Here at the analyst lunch at the HRDemo show with Elliott Clark of HROToday, Madeline Laurano of The Newman Group, Mark McMillan of the Talent Function Group, Kevin Grossman of Ventana Research, Katherine Jones of Principal Analyst of Bersin and Associates, and Jayson Saba of Aberdeen Group. So…. smart people.

What do talent pros want? was the watered down question of the luncheon.  HRO Today did a series of surveys (which I was out of the room for so we won’t get into those). Suffice to say, the vertical of Talent Acquisition has the most potential for innovation. So here’s the forever dichotomy of this cycle:

HR Technology vendors have been trying to make something that makes the whole process of identifying talent and hiring them faster, cleaner, more efficient, whatever. Yet still the stats show that there is a wide gap between what Talent Management professionals want and the kinds of innovation they’re seeing in the marketplace. Eliott Clark said ” Do I really want prettier and more awesome avatars or do I want something that customizes my workflow?” (not sic) The fact is that HR Pros want both, as consumers they’ve adapted to beautiful UI in their devices and consumer apps and as HR Pros they’ve either been exposed to the myth that the tool exists and can be had for a price OR they’ve built it in-house themselves.(As a side note: I rarely hear from an HR Pro that they are happy with their current system and that it’s meeting all their needs).

So while HR Tech was busying themselves creating amazing interfaces with drag and drop modules (barf) to feed the consumer need for intuitive interactivity, HR Pros were getting inundated with more and more and more options, with few software applications being built to narrow the scope a little bit. It was about more, about faster, about storage: but not about better. Because all the old tools were built with a file and or spreadhieet interface, vendors began building products that, even unintentionally mimicked that. Now that Talent Management Pros are demanding a more comprehensive, intelligent solution (again to keep up with consumer demand and what they have to simplify their other business processes- think Gist, Rapportive, Tungle) HR Tech is again scrambling to keep up.

Smart companies are building the app of the future, not the app that will go live in a year and be three years behind the curve by the time they release it.