Learning Content Adoption Surged, DEI Now Part of Glassdoor Profiles and More HR Tech News
Cornerstone OnDemand’s emphasis on incorporating content into its products and helping employers better communicate with their workforce seems to be paying off for the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company.
Speaking to analysts during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Phil Saunders said the focus on integrating content into Cornerstone’s products “led to a surge in business” during the period, and validated the company’s strategy. In addition, he said, the quarter saw the strongest content sales in the company’s history, as well as the highest levels of content adoption and usage.
For the full year of 2020, Cornerstone reported revenue rising nearly 29% to $740 million. (Those numbers were weighted by the February 2020 acquisition of Saba Software. Remove that from the equation and revenue would have increased 6.5%.) Subscription revenue was $705 million, a 30% increase compared to 2019 (9.4% without the Saba acquisition.)
Cornerstone’s interest in content goes beyond simply selling information. “It’s about harnessing the power of data to extract insights that drives hyper-personalized development engagement with our customers’ users,” Saunders said.
In early February, Cornerstone became one of the first learning partners in Microsoft’s new Viva platform. Both Cornerstone Learning and Saba Cloud will be integrated into the Viva Learning app, the company said. Over the past year, Cornerstone has seen a notable uptick in users taking online learning and development courses at work, including a 100% increase in mobile learning usage from March to May 2020.
For some time, Cornerstone executives have said that emphasis on content and data would set the company apart from its competitors and ensure continued growth.
Fiverr Moves to Serve Marketing Vertical
Fiverr is developing a new platform to help corporate brands hire and manage agency teams and independent creatives. The company said the site will serve changing needs in the creative industry and signals a move into the marketing business.
Just a week before, New York-based Fiverr acquired the creative talent site Working Not Working, which has a talent base of “tens of thousands” of creative professionals and is used by agencies and brands such as Google, Netflix, Spotify and Droga5. At the time, CEO Micha Kaufman said the acquisition would expand Fiverr’s penetration among creative talent. “This is just the beginning,” he added.
The company also launched Subscriptions, a feature that allows freelancers to establish long-term, ongoing relationships with their customers. In the past, Fiverr had only offered the ability to pay on a per-project basis. The company called the feature “a huge step” in its efforts to expand its offerings appeal to larger businesses, agencies and corporate teams.
The new platform will use Fiverr’s technology to “serve entire industries” in new ways, in part by helping companies to work more quickly and flexibly, Kaufman said. As marketers shift away from retainer arrangements and toward project-based approaches, they need improved access to professionals in order to scale for big project needs, he explained.
“The acquisition of Working Not Working is feeding into this new initiative with its creative base and industry experience, and we expect the new platform to open up more exceptional opportunities for the Working Not Working community,” Kaufman said.
Glassdoor Adds D&I Information to Company Profiles
Glassdoor added features to share more information on employers’ diversity and inclusion efforts. They include employee-provided ratings and salary reports broken out by specific demographic groups.
In a statement, CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong said Glassdoor is “delivering a deeper look inside the modern workplace by unlocking insights into how employees feel about diversity, equity and inclusion and by displaying employees’ differing sentiment and pay.”
The features make it easier for the Mill Valley, Calif., company’s users to examine company ratings information by race and ethnicity, gender identity, parental or caregiver status, disability, sexual orientation and veteran status. Salaries are broken out by gender identity and race/ethnicity.
For example, users can examine and compare how Black employees at a company rate their company’s culture or career opportunities, how LGBTQ+ employees rate senior leadership or the average salary in a particular role for those who identify as female, male or non-binary.
That approach works for both employers and employees: Companies can see employee sentiment levels and salary averages broken out by demographic groups and compare their data against other groups.
Glassdoor said that it’s collected 800,000 “demographic insights” from 187,000 workers since it launched demographic information sharing late last year. Among others, the reports contain information on Walmart, Amazon, Target, Starbucks and AT&T.
The company positions its diversity and demographic features as aiding both employees and employers. For job seekers, they provide a look at how a company’s D&I efforts work from workforce’s point of view. At the same time employers, should be able to gain insight on where its programs succeed or fail.
Learning Opportunities
Meanwhile, Glassdoor published a “preliminary analysis” on how Black employees’ workplace satisfaction differs from that of other workers. The analysis found overall company ratings by Black employees are lower than the overall average, 3.3 compared to 3.5, indicating that Black employees are less satisfied at work when compared to all employees.
The research analyzed 28 employers, each with at least 15 ratings from U.S.-based Black employees. When comparing Black employee ratings to a comparison group of people who self-identified as non-Black, the report found job satisfaction was lower at 11 of the 28 companies.
New Product Launches Target Recruiting, Surveys and Internal Communications
Recruiter.com launched Scouted by Recruiter.com, a candidate curation tool designed to help hiring managers recruit talent more quickly. The product provides hiring managers with automation, video profiles and data with an eye toward helping users more rapidly and accurately tap into rosters of high potential early- and mid-career professionals.
SurveyMonkey expanded its Return-to-Work solutions, which are available through the company’s Enterprise plan. New features include templates such as a Remote Worker Engagement Survey, Return-to-Work Assessment and Onsite Worker Check-in. There’s also an automated email collector.
GuideSpark announced new features to help companies to plan, coordinate and personalize employee communications in a way that improves campaign effectiveness and employee experience. New Communicate Planner and Event-Triggered Campaigns functionalities allow companies to apply marketing automation-like coordination and personalization to internal communications.
Inkling enhanced its mobile app to provide remote employees and field workers with easier access to knowledge and training. The app offers familiar mobile features, voice commands and intelligent search capabilities on iOS and Android devices. The new features provide better control over access to information, improve presentation of content and offer more flexible navigation.
Learning Market: Digital Skills Data Integration, OKR Connections, Bridge Acquisition
Degreed and Pluralsight partnered to offer an integrated experience designed to help joint customers better measure and track technology upskilling efforts within the Degreed platform. With the integration, Pluralsight’s Skill IQs will appear on Degreed Skill cards, helping managers to track skill levels and compare them to existing job descriptions or career opportunities. The integration also includes new features to help leaders track skills and direct users to take new Skill IQs inside Pluralsight Skills.
Betterworks integrated its OKR platform with Udemy for Business. The integration allows employees to search for and launch Udemy courses from within the Betterworks environment, and also to link learning progress and outcomes to their goals.
Instructure has agreed to sell Bridge, its corporate learning management system, to Learning Technologies Group (LTG) for $50 million. The deal is expected to close Feb. 26. London, UK-based LTG, whose product portfolio includes PeopleFluent, LEO Learning and the Instilled learning experience platform, has been growing aggressively, most recently acquiring diversity and inclusion specialist PDT Global and Open LMS from Blackboard
News Briefs
BenefitMall announced an integration with Employee Navigator’s Benefits Administration solution for brokers in the Mid-Atlantic market. The integration will eliminate the need to manually input client data into carrier systems, and synchronizes clients’ employee demographics and enrollment data in real time.
Willis Towers Watson hired the entire team from Jobable, a human capital analytics and software company. WTW said the companies’ combined capabilities will strengthen its ability to aid clients with transformation efforts and leverage their workforce data.
Earned-wage firm Instant Financial joined the UKG Connect Technology Partner Program. The partnership will allow joint customers to offer free earned wage access to employees through UKG Dimensions.
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About the Author
Mark Feffer is executive editor of RecruitingDaily and the HCM Technology Report and an award winning journalist. He has been writing about Human Resources and technology since 2011 for outlets including TechTarget, HR Magazine, SHRM, Dice Insights, TLNT.com and TalentCulture, as well as Dow Jones, Bloomberg and Staffing Industry Analysts. He likes schnauzers, sailing and Kentucky-distilled beverages.
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