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Zenefits People — Find and connect with your co-workers instantly
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Nice! This is going to be helpful for me. We use Zenefits and when onboarding as a new product manager, I'm getting a lot of feedback from a lot of people who know a lot more about me than I know about them. It's great, I'm glad they feel that I'm approachable and open to chat about what we're building, but it's hard to keep track who everyone is. The employee directory is helping me even the playing field as I try to learn faces/names.
Theoretically I can use Slack, Google Contacts, or LinkedIn to figure this information out, but with Zenefits as our HR partner, I have a good guarantee to have the correct title + correct office location + correct personal contact info and a better than likely chance for a photo too.
My only feedback is Zenefits uses personal emails, whereas our company email might be more useful here...
I really do try not to troll other people's products but given how bad Zenefits core functionality is and it's reputation as being barely usable, I don't fully understand why they would point engineers at a new product.
If I was a betting man I would wager that in a year this app will be exactly the same as it is today and they will have in the meantime launched 14 new products that also barely work.
Perhaps the bar is so low in HR software that quality isn't important.
struggling to see why Zenefits decided to do this...
Slack (at least for me) does everything I need it to in this space.
EDIT: Maybe because I don't need employee profiles for my use. Always connected across the social-sphere and that is enough for me :)
The functionality is rudimentary, clearly. For SMBs not on AD or an equivalent directory, this could be a convenient way of delivering contact info to employees. If you don't have an intranet tied into a directory, managing an employee directory is a separate manual process. We are doing thar right now and it is a PITA.
Even in Microsoft shops, getting contact info can be challenging. I am looking at my Outlook Mobile app for my HR director's info and all i am getting is an email address.
I am going to give this a try and if it solves just 1 critical problem, it will be useful. What would be really intereting to brainstorm is if this app could evolve into a 2FA app integrted with a policy manager.
Hey guys -- few thoughts on this:
One thing that's important here that people are missing is that b/c this (very simple but very useful IMHO) app is connected up to Zenefits, all your employee contact info is already in there. IE, when companies hire someone, they hire them through Zenefits -- and that new employee will automatically show up in the app. When they are terminated, they are automatically removed. As employee info changes, the app is always pulling from the source of truth.
Yes, if you have Active Directory, it already does this, and many big companies have that. But almost no one below 500 - 1,000 employees does. So, if you want to have an employee directory, it's a separate thing you need to maintain and update as employees join / leave your company, or as their information changes. It's a real pain in the ass.
Zenefits has always had a "directory" function within our website, but having it on your phone is much easier / better. The use case for me on this is super simple -- I always have a company "contacts" app on my phone, just like I have all my personal contacts there as well. It's always accurate and up to date. It's there on day one when you install the app (as long as the company uses Zenefits), and no one at the company has to spend time assembling and maintaining this.
Re - slack.... the comparison doesn't make a ton of sense to me. We certainly have no aspiration to become a communication / collaboration platform, which slack is awesome for. The strength of Zenefits is that, for our customers, we're the system of record about employee information. There are a lot of natural "applications" that come off of that -- whether it's stuff like employee benefits, payroll, or a contact list of colleagues you can carry on your phone and have with you at all times.
@parker_conrad I think this serves the same purpose at LinkedIn LookUp (https://business.linkedin.com/lo...), but differs in the ways you populate the employees directory. LinkedIn LookUp would not work if someone joins a company and doesn't update their profile, or doesn't have a LinkedIn profile at all. On the other hand, Zenefits People relies on the fact that the company uses Zenefits for its HR system.
Overall it's a real use case that I found myself in several times before, I'm just not sure if it's a big enough use case to warrant another app on my phone. I certainly cannot speak for other people, but I personally haven't had to look up my co-workers more than 5 times in the last 3 years. The people I usually need to contact are already added to my personal contacts book. Maybe other departments, e.g. sales, would have this use case more frequently?
@phamtrisi I agree it's a similar use case. The difference is that a feature like this is really irritating if you can't trust that the data is tehre & up to date (which any systsem not connected up to the "source of truth" will suffer from).
Personally, I use this all the time. A lot of it is stuff like: I'm in a meeting, and the conversation takes an unexpected turn. I realize that person XYZ should really be in the meeting / has relevant expertise -- I call them right from my phone and ask if they can pop in. Or, someone's name comes up, and I'm not sure if they work out of our Phoenix or SF office, or what department they are in, or who they report to -- I can look it up instantly.
The aesthetic of the site is nice. The overall idea of employee/administrator shared duties is nice. The multiple integrations with other software are also vast and offer many options for integration.
But I'd like to see more features to the program - a section to schedule an employee review, HR request from our employees, ability to add in custom fields...
Hustle X