Transcript
Mark:
… welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report, I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today is Ryan Niemann, the CEO of Skuid. They provide low-code develop tools, with particular attention paid to HR apps. We’re going to explore what low-code is, and what it means, the ebbs and flows of the market, and HR software needs on this edition of People Tech. Hi, Ryan, thanks for coming by. Could you tell me about Skuid? I mean, what do you do, and how do you do it?
Ryan:
That’s a great question. Thanks Mark for having me on today. Skuid is a low-code application platform, and we’re about nine years old, going into our 10th year of operation. And we help operational leaders create business applications that are human-centric in design. We’re one of the first companies to ever focus on human-centered design experience, and we do it in the low-code fashion. So we talk to different companies that are looking to have solutions for revenue operations, customer operations, and people operations, and modernizing their backend enterprise systems.
Mark:
Now, you’ve got a couple of people solutions, can you tell me about them?
Ryan:
So earlier this year we acquired a company, InFlight, and they’re focused, and now we’re focused in the people operation space. And a lot of that has to do with improving the overall employee experience, and specific solutions around the improving the candidate experience. We do that with a number of different backend platforms in the HRS space, like Oracle PeopleSoft, and Taleo, or Workday, and BrassRing, or other partners like Symphony Talent.
Ryan:
And many of our customers are looking for ways to improve the employee experience working with these systems. They typically haven’t been updated for a number of years, they could be quite nuanced, or just old. And if you think of the overall employee experience from application, through managing your career, and performance, and things in between, there’s a lot of room for improvement on some of these backend systems. And a lot of our companies are looking for ways to recruit more effectively, in light of being post-pandemic, and the Great Resignation, and coming up with new ways to re-imagine the employee experience, and work the way that they need and want to work, and which, in many cases could be mobile responsive, or texting for instance, and how do you incorporate those into your overall employee experience from an attraction, and retention, and growth perspective.
Mark:
Can we drill down a little bit, and talk about how InFlight fits with Skuid, I mean, why did you find them attractive enough to acquire?
Ryan:
InFlight is a fantastic platform that is also low-code, and specifically tailored in that people operation space. We now have technology, specifically around integrations with Oracle PeopleSoft, and the others that I mentioned. We have applicant tracking system that’s optimized for many of those platforms, and we have the subject matter expertise that came on board with their pre-sales, engineering, and professional services team, and our executive team. All of that really took from what Skuid already had, people operation solutions, success stories with a number of large companies, both private and federal customers, and bringing in InFlight took that from one more solution offering that we had, to a whole arsenal of solutions and capabilities in that employee experience and candidate experience space. So it really made a lot of sense, both from a technical perspective, as well as helping us expand our overall go-to-market.
Mark:
And how about the merger? I mean, the melding of the two workforces and the operations and such, how’s that going?
Ryan:
Well, every time we looked at a company, one of the first things we look at is, does it make sense from an overall product and market fit perspective? Also, where’s the workforce, and the size of the company and team? And then culture, the culture at InFlight and now our new Skuid team members, just really made it a great acquisition, and continues to be a great fit for us. Skuid has always been very focused on developing a very rich culture, and InFlight has been a really great acquisition from that perspective.
Mark:
I’d like pull back a little bit, because I’d like to ask you some questions about the business. One of the things that strikes me is, late last year, I was hearing a lot of talk about low-code development, especially low-code in HR. I’m not hearing about it quite so much anymore, so I’m wondering what’s going on out there, I mean, is it just settled down, and people are just working with it more than talking about it? Or are things growing the way they were? What’s up?
Ryan:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And as I look at the market, what we’re seeing, of course, is its significant growth with the customers we’re working with. But then also, we’re seeing that the overall market is growing fairly rapidly. As we look at, either the human capital management space, or CRM, or people operations and customer platforms, all of those are growing fairly rapidly, kind of in the total adjustable market, about 12% a year or so. But low-code application platforms are typically in that 20 to 21% growth year over year, so we’re seeing it continue to grow. We’re also seeing a number of platforms start to have some form of low-code offering. So even in the HR space, you can get started with some basic low-code capabilities.
Ryan:
And what we find is, that our customers will start down that path, begin to build some things in a low-code fashion, which is a great alternative to custom-code development, which is typically fairly costly, fairly resource intensive, and in many cases, it takes a lot longer from the time from ideation to actually getting the application built, and we shortened those cycles. But given our human-center design experience focus, we can really get pixel perfect, and on brand, which is absolutely critical as you’re starting to, not only build your brand as a company with customers, but then also, how are you building your brand from a career perspective, and attracting the right talent, and then making sure that the experience that that candidate and that employee receives, it really goes throughout their career? And in many cases, it’s really providing employee portals, or different business applications that are actually easy to use, and allow you to do your job effectively. And that’s the power of bringing Skuid into the environment when you’re looking at building business applications in a low-code approach.
Mark:
So how do you see low-code working in the HR function? Is this going to change the way HR gets their tools built, or HR people going to start to understand how to code using applications like yours?
Ryan:
I do. I think what we’re seeing is, a lot of times, the HR department receive the highest percentage of IT budget, if you will. And now more than ever, there’s a need to provide that differentiated experience, and really market to and recruit a top talent, and thinking through, or re-imagining that candidate experience, and re-imagining the employee experience. And in many cases, that can mean making sure that applications are mobile responsive, or that there’s a seamless experience across multiple backend technologies that normally, let’s say, don’t talk to each other.
Ryan:
We see our customers really getting aggressive and differentiated in the candidate experience, to be able to more effectively recruit. But then there’s a matter of making sure that, cross department, and cross systems there’s good coordination, and flexibility in being able to schedule effectively. And a lot of that means that you need a tool that can bring these together, and allow people to imagine, how would we do this, and provide that experience that gets us the business results that we’re looking for? Many of our companies will see that they’ve got candidate drop-off, that once they get to a landing spot, and encounter some challenges in submitting an application, but making that a frictionless experience, making it an elegant experience, in some cases makes the difference of being able to staff a large number of open roles that many enterprise customers we work with have.
Mark:
Are low-code tools going to significantly change the way HR gets its applications built? And what does that mean for the relationship with IT?
Ryan:
Yes, it will. There’s a number of different sources that about the amount of business applications that will be built over, let’s say, the next five years, are more business applications than the previous decades, in combination. So more and more demand for business applications, and fewer and fewer professional coding roles being filled. There are some estimates from Bureau of Labor Statistics that says in the next years there’s going to be 1.2 million unfulfilled professional code and developer roles.
Ryan:
So the need to develop business applications continues to grow, and there’s continued shortage of individuals to be able to deliver on those business applications. Fundamentally, HR will continue to have a need to create business applications, be able to pull these systems together, which, many customers have very significant investments in these platforms. But the need and the experience that they want to deliver employees continues to evolve and change, and there’s an expectation from a number of different generations, let’s say, coming into the workforce that have different expectations. And if you want to meet those expectations, meet your business objectives, you’re going to need to get much more agile, and the ability to do it with an application that allows you to develop business applications without long development cycles, or offshore development, or a high costly budget, really differentiates you in the marketplace as a HR team, let’s say.
Mark:
Last question is focusing back on Skuid for a minute, what’s in the future? Are you thinking about more acquisitions, building out the business that way? Or are you going to be more sort of self-absorbed, and sticking to your own knitting?
Ryan:
Well, we’ve got an exciting immediate future. Bringing InFlight has really bolstered our people operations solutions. We continue to march down the product roadmap. Just this last week, we had our Dubai release hit the market, which really gives our customers the power of choice. So you can start building applications with Skuid, install provision, a backend database, and start building business applications. And then you also have the ability to leverage the Skuid, what we call EXP, or employee experience platform as we acquired InFlight. And then lastly, we have the ability to deploy on Skuid SFX, which is the Salesforce experience. So we’re really giving our customers the ability to hit the ground running, and start building right away. We’re going to continue to iterate on those products, and develop, and innovate. And we’re also looking at different potential candidates out there for acquisition, that help us bolster that roadmap, help us accelerate it, also that makes sense in bringing in additional developer talent to help us scale and grow. So we’ve got a lot of exciting announcements to come, I’m sure.
Mark:
Well, Ryan, thanks for taking the time to talk to me.
Ryan:
Mark, it’s always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Mark:
My guest today has been Ryan Niemann, the CEO of Skuid, 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, www.hcmtechnologyreport.com, I’m Mark Feffer.
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