New Goals for Convergys HR Head

In a recent interview published in CRMBuyer, Convergys new Vice President of Human Resources, Clark Handy, talks about his challenges as a head of HR for a global HR services company and the opportunities and primary goals before him. During the interview, to answer a question on his initial goals as head of HR at Convergys, Mr. Handy stated “We want to increase the talent management pool and we have a number of initiatives, like the ones I just mentioned, to do that. We want a global company that has managers at all levels prepared to grow through the organization. This means they are prepared to take international assignments and work on cross-country and cross-functional teams. And as we pursue a lot of large global HRO customers, it provides many opportunities globally for these managers”. His goals are just evidence to the fact that Talent Management is a growing concern for HR professionals. Unless effective strategies to address it efficiently and consider it a primary goal of any HR manager in any organization, it is quite difficult to increase the workforce productivity for that organization, considering the factors of high attrition and other global HR concerns.
Mr. Handy also stated on HRO challenges that the faster the transition process of any HRO, the more we can increase employee productivity helping the HRO strategy to be a big success.
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Exclusive Interview With John Nail

He knows how to optimize technology to derive desired HR solutions. However, he is not a technology guy. He founded Employease, a company that was highly regarded as the first Software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor and that was subsequently acquired by ADP. He founded DigitalBenefits, an information management company intended to serve employee benefits and HR for mid-market insurance brokers and their customers and innovated the company;s flagship product BenefitsATM, which was acquired by Authoria. He is now the Principal of the Industry Radar, the much-talked RSS driven HR portal serving more than 100,000 HR professionals across the globe. He is John J. Nail, A 54 Year old HR innovator, a serial Entrepreneur, a HR TECH man. HRO MANAGER is proud to present to its readers, an exclusive interview with Mr. John J. Nail. We spoke to him at length about his initial head-start in the HR industry up to his current ventures and future plans.
Q. What stimulated you to choose HR industry as your growth path?
The first 17 years of my career I spent working for what is today The Unum Group, the world’s largest disability insurer in sales and management. I like to say that I spent half my career with a carrier torturing people with paperwork and the second half trying to automate it. I got interested from a management perspective originally in business process improvement essentially selfishly to meet our needs on the carrier side and in our office. The more I looked at the problems we had in getting clean data on employees to do our job the more I realized that employers did not have the tools to do things like benefits enrollment etc. better. The original idea for what became Employease I proposed in 1990 at UNUM and was actually was for a “disk” based tool - a sort of mini spreadsheet - for employers to provide us with their employee census and enrollment information. That core data about an employee - name, address, job title, dependent info etc is the raw material at the core of the entire HR industry and was not being managed electronically but on paper and then poorly so. That would allow us to upload data rather than hand type it, eliminate errors, speed up our work and better service our customers. You have to remember that PC’s were still just getting started then in business and the idea went nowhere at the company but stayed in the back of mind.
Q. You are best known as a “Serial Entrepreneur” in the HR industry. Could you explain on spell of your years long Journey in HR as an entrepreneur?
I’ve always been a “gadget guy” I got it from my Dad who worked for the old Zenith Radio Corp . The quality goes in before the name goes on. Having been playing w/ PC’s since 1984 I had been using Prodigy and AOL and even paying bills online long before the Internet exploded on the scene in 1995.I had been playing w/ the net for 18 months or so trying to understand its real power and potential as it was clear to me that the idea of “all connected to all” to paraphrase Nicholas Negroponte from “Being Digital” was going to change the way we all operated, I just had not figure out how yet. One day a friend called me asked me if I was using the web and I said yes and simply asked me the idea from 5 years before could actually be done over the web. A light bulb went off in my head; the web would be able to connect people to data not just web pages. I literally sat down for 13 hours non-stop and wrote the first business plan for Employease ” initially labeled, Census, Inc. I was 42 years old and as I floated the idea with friends in the industry and got positive response to it I got that passion that I “had to” pursue this idea. So literally I jumped into the “entrepreneurial abyss” as I have heard it called, with a passion for an idea that had been in my mind for a while. Once my mind started down that creative path that has been my passion, to really synthesize ideas and technology into solutions.
Q. You founded DigitalBenefits which was acquired by Authoria. Same was the case where you found Employease which was again acquired by ADP. These two acquisitions show how your products are well taken into HR world, either it be the SaaS model or an Extranet for Benefits. However, as a Seller, What is your preposition behind your strategy? Identify a business problem, find a solution, develop the solution, sell the solution?.
I have never thought of an exit strategy when I started any business. I always approach the problem with a solution and expect to make it successful. When I sold DigitalBenefits it was when the web bubble burst and venture capital dried up. We never really had a chance to take it to the level we wanted to. I guess my basic supposition in all my ideas is looking at an infrastructure problem to solve and going from there. Many people create solutions to symptoms; I always try to solve root problems as the real long term value comes from that. That is why Employease was successful in its own right and why ADP bought the company.
Q. Way back in 1998, Red Herring described you as a “Tech geek trapped in a middle-aged Insurance guy’s body”. Do you agree?
You know, this is a great line and one I use for laughs when I do speeches. It is partially true. As I said before I am a gadget guy and love to try new things. I am curious by nature I guess. I can’t program in the traditional “geek” sense but I do understand how things work well enough to be able to put ideas together with solutions. I do have friends though who would say this is a truer statement than I might like to admit.
Q.Coming back to your current successful and growing venture, The Industry Radar, Could You explain the thought process that went into setting it up?
Very simply I was finding it hard to stay on top of what was going on in an industry that is converging with HR, payroll, benefits, healthcare, talent mgmt, HRO, recruiting and technology all coming together. Existing industry publications still look at the space as silos even though customers do not and cannot and I found them lacking in timeliness of information or unfocused in what they deliver to their audience much of the time with their online “news”. Print publishing in all areas is behind and meets a smaller and smaller fraction of people’s needs in a world where even a few minutes of attention a day is highly fought over w/ all the options we have. We live in a real time world and we needed a real time solution and my mind told me that RSS could allow us to create a tool to bring together disparate sources of information, news and content into a cohesive real time solution that meets our industry’s needs. My biggest surprise frankly, and the lesson I have learned this past year is that the issues that we grapple with here in the US around people and work are universal and the international following we have developed with readers in over 50 countries this year is surprising and gratifying and fun to see.
Q. What is the current estimated traffic to Industry Radar and at what rate are you expecting this to grow in coming years?
We reach north of 100,000 industry professionals daily growing about 7% a week there. We just cracked a million article views for a week for the first time last week. Our plans are to double our subscriber base and do close to 100 million article views for the year.
Q. What is your future growth strategies lined up for Industry Radar?
We will be expanding in 5 key ways. As you know we added US Regional and state feeds on 2/1/2007. On 4/1 we will be adding four Retirement Radars and 4 Property & Casualty Insurance Radars. In 2 Q we will be adding International HR feeds for 8 regions around the world. The area I am most excited about is The Industry Radar calendar which is nearly ready for launch. Our mission is to be the only place and HR, benefits, healthcare or insurance professional needs to go to be fully informed. We are creating a central calendar for this group that has unlimited sub calendars so that in one place vendors can post conference, web cast info etc and users can access it in any subset- topical, geographic, job level etc. that they want. Nothing like this exists today and opens up new revenue areas for us in advertising, listings etc. Cross promotion of events in our newsletter and on our website as well as users subscribing to their own specific event RSS feeds will be very popular.
Q. Are you planning to expand the number of Radars available on Industry Radar? In other words, are you looking forward to add any sub groups to the existing radars?
Our fifth area of growth will be in creating deeper channels in our Radars. For example three that are ready to go today are focused on US insurance brokers and their acquisitions and US healthcare payers and providers and the disputes going on between them. There are nearly limitless opportunities to connect our river of news and content to specific channels each one bringing revenue possibilities
Q. You continue to be a veteran in Human Resources Industry. What are your thoughts on the outsourcing trends in HR?
Outsourcing is the key to long term success provided that the right technology tools are employed by your partners and that the customer understands that they must manage these processes going forward, measure them and continually improve service delivery while driving costs down. This management role is one I think companies often overlook when outsourcing just assuming that the vendor is now responsible. The biggest mistake I see companies make is trying to simply unload old, outmoded paper processes on an outsourcer to provide at a lower cost. If that is all you are trying to do you will fail. At its core the real value of outsourcing is applying scale and expertise and proven best of breed processes against an existing customer. That change from status quo to best of breed will involve pain but bring value in quality of service and bottom line contributions from HR, a new concept for most.
Q. Would you think Technology additions alone can bring productivity to HR, if not, what are the other factors?
Getting organized is the single biggest thing any size employer needs to do and most are not or are not as well organized as they should be. If an employer has one single database with all the relevant data for an employee around their job, HR, benefits, payroll etc and connects the output from this to their payroll, healthcare, benefits and retirement vendors they go a long way to solving theory traditional problems and save a lot of money on mistakes and rework. Couple this with a truly integrated employee portal that combines information, connectivity to partners and self service transactions and a culture to support it and a company of a 100 or 100,000 will be successful in this area.
Q. You have pioneered in providing optimized benefits administration solutions through your earlier ventures. Our research tells us many PEOs and HROs, administering benefits plans for their clients loose several $ due to reconciliation differences and lack of a proper administration map. What is your advice to them in terms of streamlining their benefits programs to minimize their risks and standardize?
You are right and this goes back to my earlier point on how I’ve tried to create solutions. The reason we were successful at employEase was we focused on the infrastructure problem that all the needs of a company for HR and benefits emanated from one single, integrated employee record for HR, payroll and benefits and built our solutions on top of that. If your systems are not fully integrated, and designed by industry experts, not simply techies, like this, then you will always be throwing band aids (i.e. people) at problem and not able to get the scale to make money. Things that can be automated must be off a common set of data and connected on the backend directly to carriers etc. The straight thru supply chain concept has to be applied to make money on this space and most importantly improve service quality to employees around billing, eligibility and services.
Q.You have interests in sports too to our belief. You are a founder member of Secession Golf Club in SC. How passionate you are towards Golf as a sport?
I truly love the game and its traditions but the last few years I have played very little which I hope to remedy this year. My 7 year old loves to hit golf balls so I plan to really get him into the sport this year.
Q. Any other John Nail trademark HR ventures in pipeline to be set up under the Radar Group?
You never know. My mind never stops working on ways to improve communication and connectivity between the players in what I call the “HR supply chain”.

HRO Manager’s Choice For HR Resources

We advocate Industry Radar as the best RSS resource for HR professionals across the World. RSS syndication and aggregation is the new trend in E-media as more and more readers are opting out to get e-mail updates by subscribing to the feeds or reading directly from the feeds. Not many RSS aggregators exist in Human Resources feeds which could match to the quality of content published in Industry Radar as per the results of our survey. When we checked up with Laurus HR India Operating Head, Mr. Saleem Yusuff on what feed aggregator he prefers to read everyday besides HRO MANAGER, he gave not a second thought before he admitted that Industry Radar was the best resource . Mr.Yusuff says, “We should appreciate the work and technology of Industry Radar. Bringing updates on Human Resources Industry from every corner of the world as such is not a simple exercise. Industry Radar is able to accomplish this complex exercise through the means of RSS feed aggregator, Thanks to its best technology“. Industry Radar collects HR feeds from over 10,000 sources everyday. The man behind Industry Radar is John Nail, who founded Employease which was acquired by ADP in 2006.