Spilling the Tea on HR Tech - The 29th Annual HR Systems Survey is open and here is why your organization's data belongs in it.

[00:00:00] I find it so interesting now that for many of these vendors and many of the providers of solutions that Stacey and I have been traveling to, and you too as well, Tammy, they are really focused on showing how they can provide value to their customers and the outcomes that they're driving.

[00:00:17] Especially because sometimes with heavy usage of AI tools that requires usage or consumption based pricing that you need to be able to prove out is providing value, right? If you're going to have a more flexible pricing model. So I find that interesting.

[00:00:34] Welcome to the HR Huddle Podcast presented by Sapient Insights Group, the ultimate resource for all things HR. It's time to get in the huddle. Hello and welcome to Spilling the Tea on HR Tech where we focus on the hottest HR tech news everyone needs to know to be in the know.

[00:01:04] Spilling the Tea on HR Tech where we break down the news of the week and help you make some sense of what it means for our industry and how it can impact your organization. Now, if you're a regular listener, you can pause the video or the audio. We are also on YouTube. And try and figure out what is different this week. I'll give you a second. If you said that my mic is slightly further back than I usually have it, that's correct. But the other one is that I am not Stacey Harris. I am Cliff Stevenson. And Stacey, well, both of us actually are traveling quite a bit today.

[00:01:35] This whole month really. It is April 28th of 2026. I am Cliff Stevenson, Director of Research and Principal Analyst for Sapient Insights Group. And I have a very special guest, my dear friend, Tammy Smith. I think I mistakenly just promoted to Director of Data Science, but I've been informed is actually Senior Manager of Data Science. She reliably informs me.

[00:01:58] I will be talking to us today because at the time of this recording, April 28th, tomorrow is a very special day. Tammy, I know that I really want to thank you also for jumping in on such late notice. But I know that this is something that could not be more near and dear to your heart. Tomorrow is the public launch of the 29th edition, annual edition of the annual HR Systems Survey.

[00:02:27] Tammy, you have been in charge of this survey for what, five, six longer years? Tammy Smith Yeah, I think this is my sixth survey season. So, yeah. I don't know that I would say that I was in charge for that long. Maybe a few years of being like on the ropes here for getting it going and launched and buttoned up. But yeah, tomorrow's the big day, Cliff. I am so excited. It has, as you know, been open for almost two weeks for distributors only.

[00:02:57] We have a group of distributors that join with us and promote the survey. And we usually give them about two weeks of exclusive time to send it to their clients and customers. And then after that, we start promoting it. And we're going to promote it to all of our channels and all of the folks that have been with Sapient for a long time. I don't know.

[00:03:20] I'd love to hear if we have anyone that's been with us as far as people who respond to the survey for 29 years. Because this is its 29th year. And that is just fascinating to me. I love looking at the fact that this community, as you know, I don't come from the HR community. I come from an engineering wireless kind of background.

[00:03:43] And so it's really interesting to me to see this kind of industry that just supports this global research year after year after year. So yeah, this is so exciting for me. Yeah, it's something that's grown quite a bit. It is something that Tammy and I work a lot in the sort of off-season, as it were, the last few months.

[00:04:08] Trying to find a way to take this survey, the largest in the industry, largest in the field that's out there. We had over 10,000 people sort of open, take the survey last year. We ended up keeping, well, Tammy, that's why you're here. I don't know exactly how many clubs we kept. It was around 4,700. Very close, very close. And 70 to be exact. Unique organizations. And I want to point that out.

[00:04:37] Unique organizations meaning more than one person from a company can participate in this. And as a matter of fact, a lot of our larger organizations, the enterprise, and even we're seeing mid-market organizations, will share the survey amongst their team, amongst their subject matter experts, say. And so therefore, because it is a comprehensive, large, large survey. I just got my first angry email yesterday because it happens, right?

[00:05:05] Someone angry messaged me and said, it is too big. I can't believe how big that survey is. And yes, we've never lied about it. We've never said that it's not. And my heart goes out to this person. I will respond today with all the thanks and appreciation for the time that this person has put into it. But that's why we do allow it to be a shareable thing, a survey that you can come and go.

[00:05:31] You can start it one day, go back, and it will save your answers and responses and continue on. If it is you that's going to wear the solo hat, it gives you an option at the beginning to share it to other departments, other leaders that might have the answers. And that's more like a 15, 20 minute time commitment. Someone can go in, literally use the table of contents to manipulate their way through it by clicking exactly. If you ask me, Cliff, to take the recruiting and onboarding section of that survey, that can be 15, 20 minutes for me.

[00:06:01] I'm going to go in. I'm going to tell it I want to answer that. I'm going to then use the table of contents to literally just go there, answer those 15, 20 questions. And then again, use table of contents to hit submit and I'm out. Many people, though, take the whole survey. And I'm forever grateful because it's amazing to me the amount of people that will support this community and share the knowledge base of what's going out there and get their voice heard. Yeah. A couple things there that I think are really important to note.

[00:06:28] One is that you mentioned that we do it by organization, not just individual people taking it. I think that's critical in today's environment. And it's something that I'd like to see more HR type surveys and technology surveys do that because what's happening is if you just have someone say, look, I'm just going to talk about the payroll system. And you don't know exactly what is the landscape of the organization they work at. It's just sort of payroll in a vacuum. Yeah.

[00:06:58] You don't really see how. Yeah. What other system? How many different systems are they dealing with? Where are those connections happening? And the modern HR tech world is just you don't just work in this isolation. It's all about data transfer and what you can do with the data and the stories you can tell, what you're using for AI programs and how all of this affects your entire organization. And also, is your organization doing well? You know, we focus on outcomes.

[00:07:25] And I find it so interesting now that for many of these vendors and many of the providers of solutions that Stacey Harris and I have been traveling to and you too as well, Tammy, they are really focused on showing how they can provide value to their customers and the outcomes that they're driving.

[00:07:45] Especially because sometimes with heavy usage of AI tools that requires usage or consumption based pricing that you need to be able to prove out is providing value, right? Absolutely. If you're going to have a more flexible pricing model. Absolutely. So I find that interesting. And then the other thing that I want to touch on is that you said it could be sent to other leaders in your organization.

[00:08:08] I know I keep saying HR, but we have expanded as we get responses that drives everything voice of the customer is everything for us. So this year and Tammy again, correct me if I'm wrong. We have added an entire finance section right for finance professionals and that will cover core finance systems, travel and expense systems and budgeting. Financial planning, financial planning and budgeting. That's right.

[00:08:34] We have also added in a full section on compliance and risk management systems. That is something that was definitely driven by you, the survey takers. So we have made that own system where you can look at user experience, vendor satisfaction, usage, who controls it. What else? Am I missing something? I know we've definitely also expanded our AI and how that fits in strategy. Yeah. I mean, I would just say we've definitely looked at over this past year, what our clients have asked us.

[00:09:04] What the takers have asked us about what they're curious about for the future. We've we've manipulated a bunch of our questions and we've changed the wording and we've we're going to be able to see a little bit more about like you said, the outcomes. Right. Like everyone wants to know this return on investment, this value. What are they? And so across a lot of the talent management spaces, we're asking some of those questions. What what are the outcomes that you're seeing your return on investment or value, which I'm excited to see those answers for sure.

[00:09:32] And we'll be able to share those late later in the year. Yeah. Yeah. I just want to circle back the forty six seventy that we have in our data set for this last year. I just want to say, wow. Right. Someone recently asked me what it's looked like over the last five years as far as our data set has gone. And we've always had in my book when I joined the team back in 2021.

[00:09:56] I thought it was spectacular that we had two thousand one hundred and seventy seven unique organizations. And so I just want to clarify there when you share it to a number of people in your organization, we combine all those answers into one. So of that four thousand six hundred and seventy, that is truly a unique organization.

[00:10:19] If ten people at Amazon take it, they get they're counted once in that four thousand six seventy because we do combine them all into one response to go from two thousand one hundred and seventy seven responses in twenty twenty one to four thousand six seventy in twenty twenty five. It really just speaks to this community. Right. I mean, I'd love to say that it speaks to us, Cliff. It speaks to what we do and how we do it. And Stacey and the whole team that's supporting all of us. Right.

[00:10:47] But, man, it's we can't do it without the voices. So getting out there in these the distributor partnerships that are sharing with all of their clients, as well as our marketing team that gets it done every year. It's just, you know, I'm a data junkie. So, you know, the more the merrier, the better. I love digging into this data for sure. I know a lot of our listeners are. So I would urge them to be a part of it. Right.

[00:11:15] You get a lot of benefits from it, including getting a copy of your responses and basically getting a copy of the paper. Right. Yeah. There's so well, there's a few things, not only the paper clip, but if someone takes a survey during the survey at the end, the end kind of closing questions will give you a mini benchmark.

[00:11:37] Right. Like so we'll give you instantly the minute you click submit, you're going to get a separate email back that has an attached 30 to 40 page report on last year's data for whatever industry and or region you pick. So if you want the Americas, you want manufacturing, you whatever it is, you want that we send that straight to you in the back of that is an I room credit hours. Right.

[00:12:02] So I think they call them professional development units now, PDUs, and they're offering 10 PDUs with an additional ability to gain one more. If you go to their exclusive member webinar, it's just dynamic. Right. You're not only getting this paper and we know clip when we used to when you started, you've been here five years. I mean, this is your fifth cycle through.

[00:12:23] What if I told you that your boss skydives, Tim in marketing is a magician and Sam in accounting does sums in his head while standing on his hands, seeing sides of the people you work with, but never see sides that inform and inspire their work. And that can inspire yours is what the talent show is all about. Email me, Tom Alexander, host of the talent show at talent show at backbone, Inc. Dot com. And show us what you got. I look forward to seeing you on the talent show.

[00:12:53] That paper was about 150 pages. Exactly. And it's I believe last year's official number was 380. So, I mean, it's just so much data to crunch. And we always laugh about how much data we have that we don't even get to share with people. Right. So, I mean, man, if you're curious about anything that you see that in the survey participate, man, if you see something reach out, we're happy. We have a lot of data and we're happy to support you on your mission. Yeah, that's right.

[00:13:22] And by the time you get this, it will be open to the public. You can go right to our website. You can take that. You can also, you know, as we're wrapping up today, we just really wanted to get this promo out. We will go through some of the news going through. We definitely have a lot to touch on in terms of what is going on. We will report back from some of these events we've been at such workday innovation.

[00:13:51] We're human, where I am now, ADP's meeting of the minds. Stacy will report back from what she saw out at HR Tech Europe. I also want to just do a quick shout out, even though we will go into some depth from a couple things. Workday's CTO, Peter Bayless has joined Anthropic. Gabe Monroy, who I got a chance to talk to quite a bit at Workday Innovation, is now taking over as the CTO. Workday, he's really great.

[00:14:18] Luke Hicks, leaving Cornerstone on demand for Malt Contingent Workforce. Contingent Workforce is another area that we've expanded and built on quite a bit. And Meg Baer joining NovaWorks. So we'll go into all that. We'll go into all of the news. I would also, as I said, urge you to pop on over to our website. If you haven't received a link to take the survey, you can go directly to there to do that.

[00:14:46] But you should also listen to our other HR Huddle podcasts. Of course, we have HR, we have a problem. But Terry and Susan Richards, our other founders along with Stacy Harris, have started their own new podcast. I am actually here with Susan Richards, so I got a chance to talk to her a little bit yesterday about it. It is called, I believe it is the Pivot Effect. And yes, that's correct.

[00:15:13] Pivot Effect, which is through the HR Huddle sort of family of podcasts. And it's going to be a lot around the individual pivoting within your career and where you want to go. Keeping track of the work that keeps shifting. We've been talking a lot about industry news. We want to make sure we also had insights into you, the individual. So that sounds really interesting. I confess to Susan yesterday that I've only watched the snippets of it because, you know, we haven't been busy or anything.

[00:15:42] But I'm going to watch the whole thing because it looks amazing. I was going to say, Cliff, I did get a chance to listen to it. It was fantastic. Wonderful. Perfect. We could talk about all that, but both of us are on the go. But I want to say thank you. Definitely look into all that. And a big thank you to the production team who've been working with us on these crazy schedules. Brand Method Media Group helped us produce all of these wonderful podcasts run by their amazing founder, Kelly Kelly.

[00:16:08] Our marketing team, Caitlin Diamond, Summer Oreano. I also want to thank Cole Harris, Linda Galloway, Tammy, our very special guest. I would like to thank you every day for all the work that you do, but especially for jumping in. I know that you, like me, work from home. Probably don't normally wear a pink blazer, but it looks wonderful on you. If you're not seeing the video, please do. Tammy, thank you so much. And also thank you to our listeners and community.

[00:16:37] You know, as Tammy was talking about the survey, all of this, right? This podcast, the survey, the research put out of it, you know, it's a kind of a trite saying, cliche saying we couldn't do without you, but it is true. We literally would have no data if you didn't tell us what's going on with your business and being so honest and taking that survey. Tammy, thank you so much. And listeners, thank Tammy because as she said, it's long, but she spends a lot of time going through beta tests, figuring out ways to make it easier.

[00:17:07] So thank you, Tammy, and thank you to our listeners. And I think that is it for this kind of special little interregnum episode of spilling the tea on HR tech. We hope it's been just the brew you needed to get the engines running this week. And we'll be back in two weeks with another pot of boiling hot HR tech news and updates. Thank you, everyone. Bye. Thanks for having me. Bye.