Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech the podcast of the HCM technology report. I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today are Carlos Hornstein and Mireia Cuyas. They’re the chief executive and chief growth of officer respectively of Niikiis, an HR platform that aims to help small and medium sized enterprises become more efficient, more accurate, and manage their workforce more effectively. We’re going to talk about the dynamics of their market, the competitive landscape and their vision for the future on this edition of PeopleTech. Carlos, Mireia welcome, thanks for coming in. First can you tell me a little bit about what Niikiis does and am I, am I pronouncing that right?
Carlos:
Yes, you do. And we thought it would be a great opportunity to put a name that actually allows us to be an icebreaker. So everyone that we talk to always ask the same question. So it’s a good way to start having a conversation, but it actually has a meaning is an acronym based on a few words N for [inaudible 00:01:17] the K for knowledge, the S for skills and the Is for individuals as initially we started as a learning and communication platform.
Mark:
And is that what you are now?
Carlos:
We evolved in the last two years into a complete, only one HRIS for small medium enterprises. So we cover everything from onboarding, the recruiting to evaluation and everything else, including learning and communication.
Mark:
Okay. So who’s your market?
Carlos:
So we are focusing on small medium enterprises, in fact, more the M than the S so companies that have between 200 to 500 employees. And initially our focus was Spain, Mexico, and some Northern countries in Europe, but we also have clients in the US, they come to our website have organically.
Mark:
You said you’d started as a learning platform. And now you’ve expanded to do, basically end to end HR. What caused you to do that? Most of the companies I talked to, if they’ve like picked a narrow space, they kind of stick to it. What led you to expand?
Carlos:
That’s a very valid question Mark. And the reality is the learning and communication for small medium enterprises was and still today is a nice to have. That’s not where their main focus or main pain points are. So if we think about our target customer, they operate on Excel sheet. So coming in as a fancy learning communication, mobile first platform was something that they thought it’s nice. Yes, we value communication. We value learning. But in fact, we have other problems. We actually still run everything on Excel, our time tracking, our leave and absence, the evaluation of OKRs. So they thought you better do first the other operating areas and then obviously now we have a differentiator factor because we offer the other pieces, but their main pain point was, Hey, let’s make our operations more efficient. Please come with a single source of information platform that is really focused on employee experience, and that’s a rationale behind it. So it was a market driven as opposed to a product driven launch.
Mark:
But it set you up against some pretty big competitors. Didn’t it? I mean, most of the companies I know of who are taking your approach with your kind of platform it’s SAP, it’s ADP, it’s Oracle, it’s all of those folks is that true? And how are you dealing with that?
Carlos:
Mark the companies that you mentioned, they’re focusing on large enterprises and definitely they have been long in the market. They have gained a lot of traction and reputation and I assume they’re doing a good job as they keep focusing on those large enterprises. Our focus are to smaller companies that are outside their target customer base. And the approach that we took is a little bit different than those companies, because we actually look into the experience of the employee, the end user, as opposed to thinking only to the main customer purchaser, which was HR.
Carlos:
So our platform is not only geared towards the HR admin person but also geared towards the experience that the users have. So we applied everything that we have seen in the customer experience world with chat bots, with automation tools, with good CRM tools applied to the employee, and this approach, the employees king that drives engagement and profitability to a company because they satisfy customers. That’s our differentiator factor and how we do it with our technology. Obviously we have some other things, but the approach was the “aha moment” for us to actually launch Niikiis, because we didn’t want to do the same thing as the others.
Mark:
But you must have competitors out there who are going after the same customers in the same market. Don’t you?
Carlos:
Sure. The SMEs, no matter which economy of the world cover more than 90% of the economy. So there are millions of SMEs. And even with the existing players in the market, that will be impossible to serve all those SMEs. So the pie is really big and we don’t have to fight with those competitors for every single customer. So there are enough customers. However, I always say, I always love competition. And I learn from them as well. I hope that they can learn from us. So that keeps us innovating. And the interesting thing is our technology, the way we have developed it will always have an edge over the others. And that drives our motivation, certainly our CTO, but not who is thinking all the time. What’s new in the market?
Mark:
Let me step back a little bit, not just talking about your company, but the market in general. I mean the last couple of years have been crazy. I think everybody would agree. How does it look from your end? What are you seeing and what have you seen over the last couple of years?
Carlos:
Mireia I’ll let you, yes-
Mireia:
Sure. So it’s very interesting because we see that we are sector agnostic and that we are region agnostic. What do I mean by that? We see that in a small medium company has the same type of pain points that a company in Mexico with maybe more employees, but same type of pain points. And now with COVID obviously all those things that Carlos was saying, they were not a must have three years ago now, after the pandemic and working remotely and burnout and digital detox and all these things, forces companies to think, you know what, I don’t really need to make sure that they’re asking vacation through a platform and not Excel anymore, which makes them already very happy by the way. And you avoid a lot of mistakes, but I also need to connect them. I also need to make sure that we are giving kudos to people and that everyone is participating.
Mireia:
And when we’re talking about onboarding, yes, it’s very important. We automate the process. So it’s standardized and professionalized, but the most important thing about onboarding is making sure that person is welcomed and integrated in the company as fast as possible. How do you do that when everyone’s working remotely? So, I think we are winning because of our philosophy of it’s a layer. It’s a game of efficiency, no doubt. You need to be efficient, you need to save the company to time and money with a layer of refinement. And that layer of refinement comes from different touchpoints innovation like the chat bot obviously helps us a lot, but as well, things like customer intimacy, a lot of our competitors don’t accompany as much the client. And there are ways to scale while accompanying clients and making sure they… The implementation process, et cetera, they’re taken care of.
Mireia:
So we’ve seen a lot of changes, but finally is what we’ve been saying digitalization is a must and stop working with Excel because that… You want future proof your business until you don’t stop doing that.
Mark:
And where do you see it going and say the next three to five years, do you think some of these trends are going to continue or things going to slow down and drop back a little bit?
Mireia:
No, nothing slowing down this is now I think it’s the HR teams now are being more part of the strategy. They’re trying to be more strategic. They’re trying to just not think, “Oh, I need to bring wellness to my people.” But you know what, CEO, if they’re happy, they produce more, the business goes better. So they’re trying to be part more and more of the decisions of a company, which until now they didn’t have the budget to do so, or they were finding that they were more administrative resources because of the Excel and everything being so manual. So I only see it growing and I only see it more connected and more efficient and making sure that your employee is having a great experience. That’s now becoming more and more and more important.
Carlos:
Yeah. Just to add on what Mireia said, the employee is a consumer. So why an employee should have a different experience when interacting with their peers within the company than interacting as a consumer with other brands when they purchase things? And they use the technology that you use for attracting and having that customer experience should actually apply to the company. So our view is email is not one of those communication tools that is going to last forever. So we have seen that the newest generation use the mobile phone and some other quick ways of messaging. And that’s a reason why we put a chat bot. So why Mark, can you imagine that instead of going to your email, you actually take your mobile phone and you speak loud and say, “How many days of vacation do I have left this year?” And then the chapel responds. “You have four days. Do you want to take those four days?” Oh yeah, sure. This is a conversation that is not going to take too long to see happening.
Mark:
Well, thank you both very much. This has been really great to learn about the company and to talk to you.
Carlos:
The same to you, Mark, it’s always a pleasure and thank you for finding the time to actually bring more knowledge and opportunities to the HR function, to become more strategic and more innovative and thinking about the employees.
Mark:
Our guests today have been Carlos Hornstein and Mireia Cuyas, the CEO and chief growth officer for Niikiis. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM technology report. We’re a publication of RecruitingDaily. We’re also a part of evergreen podcasts to see all of their programs visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM technology report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.acmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
Image: niikiis
