Activate by Perceptyx is an AI-powered solution transforming how organizations act on employee feedback generated through employee listening. Activate delivers precise interventions to drive business and talent outcomes by reducing the complexity of action planning for managers and involving all employees in the change process. Managers can quickly identify critical insights and efficiently develop action plans, while employees are involved in the process to create measurable, sustainable change. Backed by a team of I/O psychologists and behavioral science experts, Activate nurtures positive behavior change at scale.

Why We Liked It: Most organizations have a process or even some technology solutions to listen to employees and collect feedback, but they often struggle to analyze feedback data and quickly and easily convert it into insights that deliver impact. Perceptyx Activate helps close this gap by analyzing employee feedback, proactively identifying the top areas managers should focus on and suggesting an action plan to address those items. Additionally, Activate delivers behavioral science-backed nudges to managers and employees, giving them the boost they need to take those actions and develop better habits over time, making them more responsive to employee feedback.

Embedded Workforce Insights from Beamery is the first solution to combine and surface data from an organization’s job architecture and current hiring needs and map them against the external supply and demand of talent. With this tool, talent professionals can see more precise cost and time-to-fill insights while calibrating a vacancy and can communicate the impact of talent decisions on the business. Leaders can also future-proof their skills-based workforce strategies by using Beamery’s explainable AI to create more tailored definitions of their roles and skills and close the feedback loop based on real-time feedback from the job market.

Why We Liked It: Beamery has, with Embedded Workforce Insights, added several new and important tools for organizations to optimize their talent acquisition and management processes. Customers now have more and better information on labor market intelligence, how candidates align with role requirements, and how the parameters and requirements of a role impact cost and time-to-fill metrics. Plus, users can better understand the skills information needed to align talent with opportunities. Skill data source, criticality, prevalence and proficiency levels are visible to recruiters and talent managers, providing deep insights to inform decision-making.

Betterworks Talent Profiles aim to revolutionize employee skills tracking and development. By leveraging AI, Talent Profiles extract skills data from performance reviews, peer feedback, goals, and HRIS or talent marketplaces to create a dynamic skills inventory. Managers can review skills and set competency levels to ensure accurate skills assessments and gain transparent insights into team capabilities. Identified skill gaps can be used to inform employee development plans. Finally, HR gains a comprehensive view of organizational talent. Talent Profiles provide transparent, data-backed insights, enhancing strategic workforce planning and addressing the limitations of traditional skills profiles.

Why We Liked It: Many HR technology solutions have evolved to help customers support skills-based approaches to talent management processes and decision-making. However, they’re often complex to implement and require significant resources to exploit. We liked Betterworks’ solution due to its clear approach, intuitive design and intelligent method of drawing on continuous employee performance data to help identify new employee skills in real time. By combining AI components with performance data analysis, the solution can recommend skills enhancements and help organizations ensure a data-informed, evolving skills profile for each employee.

Claro’s Labor Market Reports offer comprehensive insights into workforce trends, enabling businesses to make data-driven talent decisions. With real-time analytics, the reports provide detailed views of hiring trends, salary benchmarks, talent mobility competitor intelligence, DEI insights and much more. The Labor Market Reports tool utilizes AI to provide contextual understanding, transforming raw data into actionable intelligence. This innovative approach drastically reduces the time spent on report curation from weeks to mere minutes. It can help HR professionals, recruiters and business leaders stay ahead in the ever-evolving job market.

Why We Liked It: Organizations and their talent challenges don’t exist in a vacuum—they are heavily influenced by external and environmental factors in the labor markets in which they choose to operate. Having a deep understanding of labor and talent conditions and contexts is critical to making the best-informed talent decisions. Claro’s comprehensive and innovative approach to generating labor market reports with insights provides HR and business leaders with rich and valuable information. This can better equip their efforts to pursue the best talent in a competitive overall labor market.

The future of employee listening is AI, and CultureX Voice leads the way. AI is a vastly superior way of listening to employees than 1-to-5-point scale surveys, an approach developed nearly a century ago. By analyzing employees’ natural language—their voice—with AI developed by thought leaders from the world’s leading universities, Voice gives leaders the actionable, credible insights they need to build cultures that win in the market and satisfy employees. Voice shows leaders how to create cultures that execute their strategy (e.g., foster innovation and agility) and how to build the strongest employee experience at a low cost.

Why We Liked It: Voice leverages advanced technology to help business leaders understand employee thoughts and feelings, providing clarity on issues and friction within the workforce. Powered by artificial intelligence developed at MIT, this unique functionality enables HR teams to use authentic employee feedback—communicated in their voices rather than the decades-old point scales—to take actionable steps to improve culture. We think HR tech buyers will appreciate its external benchmarking capabilities, population segmentation, integration with existing survey providers and ability to analyze open-ended text responses.

As a core feature of Dayforce Talent, Dayforce Career Explorer is an AI-integrated career pathing tool that reimagines how organizations offer career pathing by focusing on skills. Powered by the Dayforce Skills Engine, Career Explorer extracts skills information from each employee’s profile and recommends opportunities based on the person’s work history and skills match. Each employee receives personalized job recommendations, AI-integrated career coaching and actionable plans to close skills gaps and move up the career path. Additionally, it provides leaders with the insights they need to attract, engage, retain and inspire a future-ready workforce.

Why We Liked It: This career pathing tool provides unique visibility for both business leaders and employees, making it universally appealing across organizations. HR leaders will appreciate that Career Explorer encourages employees to seek internal opportunities for advancement, reducing the likelihood of leaving the company. The tool leverages AI to create learning plans and assessments rather than depending on employee preferences or manager/HR direction. Through machine learning, it gradually understands the work environment and employee background to intelligently build a career path history. Additionally, the reporting feature ‘prices’ the value of specific skills, helping recruiters prioritize their focus, which underscores the organizational value of Career Explorer.

Compliance Library helps employers electronically navigate the myriad of employment forms required for workforce compliance across the U.S. The solution is an online, diverse compilation of ever-changing forms covering onboarding to employment to offboarding. Launched to help employers deliver the right forms to the right employee at the right time, Compliance Library addresses the numerous essential tasks that can overwhelm HR teams. Requisite forms stem from federal, state and local jurisdictions and cover issues such as digital labor law, family rights, gender equity, medical and family leave, paid sick leave, pregnancy accommodation, wage and hour, and state separation.

Why We Liked It: Experian’s Compliance Library is refreshingly uncomplicated for HR leaders. While the employer interface doesn’t appear to rely on advanced technology, the real power is in the back end. Experian’s tech and teams ensure that complex compliance documents are flawlessly updated, relieving employers and HR teams from the pressure of sifting through forms. As workforces become increasingly remote, with employees in a variety of jurisdictions, keeping up with compliance is becoming more burdensome. We believe HR teams will appreciate that this tool handles the heavy lifting.

Find My Fit helps candidates identify roles that best match their potential by quickly assessing their skills, interests and personality. Candidates complete a brief assessment covering these areas, and the results are compared to your organization’s open opportunities. This comparison recommends roles that align with the candidate’s profile. By matching candidates based on their skills and interests, Find My Fit not only drives candidates to better-suited roles but also helps expand the diversity of your talent pool.

Why We Liked It: Many employers are looking for ways to help candidates match with roles that fit their potential without an over-reliance on experience. We liked that Find My Fit does more than pair up resumes and roles but instead accounts for personal capabilities so that opportunities aren’t missed. HR tech buyers will appreciate that this tool is easy to integrate with a single link and doesn’t have to be tied to the ATS. It also feels valuable to candidates because it gives them a profile and redirects them to additional recommended jobs.

Paychex Flex® Perks is a digital marketplace of employee benefits curated to address the needs of today’s diverse, five-generational workforce. Integrated directly into Paychex Flex, the company’s cloud-based SaaS solution, Paychex Flex Perks is tailored to the employee user experience, making it easy and intuitive to enroll in benefits, including access to earned wages, financial wellness solutions and voluntary lifestyle benefits. Employees can self-select additional benefits based on their personal needs while freeing up time for business owners and HR leaders to focus on more strategic initiatives that come with running a business.

Why We Liked It: When we heard that 65% of Gen Z workers believe their employer is responsible for their financial wellbeing, we realized that demand for a tool like Flex Perks will only grow. This benefits marketplace is comprehensive and appealing, with no administrative heartache for benefits teams. With an evergreen opt-in, no remittance responsibility for HR and zero cost to the employer, this solution feels like an accessible, tech-backed boost to the benefits package for businesses of any size.

For 25 years, Paycom has simplified businesses and the lives of their employees with easy-to-use HR and payroll technology to empower transparency through direct access to their data. With its industry-first solution, Beti®, employees now do their own payroll and are guided to find and fix costly errors before payroll submission. From onboarding and benefits enrollment to talent management and more, Paycom’s software streamlines processes, drives efficiencies and gives employees power over their own HR information, all in a single app.

Why We Liked It: The weakest link in any system is often a manual process, and many HR teams still handle time-off requests manually. We were impressed by Time-Off Requests, featuring GONE, which uses automated decision-making to balance employee requests, company policies, scheduling conditions and other customizable rules. We also appreciated that HR teams can use analytics to proactively manage their PTO liability, helping to prevent workforce gaps. Although this functionality is not available as a stand-alone product and is exclusive to Paycom clients, we recognize that this limitation ensures employers benefit from a true single database, eliminating the need to integrate disparate systems.

The Phenom Automation Engine transforms talent acquisition and management by integrating advanced automation into every stage of the talent lifecycle. It empowers HR teams to design, implement and monitor workflows, ensuring constant performance optimization. By automating tedious tasks, such as candidate sourcing, screening and scheduling, the engine accelerates hiring and enhances candidate experiences. Its process-mining capabilities uncover new optimization opportunities, leading to improved conversion rates and higher volumes of quality hires. This innovation provides personalized and efficient hiring, growth and retention processes, helping organizations engage employees with relevant recommendations that support career development and upskilling.

Why We Liked It: We’ve heard stories about a single job opening getting tens of thousands of applicants in less than a day, so Automation Engine seems to have launched at the right time. HR tech buyers will appreciate that this tool gets hot leads in front of recruiters while candidates maintain visibility through the application process. Recruiting teams also can see insights and analytics right in the workflow, so they don’t get delayed by a missed detail. Automation Engine also provides real-time insights and customizable campaigns while keeping candidates in the pipeline by suggesting suitable positions, even at other locations that might still be considered reasonable to the job seeker.

Salt is an employee rewards and incentive platform that acts like a savings account for everyday Americans. Like earning airline rewards points, employees accumulate Salt for their most innate resource: their time at work. By leveraging behavioral economics, Salt drives powerful motivation change through bottoms-up engagement. This innovative approach fosters a strong ownership mindset, with users saving 59% of their Salt earnings. Consequently, 91% report feeling more financially secure, resulting in improved employee engagement and retention.

Why We Liked It: The frontline employee population has historically been left out of technology delivered via a computer or backed by a 9-to-5 workflow pattern. Salt offers a tech-powered benefit that hits this sweet spot. Launched to incentivize school bus drivers to return to work after the summer break, we could see evidence that this savings tool can change behavior. Plus, it helps employees save money without burdening HR, benefits or payroll teams. We think HR buyers will appreciate that this tool can be co-branded with the employer to incentivize employee behavior and build engagement. We are always on the lookout for HR tech products that prove meaningful to employees and valuable to business leaders, and Salt fits the bill.

Vee, Visier’s generative AI digital assistant, instantly answers workforce-specific questions for HR leaders, line managers and CHROs—securely and accurately—helping to democratize people insights to all levels of an organization. Built specifically for HR and people analytics, Vee is anchored in a domain-specific data model, a community dataset built on 25 million anonymized employee records, more than 2,000 business metrics and 250 million benchmarks. Vee’s powerful yet simple conversational interface seamlessly integrates into daily workflows, accessible within Visier People® and Microsoft Teams. Vee also accelerates generative AI product roadmaps for people tech SaaS vendors and solution providers through embedded partnerships.

Why We Liked It: While most HR technology solutions are working feverishly to incorporate generative AI into their solutions, ensuring that these capabilities can quickly and easily create value and impact for HR organizations remains a challenge. With Vee, Visier has developed a powerful and valuable gen AI solution that HR leaders can use immediately and derive data-informed insights to power decision-making. We think HR leaders will appreciate how this product makes data available to multiple levels of decision-makers. The judging panel felt that Vee was the best application of gen-AI capabilities we saw in 2024.