Kenexa Analyst Day

There are not many firms that have rock solid leadership, deep understanding of the HR space as well as longevity in the space - all of which are Kenexa’s main strengths. As one of the largest talent management SAAS vendors that are publicly traded, they have a history of delivering solid results and being profitable. In recent years their RPO business has been hit hard and sales growth has been minimal. Although the public market seems to be valuing growth over earnings and profitability and their stock has taken a beating for it. In the last 18 months they’ve solidified their recruitment and RPO offerings and well as built out a 2X architecture. At the recent analyst day, I was somewhat disappointed as they focused only on the recruitment market offerings with very little mention of learning, compensation, and performance or the other critical pieces of the talent management pie.

For the second year in a row Troy Kantor (President) spoke of critical business metrics and aligning HR to these business metrics. The example he gave was of the movie chain measuring popcorn sales versus quantity or cost of hire. Although Troy is extremely convincing in helping the HR community and us analysts understand the importance of business metrics as opposed to traditional HR metrics such as time to fill or cost per hire ----for the second year in a row we have failed to see scorecards or products that connect the Brassring (now Kenexa BR2X) product line actually producing these key business metrics. This leads us to believe that this is all custom consulting work and individualized per client. Although significant development has been put into the Kenexa 2X platforms, specifically in regards to the Brassring platform. The common elements such as search, e-mail, integration to third-party apps such as reference checking, testing, etc… are still being rolled out across many of the functionalities. While Kenexa has had many new client wins and is one of the leading contenders in the Fortune 500 recruitment space, they still believe that there’s a midmarket play with their own Kenexa/Webhire product line now called Kenexa 2x Recruit.

Their ability to align key performance metrics to recruitment and quality of hire significantly helped them gain traction in the hourly recruiting space with such wins as Home Depot, Loblaws, Sobeys and Wal-Mart all new large key marquis accounts.