As our team gears up for the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas this October, we’ve been busy talking with some of the innovative providers of platforms and systems in the industry. Across our research, Awards programs, regular briefing schedule, and more, we talk with nearly 300 companies a year across the HR tech space. But there’s always a gravity in the fall when we attend this event and speak with 50+ in just a few days onsite.
This year we’ll have a sizable team on site at HR Tech to meet with our amazing clients, our future friends, and other partners in the community, including five analysts (so, so proud of our team!) We’ll be hosting a livestream called The Human Advantage in the Age of AI, doing briefings, speaking in sessions with clients, and more. Didn’t get a slot with us yet? Ping Jill on our team to see about setting up a conversation (jill.plantz at LHRA.io).
In order to prepare for our time onsite, we’ve been meeting with companies about their upcoming releases, major announcements, and product advancements. One final comment before getting into the list: it’s always incredible to me to see how we move the needle in product innovation in the industry. It’s easy to say “there’s nothing new or interesting” at these kinds of events, and to that, I always say the person simply didn’t look hard enough or have enough deep conversations to find out. I’m always impressed by someone or something at HR Tech, and this year will be no different, I’m certain.
Before we get to the companies we’re watching, this is what’s in store for our team in the coming months.
What’s on our agenda at Lighthouse
In the coming months we’ll be planning and preparing for our 2027 research season. This is one of the biggest questions we get every year at HR Tech! However, we haven’t been standing still. This year we’ve completed studies around:
- Customer Training and Support (extended enterprise training, in partnership with Absorb LMS)
- Talent Acquisition Trends (with a key focus on AI resumes and candidate fraud in partnership with Criteria Corp)
- RPO Buyer Trends (in partnership with the RPO Association)
- The Administrative Burden of HR for SMBs (in partnership with Insperity)
- Business Agility through Skills and Talent (in partnership with Cornerstone)
- AI and SMB: Critical Success Elements for Adoption and Value (in partnership with Insperity)
- Learner Trends Benchmark Study (in partnership with Adobe)
Research is what we do. But unlike an academic approach, we tailor the research design and outputs towards action and practicality. Some of these studies were planned for Lighthouse and had a sponsor support, but others were custom-designed for the partner/client. Our team has published dozens of reports, podcasts, and other pieces of content in support of an incredible client and partner ecosystem.
For the rest of 2026 into 2027, we’re already planning:
- Frontline Workforce Technology Landscape: an exploration of dozens of products helping employers hire, engage, develop, and retain their frontline teams (ping us if you serve frontline workforces as a primary audience and are interested in inclusion)
- AI Coaching Technology Landscape: we’ve seen an explosion of AI coaches and will be examining the common features, key differentiators, top players, and combining that with some of our research on what workers want from an AI coach (ping us if your product is primarily focused on AI coaching and are interested in inclusion)
- Talent Acquisition Trends: continuing our 7-year study into TA benchmarks, changing trends, and how candidates feel about today’s hiring market
- Business Impact of People Practices Study: a deep look at how the right hire, the right skill development, the right recognition, the right compensation… Affects the value that each individual brings to a business. This will be a landmark study that examines work through the eyes of business leaders.
- Learning, Performance, and Skills: in the AI era, the only way humans are going to learn to adopt AI, adapt themselves, and win at work is by learning and growing.
- 2027 Compensation Buyer Trends and Landscape Report: we’ve been exploring compensation’s evolution since 2019 and are excited to dive into this industry even deeper
- The Human Future of Work: despite all the AI hype, there’s still a great demand for humanity–creativity, compassion, curiosity, and more. This study will look at how employers can value and emphasize the human strengths that differentiate them in a world where everyone can query the same LLMs.
- HR Summer School: our flagship virtual event every June that has had over 10 MILLION minutes watched in recent years by thousands of HR, talent acquisition, and People professionals around the globe. Learn more.
Additionally, we’re planning our virtual event series around these studies to help bring together our audience and the broader community.
HR Tech Companies We’re Watching Closely
Note: the company notes below are arranged purely in the order that we briefed with them.
HiBob
HiBob got its start as an HCM platform built for midmarket, global firms that needed a solution that was simple to use. The recently released a refreshed Job Catalog, rebuilt so career tracks are flexible enough to support upmarket customers. A new generator reads job descriptions and hierarchy to build out the catalog, inferring key skills and attaching compensation bands. On the hiring side, candidates can now live in talent pools without being tied to a specific role, which helps with sourcing and repurposing candidates for roles. The company also emphasized Glass Box AI, including controls that let teams tune resume match scoring and rescore every candidate to check whether the model is screening out too many people. HiBob recently had a major investment from Salesforce and is well over 5,000 customers at this point.
My take: this capability is as deep as I would expect from a point solution ATS. It’s going to be hard for other HCM providers to match this functionality, and with virtually every company struggling to hire right now, this is great timing.
CodeSignal
CodeSignal built its reputation on technical skills assessment, where answers are clearly right or wrong. Now, with candidate resumes becoming increasingly less useful by the day, CodeSignal is turning that same focus to the human/soft skills side of things. Its approach is to mirror the job through simulations, since high signal comes from having candidates do realistic work. Clients include Zillow, Meta, and other leading tech companies. The company’s stated ambition is to bring the same level of clarity and rigor to non-technical skills.
My POV: I’ve watched CodeSignal from afar ever since the days I was recruiting personally! I was deeply impressed with what they’ve been building and there are BIG plans ahead for taking this into talent development and skill validation for the workforce, not just candidates. They are prepped for success.
Payscale
Payscale recently held its annual Compference event which included an analyst day to show a platform rebuilt around AI, with Ascent unifying Payfactors and Marketpay in a single modernized experience. Two other products complete the lineup: JobNav for job architecture and Paycycle for always-on compensation planning. Behind them sits the Payscale Intelligence Cloud, which draws on a data ecosystem built to keep pace with a labor market that moves faster than annual surveys. The company reports more than 50 releases in 18 months and is leaning into a new term: compensation intelligence.
My take: Payscale is doing the unglamorous work of integrating systems and folding them together to make it easier on customers and stakeholders to use compensation as a true decision-driver. They are warmed up and ready to show off.
ICIMS
During a recent podcast conversation with the new ICIMS CEO Marc Thompson on the We’re Only Human show, we talked about his vision for hiring and how it affects key business outcomes. Now we’re seeing that come into the product with some of their new positioning and upcoming features. For instance, their belief is that the ATS becomes less visible but more central, as recruiters and hiring managers complete more work in tools like Teams and Slack while AI gathers context and updates the system (we echo this). The third is that the hiring platform becomes more than a system of record, backed by ICIMS data scale of about 200M+ applications processed in 2025 alone.
My take: this “headless” conversation is one I’ve been having for several years now but the technology is actually making it possible. In a world where everyone can access their HR Tech through Slack, Teams, etc. the UI won’t be the differentiator it once was.
Paychex WISE
Paychex used its pre-show briefing to show how its agentic AI solution, WISE, works across payroll and HR. A memory feature lets customers add their own HR flavor, such as culture, communication preferences, and policies (for example, compensation targets like 10% above market as a company standard). Paychex says its payroll agents are more accurate than humans in some cases, keeps a human in the final decision seat, and lets customers turn the dial on agent autonomy up or down.
Note: that ability to adjust autonomy up and down is a differentiator. Most AI solutions are either “on” or “off,” but being able to adjust to our risk and comfort level as a company sounds incredible.
TalentNeuron
TalentNeuron positions itself as a workforce decision system that goes beyond workforce intelligence, pulling in HRIS data like retirement risk, succession, pay bands, and demographics. It tracks drift from the plan to show whether a miss was an execution problem or a bad plan, and it supports location planning and org redesign. A new partnership with another leading provider allows them to do skills validation, further setting them apart from the competition.
My thoughts: one competitor in this niche, TechWolf, was just acquired by SAP, opening up even more opportunity for TalentNeuron to take a bigger role in this space. Every time I think David and the TalentNeuron team have gathered all the data they can find for decision-making, they turn up a new source that makes the platform even better. Also a Lighthouse Tech Awards winner, no surprise!
Salary (SalaryTalent)
Salary (formerly Salary.com) introduced SalaryTalent, which brings talent management and talent acquisition together with its compensation data. It follows the release of SalaryIQ in recent years, which was the team’s first solution that went beyond serving just the compensation practitioner (offering competitive pay info for recruiting teams). The company argues that separating talent decisions from pay gives an incomplete picture of the work. Capabilities include candidate sourcing, flagging at-risk employees, skills assessments, and career path building.
My take: I’ve been waiting on a compensation provider to approach talent with the same rigor and structure with which they approach pay data. This is it. Many time skills and talent providers talk about career paths, employee development, etc. as if pay doesn’t matter. It’s one of the core building blocks. It has to matter. And Salary is setting up to deliver on that vision.
Ashby
Ashby is one of the newest ATS (and much more, don’t sell them short) providers on the block, but to date they have already built an incredible customer base of thousands of customers. Nine out of 10 clients use Ashby’s AI capabilities, which is a testament to their usefulness. Its custom agents let teams build repeatable workflows in natural language, such as an agent that analyzes why candidates were lost. An MCP server makes Ashby data available to other tools. The company acquired Talent Llama to embed AI interviewing functionality and lets customers control how many candidates the AI interviewer sees.
My thoughts: I’ll be having Benji, Ashby’s CEO, join me on the livestream at HR Tech because this product has been impressive every time I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a demo or new feature set. Excited to talk about how Ashby is supporting a more human, connected approach to hiring.
OrgChart
OrgChart gives organizations a clear, visual picture of their people, with 50+ connectors to payroll, ATS, and HCM systems feeding it. Teams can build the org view in whatever structure fits their business and pull in performance and tenure data from the HRIS, making this much more than a static org chart built in PowerPoint. A point-in-time view allows leaders to see quarter by quarter changes in organizational structure, offering a perspective that literally exists nowhere else.
My thoughts: there are multiple studies showing that unclear, disorganized, or outdated sales data costs organizations money. I have to believe the same is true of our talent and internal capabilities. OrgChart is bringing clarity to this critical component of how we see the business, and that value is tangible.
Darwinbox
Darwinbox is one of the newest HCM solutions competing on a global enterprise stage. The modern AI-native HCM is built for speed not just in the product but in product setup, with average implementation times of ~18 weeks (virtually unheard of for enterprise HCM when compared with the much longer timelines common at other providers). Reported growth is nearly double the industry average, and a key part of that growth is a Microsoft partnership where Darwinbox is integrated into Copilot functions . The company is co-selling with Microsoft’s account executives and integrating so Copilot can access HR data, deploy workflows, and answer questions.
My perspective: I have been excited about the Darwinbox product ever since I met their cofounder and head of technology when speaking at an event in India. They have a big vision and the product is modern enough to outpace the other solutions enterprise organizations are using. Darwinbox is steadily chipping away at the old guard in HCM.
Teamflect
Teamflect is an enterprise-grade performance management & employee engagement platform built natively for Microsoft 365, and that’s what sets it apart. Instead of asking employees to log in to yet another HR tool, it brings reviews, goals & OKRs, feedback, recognition, 1:1s and much more into where your team already works. The AI agent acts like an HR teammate inside Teams, which I especially liked. It preps managers for 1:1s and reviews with each person’s goal and feedback history, catches slipping goals, and answers employees’ policy questions. Teams can use Teamflect inside ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, or whichever AI assistant they already use. And because it’s Microsoft-native, security reviews much easier, which means HR can champion a tool IT has already signed off on.
My POV: When I ran performance management as an HR director, getting people the right forms and getting them turned around was a major pain. Teamflect is making this process simpler by embedding it directly into the flow of how people get things done day to day. Side note: excited to have Teamflect supporting our livestream at HR Tech!
Schoox
In a time where organizations need more proof than ever that their learning and training activities have real ties to business results, Schoox’s Learning Impact Suite aims to connect L&D directly to business outcomes and KPIs. It recommends role-specific skills, job-specific and soft skills per role, and customers can accept the recommendations, preselect their own, or modify them. Proficiency levels use a behaviorally anchored scale that can be tailored to a customer’s own language, such as a restaurant brand’s specific terminology, differentiating the results, training, and verbiage from a hotel chain, for instance. Training plans can pull in content from providers like Go1 and BizLibrary and estimate the business impact of a selected set of courses. The suite is an add-on to the core LMS product that is used by Dairy Queen, Tropical Smoothie Cafe, SportClips, and other organizations with frontline workforces.
My thinking: we’re about to embark upon some research exploring the frontline technology landscape, and this briefing doubled for that purpose. I haven’t seen anything else like this to support learning impact at this level. Lefteris and the team have big ideas on how to take this product further and make it more actionable, but it’s already a step ahead of some of the things I’ve seen.
First Advantage
Following its early-2025 merger with Sterling, First Advantage reports 80,000 active clients and more than 200M screenings a year. It offers 100+ ATS and HCM integrations and serves both frontline and white-collar hiring, with vertical focus on driver and logistics, healthcare, and retail. The company’s latest improvements and focus include investing in sophisticated identity fraud detection, including biometric liveness checks now available in more than 150 countries. Continuous monitoring and rechecks, especially for driver jobs, round out the story, and speed of completion is a key differentiator.
My POV: the identity fraud detection piece is huge in a time where 98% of employers believe that AI generated resumes are part of their hiring pipeline (based on our 2026 Talent Acquisition Trends study). Additionally, the speed element here matters. A company that can screen people faster can hire people faster, and that’s a differentiator any organization would love to hold over the competition.
ZoomInfo Talent
ZoomInfo Talent has launched a sourcing agent built on a verified-data story, with more than 1B verified profiles drawn from 1,000+ employer sources. One differentiator is that those looking for talent can often find people that wouldn’t show up in a normal LinkedIn search, and there’s no Boolean translation required! Another focus is on intent: the agent includes intelligence to target candidates who are ready to move. At this point the team is focusing on sourcing only as a way to help employers solve this critical problem. Our research shows that sourcing is in the top three most valuable uses that recruiting teams place on AI, so the demand is definitely there.
My thoughts: I posted a video earlier this summer on LinkedIn about sourcing being one of the ways to save employers from the AI resume flood. Instead of waiting for the resume that seems tailor-made to the job (somewhat fake and/or fraudulent), employers that can find the person at the source can see what should be a more true picture of their background and capabilities. ZoomInfo has the data and that’s typically the winning ticket in today’s world.
isolved
isolved, our flagship partner for HR Summer School this year, launched The Guardian in August 2026, its first AI agent for payroll. The agent reviews every payroll run before close, using historical patterns for context to identify potential issues. It prepares fixes for an administrator to approve, so a person stays in control of the outcome. The launch reflects isolved’s AI strategy of building agents that own end-to-end HR outcomes.
My POV: I had the pleasure of sitting down and chatting with isolved’s head of product, Kelli Rico, earlier this summer. She outlined an entire suite of agents that were coming down the line. isolved has a strong foothold in the SMB market, serving over 9 million employees at hundres of thousands of employers, and those organizations are known for tight resources and bandwidth. These agents are poised to change the game, helping those HR and People teams turn from reactive to proactive.
Awardco
Awardco now serves more than 2,800 clients and 8M users across 163 countries, with 98% enterprise retention. Its client base includes an employers like Zillow, Texas Roadhouse, McCormick, and others. The company has become multiproduct as of 2026. For a long time, the core product was Awardco’s recognition platform built on transparency and ease of use. That traction has paved the way for the new Engage product offering surveys and pulse surveys. Another module, Incentivize, includes a wellness lever, and clients currently use it for activities like step challenges or other wellbeing priorities. There are other components coming to make it easier to recognize people in other systems the teams already use (a theme in this report) and to make it simpler to connect people and their activities in a central feed.
My take: This is a natural extension and direction for the product. All too often I see companies try to jump in the market and be all things to all people. Awardco stuck with recognition for years, doing it really well and solidifying that footprint. Now they are expanding not based on their own aims but based on close partnership with key enterprise clients, which is the recipe for success. Excited to see what they accomplish.
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All this to say that we’re excited for the HR Tech Conference this year and we have some great things in store. Congratulations to the companies featured in this piece and we’re happy about your success.
Ben Eubanks is the Chief Research Officer at Lighthouse Research & Advisory. He is an author, speaker, and researcher with a passion for telling stories and making complex topics easy to understand.
His latest book Talent Scarcity answers the question every business leader has asked in recent years: “Where are all the people, and how do we get them back to work?” It shares practical and strategic recruiting and retention ideas and case studies for every employer.
His first book, Artificial Intelligence for HR, is the world’s most-cited resource on AI applications for hiring, development, and employee experience.
Ben has more than 10 years of experience both as an HR/recruiting executive as well as a researcher on workplace topics. His work is practical, relevant, and valued by practitioners from F100 firms to SMB organizations across the globe.
He has spoken to tens of thousands of HR professionals across the globe and enjoys sharing about technology, talent practices, and more. His speaking credits include the SHRM Annual Conference, Seminarium International, PeopleMatters Dubai and India, and over 100 other notable events.
