle of it as a marketer in Q4. And you realize, as you pull those reports together, you're trying to demonstrate your impact, show the value you've made this year or this quarter against the resources and the investments that you've made, that you've received and the investments that you've made that you've received. And there's really just no legitimate story without data to support that story.
Speaker 3:You can't just come in as a marketer and say, oh, we've grown brand awareness this year because people said that they've heard of us. Right, you need data to back that up, you need website views, you need other brand metrics and for HR, it's absolutely the same. It's one thing to say you've rolled out some great employee engagement or DEI initiative this year, but how do you know they're working? What impact have you made on the business? And, most importantly, how can you justify the need for more resources next year in this budget-constrained environment? Whether it's more headcount, more funding, whatever it might be, you need to be able to tie your performance back to business outcomes and I think business leaders across any function can tell you that if you're trying to make the case to your C-suite or get executive buy-in for any program, any investment, you need data to tell the story. So it really resonated with me as I was pulling together my own report for the end of the year.
Speaker 2:Okay, very good. One of the types of data you guys offer is data around DEI or DEIB. We are recording this conversation today, towards the end of January 2025. In light of recent political decisions and the broader pullback on DEI efforts Kristen across industries, the urgency to back DEI initiatives with data has perhaps never been more important or mission critical. Adding to your answer just now, why is not collecting DEI data no longer an option? Perhaps you can share some ways that People Insight provides the DEI data that can correctly inform those business decisions.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. We held a webinar with MLT Consulting and Steve Pemberton, who sits on the Higher Road Board of Directors and has years of experience in leading DEI initiatives, and it was right before the election, so it's certainly been an interesting few weeks and months since then. But Steve shed light on some of the history of DEI in business and spoke about the class action lawsuits that occurred in the 90s as a result of companies who were being sued for discrimination against DEI groups, and we've realized it really comes down to two things. One is that claiming ignorance about your DEI hiring or workforce actions is not a defense in a court of law. Right To say we didn't know because we didn't measure it isn't going to cut it.
Speaker 3:So really it's critical for companies to measure and track their DEI hiring, their DEI engagement, by using people data, and whether they decide to act on it or not is a different story. And two, in today's political environment where we're seeing companies pull back on DEI, it ultimately comes back to business value. There's so much research and evidence to suggest again and again that prioritizing DEI drives better business outcomes, whether it's employee engagement, productivity or revenue in a lot of cases. So companies who can use data to connect the dots between their DEI programs and their business outcomes. They have their business case right there. So that way, regardless of what your politicians are saying or even what the right thing to do might feel like, it will ultimately come down to data and how you're driving business outcomes. So I think that's where people insight and people analytics in general can help HR teams connect their DEI data, not just to each other across hiring and employee, but also connecting back to business KPIs that are going to be used as evidence to justify investment.
Speaker 5:Once in a while, an event series is born that shakes things up, it makes you think differently and it leaves you inspired. That event is Disrupt HR. The format is 14 speakers, five minutes each and slides rotate every 15 seconds. If you're an HR professional, a CEO, Thank you very much. Learn more at disrupthrco.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much and listeners. Just to add to that, if you're looking for more information, more reports on that connection between the DEI initiatives and how that does affect the bottom line, check out various reports by McKinsey. They've written lots on this. Okay, so continuing through what are some of the primary challenges, Kristen, that your team has seen HR pros face when adopting data-driven decision-making.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, I think the hardest part for a lot of HR teams is just getting started. Companies feel like they need to have everything be perfect, that their data needs to be fully cleansed, that every HR system needs to be aligned and talking to each other, that they need the latest AI to help them visualize and extract, and I think you don't want perfect to be the enemy of good, especially for smaller or under-resourced organizations. Ultimately, adopting a data-driven mentality, it's not reserved for the largest enterprises. Anybody can do it, and that is really what People Insight embraces that people analytics is for everyone, and so, especially for teams who might not have a dedicated data science resource, which is many teams, we offer a team of dedicated analysts, along with our software to help teams make sense of their data, cleanse it, model it, customize dashboards to their business needs and offer ongoing support. So I think that really helps alleviate some of the initial roadblocks that teams face when getting people analytics off the ground at their company.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. Okay, so one thing that your team were keen that we touched upon in today's conversation is the fact that Higher Road recently published the State of People Analytics 2025 report. So I'd love to talk to you a bit about that now report. So I'd love to talk to you a bit about that now. Why did Higher Road decide to publish that report and what do you hope readers will take away from it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, higher Road published this report sort of off of an HRcom report titled the State of People Analytics 2024-2025. And Higher Road was a sponsor and a partner on that report. But we took you know, the HRcom report took the approach of analyzing people analytics and the space by breaking out leading people analytics organizations versus what they called people analytics laggards. And we didn't want to end it there. We feel like the term laggards really implies that those organizations are behind, when in reality it is never too late to get started.
Speaker 3:So we took this research and we took it a few more steps forward. We were repositioning laggards and that population in that report as early stage organizations, early stage organizations, and we use the data surrounding the leading organizations to focus on what they were doing well and repurposed it into actionable steps that some early stage organizations can take to actually make a difference in their data-driven strategy in 2025. And it all comes down to you know, rome wasn't built in a day. Small, under-resourced teams who see themselves as lagging behind should not feel defeated that they're not operating as some leading, you know five-star people analytics organization. Instead, they should be focusing on small, very tangible, feasible steps to take, one at a time, to transform their HR function into a data-driven organization. Okay.
Speaker 2:So one thing that I thought was quite interesting from that ebook that reports was that it mentions that only 22% of organizations rate their people analytics as very effective. One would hope that number would be higher. What advice from the ebook would you offer to companies aiming to build a more robust data-driven HR function?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's certainly. Nobody should feel alone, and if they don't feel like they're very effective in people analytics, it's that only 22% say that they're doing it right. I do think the most critical starting point for HR teams is really about aligning and streamlining your HR data sources, because ultimately, it's going to be impossible to be data driven if you can't make sense of your data, and this really means aligning on data definitions across sources so that you aren't comparing apples to oranges. When you want to connect the dots between your ATS data and your HRIS data, you want to make sure you've got standardized definitions. Again, that's really where people insight or other people analytics solutions come into play Just any you know opportunity to integrate and model your data in one place so that you can compare all of your data sets side by side in a way that makes sense. And for a lot of companies again who don't have that internal data lake and dedicated data science team, it can be really hard to get to this step.
Speaker 2:Okay, thank you very much. Let's talk a bit about the tech, if you don't mind. I'd love to hear from you what's new on the platform front. So in another recent LinkedIn post, you said that generic dashboards that don't address your needs are a thing of the past. Let's hope so. So my question for you is what's new or what's on the roadmap for people in sight in 2025 that will further enhance the platform's user experience, its reporting and other features?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's true Out of the box dashboards. They might help you get some of the way and some of what you need, but ultimately comes down to customizing your data analysis and visualization to the specific needs of your business. What are your company's KPIs and how is HR going to impact them? So, building specific dashboards to address those key questions that can be cleanly handed off to your stakeholders that's really the North Star for every organization. And in terms of other new platform features, we are very excited We've got some really great AI enhancements rolling out in 2025.
Speaker 3:We now offer a full suite of AI functionality, including AI-generated insights, as well as diagnostic and predictive analytics. So these are offered you know they're kind of side-by-side with our customers' dashboards to make it even easier for users to extract insights quickly and effectively. And our people insight assistant, who we have named Pia P-I-A do a little pun there can also really help just speed up the time to value within our system. So users can ask questions through conversational AI and extract those insights very quickly and confidently. So all of these features kind of paired with our dedicated analyst support. Really the North Star for People Insight is to make our analytics more accessible to hr teams who may not be experts in data in their field thank you very much.
Speaker 2:So, uh, we here at the hr gazette love industry events, possibly because I am a shameless extrovert and I love getting involved with networking and whatnot. What events will you and your team be attending or speaking or exhibiting at in the next year or so? Do they include, for example, shrm, hr Tech, atd, cipd, disrupt and others?
Speaker 3:You named a lot of acronyms there, but I think I'm going to stay with you there. You know, our one upcoming event that we're very excited about is Unleash. We're really excited. Unleash America. I should clarify we're excited to present some of our latest industry research in partnership with Lighthouse Research, so we'll definitely be at that event, if anyone is there in good old Las Vegas. Other than that, we're attending a lot of smaller events focused on data and analytics. So People Analytics Summit, people Analytics, World HR I have to get these names right HR Data Analytics and AI Summit right, it's a mouthful, but we'll be in Toronto, in Atlanta, in Chicago this spring, and you'll definitely find us at HR Tech in some capacity. Last year, we held this great roadies happy hour. We passed out some beers and beverages to conference attendees as a pit stop on their way out of the event. So we love a good trade show over here.
Speaker 2:Very good. I've attended most of those. I was based in Toronto for 10 years, so I know that people will analytics summit very well. You'll enjoy that one as well. Lots to offer there. Uh, we are just about out of time for today before we wrap up. How can our folks connect with you, so maybe you might want to share your linkedin, your email? Apparently tiktok's not going anywhere, uh, so if you're on tiktok, tell us about that. And, of course, how can folks learn more about people insight?
Speaker 3:yeah, I might be the last marketer in the world who's not on TikTok, so you won't find me there yet I'm old school, but now you can find me on LinkedIn, kristen Boyle. Also visit higherroadcom or visit us on LinkedIn People Insight by Higher Road. I'm happy to connect and chat further. Really enjoyed the conversation.
Speaker 2:Me too. That just leaves me to say Kristen, thank you very much for being my guest today.
Speaker 3:Thank you Appreciate the time.
Speaker 2:And listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.
