Impactful Insights from Today’s Leading HR Software Companies
In late October, JMI Equity hosted approximately 40 human resource leaders from high growth software companies at a full-day HR Roundtable session and evening networking event. This year’s gathering – led by the JMI Operational Excellence Group and executives from the JMI portfolio– focused on organizational effectiveness, including driving organizational alignment and leadership effectiveness, the continuous emergence of artificial intelligence in talent acquisition, and ensuring employee retention through company-wide learning and development strategies.
JMI’s HR Roundtable was the fifth and final event of this year’s JMI Equity Executive Roundtable Program, which is a series of immersive hands-on events that facilitate peer-to-peer sharing of best practices in each of JMI’s current vertical industries of focus. Each roundtable brings together functional executives from across JMI’s portfolio to share their achievements and their challenges with other business-to-business software peers.
Here are the key takeaways from JMI’s most recent HR Roundtable:
Growth software people leaders need to address the challenges of aligning their executive teams while driving organizational focus and clarity for each employee. Communicating clarity of purpose enables the most important asset of any software company, its people, to understand what is expected of them, connect their actions to business outcomes and provide every team member the opportunity perform at their highest levels.
Three of JMI’s portfolio companies shared how they use the methods of Patrick Lencioni, author of The Advantage, to drive alignment and prioritization to achieve business results. Each approached Lencioni’s teachings slightly differently, but all shared similar challenges and rewards of senior management regularly making time to align around corporate objectives and ensure communication of those objectives throughout the company.
While organizational clarity starts at the top, it cannot be achieved organization-wide without developing strong people managers. Kronos, a company that believes “Great People Deserve Great Managers,” shared how it puts this belief into practice. The group learned from Kronos’ continuing nine-year journey of measuring manager effectiveness and how it helped the company accomplish a Top 44 ranking on Glassdoor out of 750,000 companies, including a CEO approval rating of 92%. Event participants were highly engaged in how Kronos evolved its program over the past several years and discussed lessons learned and best practices to improve manager training, expectation setting and manager effectiveness in their own organizations.
Of course, no company can grow rapidly without finding and developing the right people. Talent acquisition in today’s market is an ongoing challenge for every HR executive. In one of the event’s most impactful sessions, participants were presented with the evolving use of artificial intelligence solutions that can improve time to hire and time to productivity. Topics included how to use video interviewing to assess hidden talents such as Emotional Quotient, games that deduce cognitive abilities, and other forward-thinking approaches to talent acquisition. One of JMI’s highest growth companies also shared how it refined its learning and development strategy to retain its high performing/“A” players. Participants learned not only from the positive outcomes that can be accomplished through a well-curated learning and development program, but also from getting a candid, behind the scenes glimpse into the journey a company must undertake to establish a learning culture.
The JMI HR Industry Group will come together again on December 4th for a webinar to discuss Best Practices for Working with Executive Search Firms. For more information, please reach out to Sammi Mosketti at smosketti@jmi.com.
JMI Equity is a growth equity firm focused on investing in leading software companies. Founded in 1992, JMI has invested in over 145 businesses in its target markets, successfully completed over 95 exits and raised more than $4 billion of committed capital. JMI partners with exceptional management teams to help build their companies into industry leaders. For more information visit jmi.com.
