Research Library
Using the Research Library
The research below is drawn from more than five years of industry studies, practitioner interviews, and deep analysis of the most important topics facing talent leaders today.
Feel free to use the categories below to find what you are looking for, or you can search for content that matters most to you.
Research Reports and Graphics
Fast, Fair, and Functional: A New Look at Structured Interviews [New Research]
For talent acquisition leaders, it sometimes feels as if there is a set of opposing forces fighting for control over hiring processes: We need a strong, supportive candidate experience We need to provide fair consideration and minimize bias We need to pick the candidate who can best perform the job… All that seems like a…
The Next Generation of Talent Rises and Falls on Potential [New Report]
Can I be transparent for a moment? Earlier this year, the team at Plum reached out to us about writing a piece for a different audience than we typically reach. Instead of targeting enterprise talent leaders, HR professionals, and business leaders, we were reaching out to students, recent graduates, and job seekers. We are helping…
Frontline Workers are Different: Here’s How to Engage and Retain Them [New Report]
Employers across the globe have felt the challenges associated with talent shortages in recent years, and frontline employers have felt those pains most acutely. The realities are staggering: Record high quit rates: every month since February 2021 voluntary resignations have been above the highest historical figures. The combination of employee stress and burnout was one…
2023 Compensation Data and Technology Buyer’s Guide and Landscape Report [New Research]
Every other year our team takes a deep dive into the world of compensation. We look at all of the top technology providers. We gather data from a wide variety of employers to understand how they are using data and technology to support comp practices. And we ultimately write the industry’s most in-depth research report…
The State of Hiring in Financial Services: What’s Now and What’s Next [Report]
Within the context of this new report, we look at some of the specific data that apply to the financial services sector based on responses from talent leaders at those firms in our 2023 Talent Acquisition Trends study. Not only that—we’ll also pull in some candidate data points to highlight what candidates are looking for…
The State of Hiring: How the Manufacturing Industry is Responding [Report]
“It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in more than 25 years of recruiting.” This comment is probably one you have either heard or spoken yourself in the last year. From the shortage of qualified talent to historically low unemployment levels to layoffs at some companies, the hiring market seems to be sending mixed messages…
Key Takeaways from the 2023 Performance, Engagement, and Culture Enablement Livestream
Recently we posted about our PEACE livestream session that we were hosting in conjunction with Quantum Workplace, HiBob, and Confirm. This session attracted more than a thousand HR and talent leaders and was an incredible success. Below we have drawn key insights from each speaker to share, including our research preview with me and our…
Performance, Culture, and Employee Retention [Infographic]
Making work meaningful isn’t a pipe dream. It isn’t something that can’t happen. But it also doesn’t happen without intention and effort. Our latest research on PEACE – Performance, Engagement, and Culture Enablement is focused on how to do this in the modern workplace. (Hint: some things have changed, and others haven’t changed a bit!)…
What’s New in Employee Retention, Performance, and Culture? [Livestream]
On Thursday, August 10th, our team will be hosting a special livestream to look at our brand new data on Performance, Engagement, and Culture Enablement (PEACE). Based on 1,000 global workers, this study has some incredible insights on how employees feel about their experiences at work today, what employers need to do to support them,…
Biased, Burdensome, and Burnt Out: The Unlimited PTO Story [New Research]
Not too far in the past, a company that offered its workers an unfettered amount of paid leave would have seemed illogical at best. After all, the typical method of accruing paid leave over time was commonplace and widely accepted by employers and employees alike. But then a small minority of companies began to offer…
Case Studies
Trusaic 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company Trusaic is a workplace equity technology company committed to advancing social good by helping organizations achieve pay equity, foster a more diverse and inclusive workforce, assist economically disadvantaged individuals with finding work, and ensure employee access to affordable healthcare. Trusaic’s mission is to create a better working world through data-driven, people-centered technology…
SmartRank 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company SmartRank is a Non-Traditional Productivity-ATS that completely automates the job applicant screening process, stack-ranks and filters those applicants, and gives hiring managers exactly what they’re looking for without using/needing a résumé. This saves time, increases hiring quality, and reduces both hiring manager frustration and recruiter workload. SmartRank was originally founded in April…
SkyHive 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company SkyHive is a Certified B Corporation and software provider of global workforce intelligence technology, optimizing labor market efficiencies in real-time for companies, communities, and national economies. Like the DNA of the human genome was coded, SkyHive has coded human capability. By doing so, governments, large enterprises, and educational institutions can reskill the…
Schoox 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company Schoox is workplace learning software with a people-first twist. For organizations with frontline, remote, and corporate learners who need an engaged and skilled workforce ready to take on the new challenges of their evolving business, Schoox is an award-winning learning management and talent development company. This SaaS solution delivers social-, mobile-, and…
Jobvite 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company Jobvite, an Employ Inc. brand, is a purpose-built proven talent acquisition (TA) solution built to innovate, scale, and solve the hiring complexities within sophisticated organizations across the entire TA lifecycle. Jobvite’s Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite is a comprehensive TA solution, empowering teams to address challenges across the entire talent acquisition lifecycle. The…
HiBob 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company HiBob is on a mission to enable companies to thrive through change using people-first strategies. The HCM platform, Bob, simplifies the complexities of today’s global, hybrid, and remote world of work, driving greater impact for HR, managers, and employees. The ideal customer is a modern, multinational, mid-enterprise company with 250-3,000 employees with…
Cornerstone 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company Cornerstone powers the future-ready workforce with a next-generation talent experience platform designed to unite technology, data and content and inspire a work environment of growth, agility and success for all. With an AI-powered, skills-forward, experiential platform, built on an open architecture designed for neutrality and scale, Cornerstone helps organizations modernize their learning…
Harri 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company Harri is the revolutionary global leader in Frontline Employee Experience. The Harri platform is built for companies that have service at the heart of their business and believe that the customer experience will never exceed the employee experience. The Harri suite of talent attraction, workforce management, employee engagement and compliance technologies enable…
15Five 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company 15Five is the holistic performance management company. 15Five equips HR teams with a complete, single-platform solution to improve manager effectiveness, drive high performance and engagement, and increase retention. 15Five was founded in 2011, by serial entrepreneur, David Hassell, and born of his deep desire to help people reach their fullest potential at…
Phenom 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company Phenom has a purpose of helping a billion people find the right job. Through AI-powered talent experiences, employers are using Phenom to hire employees faster, develop them to their full potential, and retain them longer. The Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform seamlessly connects candidates, employees, recruiters, hiring managers, HR and HRIS —…
Videos, Interviews, and Podcasts
Lighthouse Listens: 6 Innovative Talent Acquisition Technologies
As part of our ongoing research efforts, our team meets with technology providers across the HR, talent, and learning space on a regular basis. Last month we held a special set of briefings as part of a talent acquisition deep dive we called Lighthouse Listens. In it, we met with six different providers touching on…
Predicting Pay and Skills From Job Market Intelligence Data on #HRTechTalks
In today’s world, things change and evolve so quickly. Take pay for instance. It’s changing faster than the surveys and other data sources can keep up. So what do we do? One area of emerging data comes from labor market intelligence tools. In this episode of #hrtechtalks, we chat with Cary Sparrow, CEO of Greenwich.HR,…
Personalization and Wellness: How AI Supports Wellbeing at Scale
“You need to have a competitive pay and benefits offering. When you go to do that, the employer ends up paying for a lot of things that go unused just because there’s too much to communicate. What’s just amazing about the time and space we’re in now is you can really use personalization to surface…
Compliance Challenges? You’re Not Alone: Featuring ThinkHR/MammothHR on HR Tech Talks
Since the start of this year, multiple new laws have passed that change responsibilities for employers, and that’s just a small sample of the overall changes in the workplace over the last few years. Even when you’re focusing on those evolving requirements, it can be overwhelming to decipher what applies to your company and how to adopt the new regulations.
In this discussion on HR Tech Talks, I am going to chat with Nathan Christensen, CEO of Mammoth/ThinkHR about why navigating compliance is a critical skill set for HR leaders and how his team supports this need for the business (without breaking the bank).
#HRTechTalks
Solving Pay Equity and Comp Challenges: Featuring Curo Compensation on HR Tech Talks
More and more companies across the globe are attempting to tackle the pay equity issue, but it’s not always easy if you don’t have the right tools to support the process. In some brand new research at Lighthouse Research & Advisory, we found that compensation technology is not only becoming more powerful, but it’s becoming a staple of the HR leader’s toolbox for navigating pay decisions across the board.
In this episode, I’m talking with Ruth Thomas of Curo Compensation about how this company has exploded into the scene of compensation management tools. We’ll also cover the firm’s priority focus on pay equity and how it is helping employers to create a fair and equitable playing field when it comes to pay.
#HRTechTalks
Embracing Flexibility in Your Talent System: PeopleFluent on HR Tech Talks
When HR technology first became a “thing,” tools were rigid and structured. Today, some tools are still that way, but others have taken the opposite approach: they allow employers to customize and tailor the settings and capabilities around their unique and specific needs.
In our 2020 research, we found that 97% of firms that say they are adaptable also say that their HR technology plays a key part in that flexibility.
In this episode of HR Tech Talks, I’m going to talk with Stephen Bruce of PeopleFluent about how his firm has adopted this approach and how it results in better customer relationships, stronger capabilities that fit each client’s needs, and deep expertise in talent. We’ll touch on talent mobility, talent analytics, and the need for a flexible system to meet the needs of an agile organization.
#hrtechtalks
Health Intelligence: Going Beyond Health Analytics with Springbuk on HR Tech Talks
Employers often put little thought into the data wrapped around their health benefits. But what if leaders could use health analytics to connect business metrics with the health of your workforce? In this episode of HR Tech Talks, I’m talking with Amy Brown from Springbuk (a 2020 HR Tech Awards winner!) about how their company helps employers to see trends and insights in the data. Join us to learn how we can get better at using this data for supporting our people.
#HRTechTalks
Technology Reviews
Trusaic 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company Trusaic is a workplace equity technology company committed to advancing social good by helping organizations achieve pay equity, foster a more diverse and inclusive workforce, assist economically disadvantaged individuals with finding work, and ensure employee access to affordable healthcare. Trusaic’s mission is to create a better working world through data-driven, people-centered technology…
SmartRank 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company SmartRank is a Non-Traditional Productivity-ATS that completely automates the job applicant screening process, stack-ranks and filters those applicants, and gives hiring managers exactly what they’re looking for without using/needing a résumé. This saves time, increases hiring quality, and reduces both hiring manager frustration and recruiter workload. SmartRank was originally founded in April…
isolved HCM Connect Conference: Serious Growth, Aggressive Roadmap, and a Critical AI Strategy
This week I spent time in beautiful Palm Springs at the isolved Connect user conference. If you’re not familiar with the name, isolved HCM’s hot pink brand is spreading quickly across the nation as they pick up customers, build out the product, and celebrate their increased successes in recent years. See my notes from the…
Ceridian Rebrands to Dayforce, Launches Range of New Features and Strategic Efforts
Fall for analysts like us in the HR technology space equates to travel season, with industry conferences and technology user conferences happening on a weekly basis between August and November. This week is Ceridian’s Insights conference in Las Vegas. Ceridian has been known for its Dayforce product for many years (the company has a 30…
2023 Compensation Data and Technology Buyer’s Guide and Landscape Report [New Research]
Every other year our team takes a deep dive into the world of compensation. We look at all of the top technology providers. We gather data from a wide variety of employers to understand how they are using data and technology to support comp practices. And we ultimately write the industry’s most in-depth research report…
SkyHive 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company SkyHive is a Certified B Corporation and software provider of global workforce intelligence technology, optimizing labor market efficiencies in real-time for companies, communities, and national economies. Like the DNA of the human genome was coded, SkyHive has coded human capability. By doing so, governments, large enterprises, and educational institutions can reskill the…
Schoox 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company Schoox is workplace learning software with a people-first twist. For organizations with frontline, remote, and corporate learners who need an engaged and skilled workforce ready to take on the new challenges of their evolving business, Schoox is an award-winning learning management and talent development company. This SaaS solution delivers social-, mobile-, and…
Jobvite 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company Jobvite, an Employ Inc. brand, is a purpose-built proven talent acquisition (TA) solution built to innovate, scale, and solve the hiring complexities within sophisticated organizations across the entire TA lifecycle. Jobvite’s Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite is a comprehensive TA solution, empowering teams to address challenges across the entire talent acquisition lifecycle. The…
HiBob 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company HiBob is on a mission to enable companies to thrive through change using people-first strategies. The HCM platform, Bob, simplifies the complexities of today’s global, hybrid, and remote world of work, driving greater impact for HR, managers, and employees. The ideal customer is a modern, multinational, mid-enterprise company with 250-3,000 employees with…
Cornerstone 2023 HR Tech Awards Case Study
About the Company Cornerstone powers the future-ready workforce with a next-generation talent experience platform designed to unite technology, data and content and inspire a work environment of growth, agility and success for all. With an AI-powered, skills-forward, experiential platform, built on an open architecture designed for neutrality and scale, Cornerstone helps organizations modernize their learning…
See the Latest from Lighthouse Research & Advisory
How Learning is Changing: An Interview with Skillsoft’s Chief Content Officer
Ask almost any business leader, and they’ll tell you that they want their organization to have a culture of learning. However, in today’s discussion, Mark Onisk points out that firms often fail at that “squishy” dream because it’s not well-defined. Simply setting up a learning portal won’t lead to improved results, says Onisk. In this…
Read More
#AI in #Learning: 8 Learning Content Recommendation Signals for Personalized Experiences
AI is penetrating into every aspect of HCM, including learning and development. In many briefings with technology providers I’m hearing the same thing over and over again: we designed this experience to be like the Netflix of learning content. That’s a nice sentiment, but Netflix is an entertainment streaming service with highly personalized experiences for…
Read More
2019 HCM Trends: Market Size, Investment Priorities, and More
As we edge closer and closer to 2019, I’m receiving more and more questions from employers and vendors in the community about what trends I’m seeing. What will define the coming year? Obviously AI is going to be a big part of that, especially with my book coming out just before the new year starts,…
Read More
Algorithms, Bias, and Decision-Making: Podcast Insights from IBM Leaders
To prevent biased algorithms you need to make sure you have unbiased training data on hand. You also need algorithms to be developed by a diverse set of people. –Lisa Seacat DeLuca, Director of Offering Management and Distinguished Engineer for IBM Watson Internet of Things How do we select vendors and what do we focus…
Read More
The #AI Enabled Future of Work Requires Essential Human Skills
In my new book on Artificial Intelligence for HR (debuted at #1 on the New and Noteworthy books on Amazon), the final chapter is dedicated to the future human skills of the workplace. As I worked through the research I realized there were some common themes that blended together across academic and industry research sources…
Read More
Analytics for Diversity: How IKEA Uses Data to Improve D&I Outcomes
Recently I had the opportunity to speak at a SHRM Diversity Conference. I spoke on bias, HR technology, and how AI might be able to help us avoid some of our biased tendencies (if we can keep the bias out of the systems themselves). It was a great session because the audience was more than…
Read More
Artificial Intelligence in Learning: The Resounding Message from #DoceboInspire
I’ve written quite a bit on AI and its impact on the employee experience, but one area that I have talked less about is the learning side of the equation. There have been so many advances in recruiting technology and other areas, but learning has lagged behind a bit. Until now, that is. At this…
Read More
Saba Buys Lumesse: Fills Critical Gaps for Technology and Customer Acquisition
Things are moving quickly in the HCM technology industry. Last week I reported in from Saba Insight, the company’s annual user conference. This week news popped that Saba has entered talks to acquire Lumesse, a European talent management provider. Here’s the snippet from the news. In the News Saba, a portfolio company of Vector Capital,…
Read More
Key Takeaways from Saba Insight 2018 (#sabainsight18)
2018 is the year that learning and performance are finally intersecting. I’m talking with a variety of vendors that are tackling this, and one of them that is poised to do it well is Saba. The company is on positive track more than a year after its latest acquisition, and the roadmap shared at the…
Read More
Using Technology to Level Up Recruiting
My first love as an HR pro was recruiting. Within my first two or three weeks on the job my boss gave me my first recruiting assignment: find a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter instructor pilot that wants to travel 90% of the time to locations across the United States. Needless to say it was an incredible…
Read More
HR Tech 2018: Let’s Connect!
The HR Technology Conference is the biggest show in the HR tech space for a reason: powerful practitioner content and case studies, great vendor participation, and a phenomenal set of keynotes. This year I’m really excited about the event as it’s where my firm builds the best relationships with the solution providers in the marketplace.…
Read More
3 Ways Compensation Policies Can Cause Employee Turnover
Did you realize that the way your company approaches compensation policy can actually create (or reduce) employee turnover? If keeping your people is a priority in today’s tight talent market, you need to look at whether your pay practices are competitive enough to keep workers from heading for greener pastures. What Causes Employees to Decide…
Read More
4 Fundamental Qualities that Separate Humans and #AI
Note: one of the research efforts we have undertaken here at Lighthouse is the We’re Only Human podcast. This show is now two years old and features interviews with HR and talent executives, business leaders, vendors, and more to help you stay on top of the interesting trends and insights you need to perform at…
Read More
3 Lessons on Creating a Culture of Employee Recognition
Employee recognition is a powerful tool to engage workers. Yet all too often recognition initiatives fail. One of the key reasons this happens is because employers tend to look at the process of creating a recognition program as a logical transaction — a “campaign” intended to keep turnover numbers down rather than a true holistic effort…
Read More
The Best Business is Built on Relationships: A Visit with ExponentHR
We’ve been keeping busy here at Lighthouse, and this past week I was on the road for my last travel of the summer. I visited the SHRM conference in Chicago, which is the largest HR event on the planet with more than 20,000 attendees. While I was in town I didn’t go to any sessions.…
Read MoreCopyright Lighthouse Research & Advisory. All rights reserved.