HR Tech Has a Listening Problem. Sarah White Says Buyers Are Done With the Noise | SHRM ‘26

[00:00:00] We're still creating products that don't actually solve the need that they're looking for. We're still going to market and marketing completely wrong and telling them what we want them to hear instead of like getting the feedback and really listening. I think what we're really hearing from the buyers right now is they want, first and foremost, is not all the bells and whistles in every single feature. They want a usable product. They want a clean UX.

[00:00:26] Most people confuse innovation or design partners and your customer advisory board, right? And your customer advisory board is usually more logo driven. One of the biggest challenges is actually translation that we have is that HR is saying one thing. A product or an engineering or dev team is hearing something different.

[00:01:02] 26, the Heroes of HR Podcast. Your first podcast. How are you feeling? Excellent. It is my first podcast since coming off sabbatical. There we go. Will be nice. Yeah. No, I love it. Friendly fire. This is your first podcast since coming back? Yeah. I was just joking. I feel honored. I'm not technically back until July 1st. Well, then this is exciting. So we can't launch this until July 2nd. Yeah. Is what we're saying. Gotcha. Good.

[00:01:30] So what do we do with the recording? Just let it mellow? No, no, no. I mean, if I have learned anything, it is that I absolutely fail at being on sabbatical. I just love it, right? Like I love what we do. I love this industry. I love the impact we get to have. And, you know, as much as I love documentaries and Netflix, like I'm out. I ran out of stuff to wash. And so, you know, it's time to come back. I have never, ever taken this about. I've maybe taken two vacations.

[00:02:00] Yeah. No. I've not either. I've not either. No. I mean, I took maternity leave as my biggest leave that I've ever taken. And even then I came back early. I was like, I got to get back to work. I did get paternity leave. That was when, that was still in corporate days. Yeah. IBM gave me two weeks. And they're like, you could take. I'm like, I didn't have the day. Like, don't you get two weeks? Yeah. Awesome. I took two weeks. Yeah. Take it. Yeah. Take it. That was the longest vacation I've ever had. Yeah. And I wanted to go back. Yes. I'm not going to lie. I did take a vacation or honeymoon.

[00:02:30] This is back in 06. And I came back and I quit my job the very first day back. Yes. That happens a lot. Yeah. My manager said something to me. She wasn't mean. It was a staffing company. She wasn't being mean or outrageous. Don't talk for her today. But she said something. And I said, you know what? We're good. Yeah. I'm out. And I literally left. I understand that feeling. Yeah. I don't know why. Yeah. No, it's good. Yeah. It's a good feeling to have, though. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

[00:02:59] So let's talk about this thing we call HR. Excellent. So you got a long background as an analyst and consultant and helper and doer of everything. Yeah. What are we still getting involved? You know, I think over the years we've done a lot right. You know, I've been in this industry a lot longer than I want to publicly admit. Right. 10 years is not a lot. You started when you were 16, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. And I think over this time we've watched it evolve.

[00:03:28] I mean, you and I have known each other for 20 plus years at this point. We've really watched the evolution of the vendors and the buyers and what has happened. And I think what we get wrong still to this day is not actually listening to what the buyers are trying to tell us. And so we're still creating content they don't care about. We're still creating products that don't actually solve the need that they're looking for.

[00:03:55] We're still going to market and marketing completely wrong and telling them what we want them to hear instead of like getting the feedback and really listening. And I think we are starting to see more and more companies really listening and understanding this. And, you know, one of the things that stands out, you know, I've been on a six month sabbatical at this point.

[00:04:17] The most common job that I was approached for during this period was actually to come in and connect customer experience and customer success teams back to product strategy. Yeah. And there's a there's a very real renewed focus on this that was not even existent a couple of years ago. No. And, you know, this is a big part of what I did at SAP SuccessFactors and, you know, before leaving there was taking a look at like, how do we streamline this type of stuff out?

[00:04:47] And I think more and more companies, obviously, Isolt has been doing this for years. And, you know, this is something that I think some of the organizations got this right early and and did it really well early. But it isn't something I think that is the norm across, especially as you move into like mid market and enterprise technology. And that's really where you're seeing a lot of companies really like struggling at this point.

[00:05:13] I feel like this is the buyers have gotten more complex over. I don't at least in my work. Yeah. And I talk to them. They I should I should just I should probably qualify what my world is from a buyer media media. But they they're product buyers, too. Yeah.

[00:05:33] And they've gotten more complex in what they're looking for, but more highly confused, if that's even the right way to say that, in what they actually need versus one. It's like a company building features over listening because most of the job is listening and pushing that to market. Don't know if I would agree that they've gotten more complex of buyers.

[00:05:56] I think their tolerance has rots as everything else around them has turned into much more consumerized approaches and we can access things very easily because of our smartphones and we've changed how apps. They're far less tolerant of bad UX. They're far less tolerant of buzzwords. They're far less tolerant of being sold. And and at the same time, they're more and more confused because we have more and more companies. I mean, there's five hundred and eighty five vendors on the floor here.

[00:06:26] I've been walking the floor meeting with, you know, vendor after vendor, just trying to learn what they're doing. And I don't even understand what half of them are saying. I'm quite certain half of them don't understand what they're saying to me. And so you've got this disconnect where I think some of the confusion is less that they are unaware what they actually mean and more. Or they're unaware to of how to get through the noise to actually understand what the companies are doing.

[00:06:54] Like we're we're making it very hard to buy software like people want to buy software. And as a vendor community, we are making it near impossible to buy for us. So what do you think are that, you know, from an HR perspective, what are the must haves that you're seeing in the market that clients are coming to are asking for advice now?

[00:07:15] You know, I think what we're really hearing from the buyers right now is they want first and foremost is not all the bells and whistles in every single feature. They want a usable product. They want a clean UX. They want something that makes sense. And I think that's where a lot of the vendors are getting it wrong is they hear like, no, it's the UX or it's complex or it's hard. And they're like, oh, we just have to demo differently.

[00:07:42] And it's like, no, it's just it shouldn't be so hard. You know, changing it back to consumer grade feel and look is a very real thing. That is the kind of the expectation. I think the second thing they're really frustrated, but is not being hurt. And so the disconnect between what happens in the sales process versus what is happening as a customer experience and like living in the customer world of like, OK, now I'm a customer. I actually pay you.

[00:08:12] Why don't you listen to me anymore? Like, why aren't you hearing my feedback? Why is what you're telling me now so different than what you told me before? And so they're looking for kind of a strategic clarity and consistency from from their vendor. And I think the third thing they're looking for is to be innovation carriers. Right. They they know what is going on.

[00:08:33] And I think what they are getting really kind of tired of and that I have heard over and over is they're really frustrated by they're like, OK, well, they are listening. But the people that are asking the questions don't seem to even understand what to ask. Like they're not asking the right things. They're asking me very leading things. And so I'm trying to explain what I need. And they keep just wanting basically to validate their own opinion on something versus understanding where this this process is.

[00:09:01] And so, you know, and again, it isn't we want more AI. We want more of this. They just want something that works and they want it to work efficiently, effectively, easily, seamlessly and to be treated with like respect in the process. I was going to say what and you kind of alluded to this or you're going to this. Like, how do you solve for that? Right. How do you solve for that when somebody doesn't you know, they're not part of the buyer's journey. Right. When they're developing and they don't pull in the buyer's opinions or the buyer's feedback.

[00:09:30] You know, it can be disjointed in a particular. Yeah. So I get so many questions right now. So, Amy, yesterday Sarah took me around the innovation lab. Right. Yeah. And I got to listen to a couple pitches, like two or three minute pitches. And I got to agree with it. Like, I was confused. And we know this space. Right. And I was confused on what they were. I knew what they did before for the most part. Right.

[00:09:57] Because they can just tell by seeing their stuff before they started talking. Then I was like, oh, wait, maybe they don't do what I. Right. The simplest pitch was testify. Yeah. And he was 17 years old. Yeah. And the kid's seven. His mom's coming. Right. Yeah. 17 years old. 17 years old. Yeah. And he looked young. But when you said, how old do you think is him a guy? He's actually young. He just turned 17 last week. Yeah. Yeah. His pitch was so simple.

[00:10:25] So, like, dumbified. I know when you say, like, elementary, right? Yeah. Like, going back to it. It really was. Like, I always say, explain it to me like a high school kid. Yeah. I always say like a grandma. My training. Yeah. My training back. I would say. And he did it now outside of, like, one or two things. Like, all right, well, we need help there. Yeah. He's 17. And he got it. So. He doesn't have all that noise. Yes. No. He doesn't have all the competition in his ears going back and forth. Yeah. You know, hey, you got to do this because that's what's out in the market.

[00:10:55] Yeah. Yeah. No. And he did a wonderful job. And a couple of them did really well. But you said innovation partner. Talk about that because I think I like the idea. Yeah. And we know all these cars. Like, we get that. But let's go deeper on that because we have. We have. So I was talking with a woman earlier today. And she has customers, larger customers. And they get about, I guess, about 100,000 or so users on the software. And they want the larger companies that they represent to be innovation partners.

[00:11:24] Well, what does that actually mean? Because I don't know that they understand. Yeah. I think most people confuse innovation or design partners and your customer advisory board. Right. And your customer advisory board is usually more logo driven. Right. Like, we got these big logos. We want to show these things off. You have Under Armour. Yeah. You know, this is great.

[00:11:46] The people in customer advisory boards are not often the best people for actual product feedback and for doing focus groups. And so, like, when we do types of focus groups, we use that to inform who should be on a customer design board or advisory board in a slightly different way that can be design partners. And it's typically not at an admin level.

[00:12:11] It's at an actual user level of who can sit with us or who can sit with our client and really walk through. Tell me what you do actually day to day. Like, tell me how this actually works. Why is this actually a struggle? And you have people there that also understand how to listen. I think one of the biggest challenges is actually translation that we have is that HR is saying one thing.

[00:12:38] A product or an engineering or dev team is hearing something different. And so, they're building exactly what is being asked for. But they don't actually want exactly what they ask for. Right. They want it to work in a particular way. But sometimes, you know, we build to literally. And so, understanding the translation, understanding how to take what they have and simplify.

[00:13:01] Because a lot of times the ask is based off how they've been able to think about a band-aid or a worker wrap. And so, they're like, if you could just do this, this, and this. And they think that they are giving you as a vendor the easiest path. But it's the easiest path for them that they could think of based off of what they already have versus if this was, you know, I always ask people to do a dream scenario. Right. If there were no rules, what would this dream scenario look like? And how would this function for you?

[00:13:31] How would this actually work? And so, with large organizations, with the startups, I'm an advisor for the SHRM Labs Investment Fund and all the companies that are within that. You know, one of the things we always talk to them about is finding a couple of companies that want to go on the journey with you. And that, no, like, we're not expecting this to be perfect. We're probably not even launching this for another, like, three, six, nine, even 12 months, depending on the size of this.

[00:13:57] But I want you from the beginning to be part of this journey and make sure that you're giving us feedback along the way. I want you to be an early beta tester for this. I want you to be very highly critical. And, you know, maybe sometimes they turn into case studies and other things, and sometimes they don't.

[00:14:14] It isn't always just about the end outcome with your design partners, where your customer advisory board is typically much closer tied to your marketing and that side of the group and your product evangelism and all of your event stuff. Where this, the other side of it really is heavily tied to portfolio, product, and market strategy more than anything else. And sometimes you get down the path with them and you realize, yeah, we actually don't want to go this direction.

[00:14:44] This is, we thought we wanted to go here. And I think that is equally as important for any of the HR tech vendors to be able to know where to have restraint once they actually get that far down. It is very, very hard, but it is the difference between producing a really great product and producing a bad or average product that brings down the rest of an exceptional tech stack. I think that's your moment right there. We're just going to end it right there.

[00:15:13] Bring down the tech stack. Sarah, thank you so much. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We got it!