If I had a dollar for every HR start-up, I wouldn't have to
start up my own HR venture!
Have you noticed how many people seem to be starting HR
companies lately? I talked to an Angel Fund manager a few weeks back and he
said “We've already talked to 2 HR start-ups this week.” There was no room at
that Inn.
I wonder if these people starting new ventures in HR feel
like HR is a piece of cake. There are certain things in the world where people
think they are experts without putting in the effort to gain expertise. Parenting is one example, marketing seems to
be that way too, but so is HR.
I find HR entrepreneurship very hard. I have helped many HR
companies over the last 30 years discover and build new products for HR. After
helping sell the last one, I decided to start a business on my own. I have (as
I said above) 30 years of experience building HR products. But I have never
been an HR practitioner. So the first thing I did was form an advisory group
made up of some of the best HR people I know. They are my life blood and my
muses. It took several ideas developed, proposed, adjusted and revised before
we came to anything we thought made sense and would truly fill a hole in
existing HR processes. (We didn't want to build the same thing everyone else is
building). It wasn't a piece of cake.
The result of this effort is what we call Referral Link: http://innotrieve.com/referrallink/
We just released yesterday – but we still have miles to go.
The product is good but it is not everything that it can be. HR is a crowded
market, HR Directors and Managers are smart, savvy buyers, HR has extremely
tight budgets and very demanding ROI requirements, and HR people know when a product
really helps them and when it is just another version of something that already
works well enough.
And boy has this been anything but a piece of cake.
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