The Use Case Podcast – Storytelling about beqom with Tanya Jansen

Music:
Welcome to RecruitingDaily’s Use Case podcast, a show dedicated to the storytelling that happens or should happen when practitioners purchase technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better. As we speak with the brightest minds in recruitment and HR tech, that’s what we do. Here’s your host, William Tincup.

William Tincup:
Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup, and you are listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today, we have Tanya on from beqom, and we’ll be learning about the business case, the use case for why customers and prospects choose beqom. So Tanya, do us a favor and introduce both yourself and beqom.

Tanya Jansen:
Sure. Thanks a lot, William. Hi everyone, Tanya Jansen, the CMO and co-founder of beqom, and what beqom does, it’s a cloud-based solution designed to manage end to end compensation, so all aspects of how you pay your people. And a bit of background, we started this company around 13 years ago, seeing that there was a gap in the market. There were solutions out there for, to manage your HR transformation. But all of them seemed to lack the, I’d say, richness and depth of functionalities needed to properly address such an important topic such as comp, and use it for what it’s meant to be used as, which is a strategic differentiator to attract and retain people, all topics that have gained in abundance of importance, I’d say, over the last couple of years, given the dynamic environment that we’re in.

William Tincup:
I love it. And 11 days ago you announced some rather compelling news. Tell us a little bit about that.

Tanya Jansen:
Yes, we did. It was one of the biggest investments we’ve taken since our history, partnering with a company called Sumeru. And again, I think it comes down to what’s happening in the market. It’s really now, now is really the right time to be looking at HR transformations that will, in fact, or HR technology that will in fact transform the lives and the experience of not just HR, but every employee of an organization. So that was a big driver with the partnership that we announced with Sumeru, and how we want to use that partnership in order to attack the market more.

William Tincup:
Awesome.

Tanya Jansen:
More than we’ve been over the last couple years.

William Tincup:
Well, congratulations. Fundraising is never, ever easy, and it’s just, it’s really great news. Tanya, I hate software categories, look, despise them. However, HR budgets, recruiting budgets, they’re built in Excel, generally speaking. And there’s a line, there’s a row, there’s a column. Where do people tend to think of beqom?

Tanya Jansen:
That’s the first time I think I’ve ever got asked that question. It definitely falls under the comp and ben category, under HR. There’s also a piece of it that sits within sales, head of sales, if we’re looking at sales incentive, sales commission, and then there’s other buying centers as well, either from finance or risk and compliance, if you’re looking at the compliance aspect of, internally and externally how you pay your people. So there’s different … I think you could attribute one general line item, but with different stakeholders and buyers that might be involved, but typically it’s an HR software or it’s a sales software, or both, in our case.

William Tincup:
And comp, sometimes comp and benefits here in the States, it gets thrown together. Comp benefits. It gets this umbrella of total rewards. It gets lumped in with a bunch of things. But comp, everyone cares, especially today. Hopefully, everyone cares about comp.

Tanya Jansen:
Well, if they didn’t, they do now.

William Tincup:
True. I remember starting in HR 100 years ago and the person that was training me said, “Listen, you can mess up everything in HR. You can literally make mistakes in everything in HR, performance, that’s 360 degree feedback, whatever. You can’t mess up paychecks. You just can’t. This is the one thing you cannot mess up.” And true then, true now. But what’s interesting about compensation now is it’s so much more transparent. There’s so much more data internally, externally, and also some of the societal things here we’ve seen in the US, with me too, love is love, black lives matter, all these things, and really starting off with pay equity. People actually caring deeply about making sure that we … I think the last stat I read was 71 cents on the dollar here in the United States, male to female. I hope it’s better than that now, but what are your customers … what are they, when they’re coming to you, what are they trying to reinvent in themselves?

Tanya Jansen:
Well, you brought up the word transparency, and that’s probably one of my favorite words, because even as economics and situations and geographies change over time, companies are still struggling with exactly this concept of transparency. And you said that you cannot mess up how you pay your people. If you want to immediately have an impact on how they feel about the company, on performance, it’s not paying them what they’re expected to do, and what they’re expecting to get. And it’s so hard to get back to that. So, and it all comes down with transparency, and it’s still, it’s something that companies are fundamentally struggling with. You brought up the fact that some … there’s budgets, there’s line items in Excel, so they have all these systems in place. And yet still, they’re still looking to Excel to fill the gap between any of those systems.

Tanya Jansen:
And the end result of that, there’s no way to understand top to bottom, how you’re really paying, if everything is so segregated. And so pay equity is a big piece of that. It’s how do you really use all of that data to tell the correct story, and what are all those underlying factors that are impacting the data? And that’s where companies really struggle with, is they can’t fully … it’s not just about, how do I pay my women versus how do I pay my males? It’s, there are all these other aspects that you need to include with how you’re comparing it in order to come up with the true wage gap, and understand the underlying causes, and therefore understand how to fix it. So I think all of that can be bucketed into transparency as one of the biggest problems HR leaders and organizations as a whole need to solve.

William Tincup:
It’s interesting. Because you mentioned transformation probably three or four times, and one of the things I’m seeing transform just right in front of my eyes is recruiting and comp getting closer together, almost being forced in this way, I would say, because Indeed and some of the larger job boards are starting to make it mandatory that you put in a pay range or specific pay. And if not, they’ll recommend a pay range or a pay. So it’s really interesting the way that Indeed has changed their model, that’s now forcing two disparate silos that have historically never talked, or rarely talked, I should say. And they’re forcing them together, because recruiters, to recruit, you got to actually know what that range. It can’t just be a budget from a hiring manager anymore, it’s got to actually be something that comes out of comp.

Tanya Jansen:
Exactly. And this is something that, if you want to eliminate pay gaps in your organization, you need to have a policy that defines pay linked to a certain job range and a certain job grade. It’s just a process-driven approach to how you manage it. You have a new role, a new head count that comes up, that comes out. You have priced that job according to the person that you’re looking for. Whereas what we tend to do, even as hiring managers, we tend to try to find the best candidate, and then give them a bit more than what they made at their current job or previous job, so that they’re much more enticed to join. And as a result of that, you’re creating these huge pay gaps that are just adding to disparities in how you pay. And so knowing that upfront and communicating that upfront, you’re much less impacted or able to kind of stray away from that, once it’s been clearly defined. So I think it’s a great movement.

William Tincup:
Yeah. Again, this is a journey, right? And every one of your customers is on their own journey. Y’all are on a journey. Everyone’s on a different journey. I wanted to ask you about analytics as it relates to transparency, especially when you start with somebody. No names, not that you would, but no company names or brand names, but just when … because I’ve often thought, I mean, I’ll just be honest, when me too first started, I was shocked that people were shocked. So, because I just assumed that people knew that these things happened in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. I was shocked-

Tanya Jansen:
Yeah. Everywhere.

William Tincup:
… that what do you … well, why is everybody shocked? Are you kidding me? Men acting like pigs. Who’s shocked by this? I’m around a bunch of men. I mean, come on now. Who’s shocked? Now I only say that to say, thinking about pay gaps and pay equity in particular, there’s probably two lines of thought. Either the executives and the board really know, they actually know that this is going on, they know, or they don’t know, and there’s probably a spectrum. Right? So those are the extremes. What are you seeing when someone first becomes a part of your family and takes y’all on, what’s … their eyes get opened. Transparency is … if they didn’t want it, now they got it. So there it is.

Tanya Jansen:
I’m glad you asked that. I’ve had, sometimes during the sales process, I’ve had sales guys come to me and say, “Stop using transparency as a differentiator. This company does not want transparency.”

William Tincup:
Yeah. Yeah.

Tanya Jansen:
And that was a while ago. It’s drastically changed, but yeah, you have the companies that are really leading the way, that have taken it upon themselves to communicate externally, not being forced by regulation or anything like that, in terms of pay fairness and older DEI initiatives. And so you have companies that have been forward-thinking about this. And yes, in the other case, and I see both, you have other ones where, I ask the question, “Is pay equity an issue? Do you want to talk about that? How are you analyzing your data?” And the response is, “We know it’s a problem and we don’t even want to go there.” So of course the … you have both sides of the spectrum, but I think those companies that said the latter, that’s just not acceptable in today’s society anymore. And all employees, they’re holding their employer accountable for having a good faith and actions behind ESG initiatives and DEI initiatives, real ones. So not just stuff anymore. So I think that those examples are going to change because society, whether they want to or not, society is going to force them. And if they want to attract a new generation of workforce, they’re going to have to adapt.

William Tincup:
Yeah. I concur. And what I see is it’s not even a new generation. I think it’s actually … what’s really, really been compelling about millennials and gen Z is they’ve transformed the questions they get asked in the job hiring process. And they’re asking societal questions, they’re asking pay equity questions, and it’s bled over. I mean, I have a friend of mine’s, 62 years old, and he is interviewing for a job at Deloitte. And literally the question … I asked him what questions he was asking, and it was straight out of questions that we’re talking about right now. It was fascinating. So those companies that are trying to run from transparency are just dinosaurs. They either transform or die.

Tanya Jansen:
Exactly. And the last two years, and the fact that it’s more difficult than ever to hire workers and find new employees. People just said, “I’ve had enough. I have values-”

William Tincup:
Thank God.

Tanya Jansen:
“… I care about these things.” And yeah.

William Tincup:
We’re only 150 years late.

Tanya Jansen:
My employer should too. Oh yeah. I believe we got to evolve somehow. So.

William Tincup:
Turns out we’re not as fast as we thought we were. We’re just, we’re really slow.

Tanya Jansen:
Well, and like you it’s … for me, it’s just shocking that we even, speaking of evolution and how quickly we evolve and progress, look at technology and how that has changed so rapidly and shaped our lives. And we’re still having this issue about, can we please pay people fairly, regardless of their background?

William Tincup:
It’s insane.

Tanya Jansen:
Yeah.

William Tincup:
It’s insane. We can create a driverless car. I was in Vegas before the pandemic, and Lyft asked me if I wanted to have a driverless car. I’m like, “Yeah, sure. I don’t care.” So I’m in Vegas, what could possibly go wrong? So, I had a driverless car the entire time I was in Vegas. There was nothing in the front, there was nothing. I was in the backseat of a BMW. And there was nothing in the front. And it was like, “Hello, William.” And it had a Spotify playlist on, and I’m like, “We can create this.”

Tanya Jansen:
And that’s going to be the norm, by the way-

William Tincup:
Oh yeah.

Tanya Jansen:
… 10 years from now.

William Tincup:
We can create this.

Tanya Jansen:
What do we do with the equity?

William Tincup:
And we somehow can’t pay … and we’ll just make it simple, women and men, but it goes much deeper, much, much deeper than just that. What are the metrics that folks ask you about, that they should be paying attention to?

Tanya Jansen:
It’s a pretty broad range, and it depends on the type of user. So, if I’m talking to a CHRO or head of comp and ben, it’s about how do I get the full picture of how I’m paying, and how is that broken down across different geographies, across different aspects, like performance, like tenure, how am I … executive comp is of course a big piece of it, and retention around there. So how competitive are my pay packages against certain peer groups? Where do I have issues? It’s so expensive to hire new people and replace people. Where do I potentially have issues in retention because of pay gaps, and how do I mitigate that? So, there’s one thing, how do I follow my process and make sure I’m doing it the right way, but then how do I use all of this information to preempt and make better decisions that’s going to help my employees, and help my organization in the future?

William Tincup:
I love that. I love that, because it alerts them. This is where the beauty of technology. It can connect dots that you can’t connect as a human being. So when it alerts, you’re like, “That’s out of the pay range. That creates a pay inequity. That creates compression issues down the road.” I love that. I love that. As you’re a marketer, and I’m a recovering marketer, I wanted to ask you kind of your favorite story, or customer story, without names, of course, just things where you’ve seen people use beqom, and you’re like, “That’s why we created a company. That’s awesome.”

Tanya Jansen:
I think, if I take a look at one of our clients, they … it was a big global chemical company. And they were having a hard time keeping their executives. So they were having high turnover, and they realized that they had put in place this long-term incentive scheme that nobody understood, because LTI plans can be a bit complicated in terms of how things are vested and when, and what the value is. And so they were having huge retention issues. And it wasn’t until they realized that they had no way of transparently communicating these type of rewards to their critical employees. So fundamentally, they felt that they were being underpaid, and they were leaving and going to other places. So I think what continues to shock me over and over again is the impact when an employee doesn’t understand why they’re paid and what they’re paid, the impact that it has, it’s just huge.

Tanya Jansen:
And if there’s any perception of, this isn’t fair compared to my colleague, regardless of if it’s correct or not, they will leave the company. And for me, that’s huge. And I don’t think companies spend enough time teaching their employees about comp, and how to understand it and really speak about it. Everyone was always historically so afraid to be open about what you pay across all levels of the organization. But, by not talking about it, you’re just creating these perceptions that are wrong, and people feel bad about it, and it really impacts the company. So I think that, yeah, continues to be surprising.

William Tincup:
Yeah. And what’s interesting is some of the things that we see here in the States is total compensation. It’s creating kind of a report for the employees, and just walking them line by line, like, “Okay, here’s your benefits. Here’s what … here are all the bonuses, here’s all of your total comp.” It isn’t just salary, which is what we’ve been trained historically to look at. It’s just, okay, what’s my base salary, which is great, but that’s not your total compensation. That’s not the whole story.

Tanya Jansen:
And I have a good story there. So we had a … we were working with someone from a large tech company, and he came to me and said, “I really want to come work for you guys.” And I said, “There’s no way.” We were, at the time, smaller kind of startup, scale up, we said, “We’re not going to pay you the same type of salary that you get.” And he said, “Yeah, but it’s really not that much. So I’m pretty sure you guys can match it.” So he went away for … and it took two weeks. And two weeks later, he came back and he was like, “Wow, I had no idea what they were paying for me. I think I’m going to stay.” So it wasn’t … it was the act of leaving that led them to go and investigate. And this was at one of the … this was a very reputable technology company, and they still could not provide that concept of the total reward statement to their employees.

William Tincup:
You’d think it, again, you’d think we’d be more advanced than we are right now. And again … for the audience, it’s this theme of transparency and transformation, and again, we have … these are choices that we make in HR and recruiting, that we can either be transparent or not. So one of the things I wanted to ask you was kind of your favorite buying questions, and is … I know that you get asked from sales folks, but you’ve also been on probably a fair share of demos yourself. What do you love? You just automatically know that they get it, you’re just like, “Okay, this, yes, it’ll close,” and all that other stuff, but they get it. They actually really, really want what we’re doing. And the opposite is also something I want to find out. When do you know, “Yeah, this is going to be pushing a boulder up a hill”?

Tanya Jansen:
The painful emotion of software sales.

William Tincup:
Yes.

Tanya Jansen:
It’s … I’m going to be a bit vague, and not by meaning, but it’s like when you know, you know, and it’s really like a … it’s a partnership. You feel that it’s … you feel that you have sponsorship, you feel that the people in the room are open to choosing the best and the right technology to solve their problem, which is not often the case. We’re going head to head against big HR suites, like SuccessFactors and Workday and Oracle. You have a head of IT in the room who only wants to have one … Oracle first, or SAP first. And it’s really painful, because it’s that uphill battle of, you have the business users you have to convince, but then you have people who are pushing against it for whatever reason, where they don’t want to make it work.

Tanya Jansen:
So that’s a bit where you feel like you have a challenge, but when you really feel that you’re in a partnership with the right people who want the right technology, and you don’t necessarily have to teach them the business case, they know it, that certainly makes the job much, much easier, and much more enjoyable, versus when you feel that pushback and you feel the rigidity. It’s like … it’s a two way street. We want to make you successful, but it has to work hand in hand. So we always looked at our customers like this, as who do we … we also need to feel that there’s a right fit. And in some cases it just wasn’t. And you walk away and you move on.

William Tincup:
Last question on the partnership. Is that more in the people that are running total compensation? Or is that in HR, or again, in sales and finance? Where do you find most of your greatest partnerships?

Tanya Jansen:
I think it’s going to be … it depends on the scope of the project, but for sure it’s going to be the head of comp and ben, the CHRO, the CPO, and Chief People Officer, in some cases, but it’s … you need buy-in for such an enterprise solution. You need buy-in across the board. And when they really understand what they can gain by having such a tool in place, it’s … the relationship already starts pretty positively.

William Tincup:
Well, this is a board … today, at least, it’s become a board level discussion around compensation, which is not just their compensation. Sorry, but everyone’s compensation.

Tanya Jansen:
Another discussion.

William Tincup:
Yeah. That is, that’s another podcast right there. But literally it’s what I find fascinating is board calls now have a line item around compensation, which, two, three years ago, we didn’t see that. And so I like that, because again, I think if they’re talking about it, it gets pushed down and it becomes prioritized, which helps everybody. So-

Tanya Jansen:
Exactly. And I feel like this, especially, these issues that came up out of nowhere, like, all of a sudden we have people resigning that we didn’t expect. And in order to hire people, we have to pay 20, 30% more. We have to deal with inflation. So all of a sudden all these things were happening. And I think it, by default, kind of pushed up the level of comp and ben and CHRO in this discussion, at the table, at the board, because people really understand that these are critical issues that they need to fix, that have an impact on every objective that the company is trying to achieve.

William Tincup:
That’s right. Can’t get to those initiatives, if you don’t have the people, if you don’t do comp the way it’s supposed to be done-

Tanya Jansen:
Yeah, exactly. You won’t have the people.

William Tincup:
Some of this is simple to kind of put the math to. Tanya, thank you so much for your time. I know you’re crazy busy, but especially given the news-

Tanya Jansen:
Last couple days.

William Tincup:
… sorry, sorry.

Tanya Jansen:
No, happy to talk to you.

William Tincup:
But you’re doing wonderful work, and I just appreciate your time.

Tanya Jansen:
All right. Well, thanks a lot, William. I appreciate your time as well, and looking forward to hear the release.

William Tincup:
Awesome. And thanks for everyone listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast in-