April 28, 2015
Salesforce for HR and the Impact to the HR Community
Salesforce for HR is a set of Human Resource tools designed to improve employee engagement and retention.
Recently Salesforce introduced Salesforce for HR – the Employee Success Platform. By taking advantage of the powerful Salesforce1 platform organizations like Virgin America and Coca-Cola are transforming employee engagement with mobile tools, communities and analytics.
For most people working in HR, Salesforce is synonymous with CRM – an array of sales and marketing cloud-based tools designed to manage all aspects of your customer relationship and closing new business. Even their company stock symbol is listed as “CRM”. However, the days of being a CRM only company are long over as they evolve to deliver the most versatile, mature cloud platform built for the next generation.
Salesforce for HR is a set of human resource tools designed to improve employee engagement and retention similar to how Salesforce has been delivering tools for increasing productivity of the front office for years.
Here is brief description of Salesforce for HR:
- Employee journeys designed to offer employee engagement from efficient onboarding to employee development
- Employee communities for collaboration
- HR help desk for self service on HR related issues powered by Salesforce’s Service Cloud
- Salesforce HR Analytics for talent related decisions based on productivity metrics
- Engagement apps designed to help organizations build mobile apps to support business processes
The new Salesforce for HR announcement will be complimentary to any core HRIS system, especially if it is built natively on the Salesforce1 platform such as FinancialForce HCM.
Back in 2013, Mike wrote a blog titled “The HRIS Dream – The Next Big Thing” which outlined the power of the platform and an eco-system that gave vendors the opportunity to focus on the user experience and engagement versus having to worry about the infrastructure layer like so many other firms such as Workday, NetSuite, SuccessFactors and Ultimate Software. This announcement brings the HR community one step closer to achieving the “HRIS Dream”.
Is Salesforce for HR going to be replacing the likes of these big HRIS/HCM competitors? No, but you will see emerging companies like FinancialForce taking down HCM deals against them. Why? Because with its recent announcement of $110 million in fresh funding, FinancialForce is well positioned to leverage and piggy back off Salesforce for HR to re-enforce the message of managing your entire workforce on the Salesforce platform and solving businesses human capital management concerns.
We believe Salesforce realizes that they can’t do everything on their own and will rely on their partners, like FinancialForce, to deliver solutions to help them extend and advance the customer journey.