Strong Opinions @marksbirch

As I mentioned last week, I was going to get into some specific vendors that are really changing up the HR technology scene.  While not quite disruptive, it is good to see that some vendors are innovating and challenging the status quo of bloatware and lame user experiences.   My picks for most innovative at HR Tech go to Rypple, Sonar6 and Jobvite.

Sonar6 and Rypple are slaying the same monster; performance reviews.  Sonar6 (which had by far the most awesome booth display) is bringing a fresh look to the user experience of performance reviews leveraging the latest Web 2.0 tricks to make the process less painful for employees, managers and HR professionals.

Rypple however is taking the entire old schools performance review process and kicking is out to the curb.  Instead of periodic reviews, they allow people to recognize on-the-job awesomeness on the spot.  All of this is enabled in a web app that is more Facebook than HRIS (aka HR software for dinosaurs) and incorporates game dynamic methods such as badges to award positive contributions and accomplishments. 

Jobvite is trying to upend the social recruiting space with a product that…wait for it…is actually social.  Instead of fake social apps and weak plug-ins used by other so-called talent management vendors, Jobvite is delivering the goods making it stupid easy to share jobs in ones social network in a way that is non-intrusive or spammy.  Jobvite is also one of the few vendors that I could see a small business use for sourcing talent, but can also scale for the biggest corporations.

I also want to give a shout out to some honorable mentions that were attending the show.  SynchSource was actually sharing a booth with their flagship customer Advantec/Kardiant.  SynchSource has rebuilt HRIS from the ground up correcting all of the mistakes in PeopleSoft, SAP and other legacy HRIS.  I have not seen better enterprise technology ever that is as open, easy to configure and powerful as SynchSource.  The other shout out goes to MySenSay, which did not have a booth but was attending the conference.  They are reinventing the college job fair process, which is quite broken, by building a better way to match college graduates to jobs and employers.  MySenSay has not yet officially launched, but if LinkedIn is scared, then you know this has potential.