Data driven decision making and People Analytics in enterprise HR: our investment in Crunchr

We’re excited to announce our investment in Netherlands-headquartered Crunchr, an enterprise people analytics platform. Having spent a significant amount of time talking to stand-alone people analytics providers, people analytics professionals, HR Business Partners, CHROs, and some of the most notable thought leaders in this space, we’ve quickly realised how uniquely positioned Crunchr is. HR is lagging behind other business functions in data driven decision making, and Crunchr is fixing that for the enterprise sector. We’re delighted to partner with the excellent Crunchr team led by founder and CEO Dirk Jonker, a trailblazer in the HR analytics space and an incredibly impressive ‘super-CEO’!

Dirk has guided Crunchr to develop the world’s most intuitive enterprise platform for self-service people analytics, HR dashboards, and strategic workforce planning. Using Crunchr, large enterprises get a clear picture of what's really happening in their workforce and organization. Crunchr’s platform has been adopted by companies around the world including MetLife, Rabobank, Randstad and many more to support their tens of thousands of employees.

The importance of an intuitive platform cannot be overstated here. Having seen some very scary analytics solutions meant for HR professionals, we were super impressed with how user friendly and sticky Crunchr was from just an initial interaction. Customers have told us that the Crunchr team “are crazy to propose such short implementation times,” and are “blown away” as the team seamlessly deliver on that proposal. But even more importantly, customers describe Crunchr as a team who “truly understand what is needed and are partners, not sales people, making sure their customers’ success are their success.” With this outstanding customer feedback, it’s no surprise that both Crunchr’s product and customer support are leading in the market.

There is a huge opportunity in HR for data driven decision making

Why are we excited about this sector? Business functions such as finance, sales, marketing, product have been developing strategy that’s driven by data for some time. But HR is lagging behind these functions in data-driven decision making. For instance, CPOs are expected to present a data backed roadmap (to the extent where even the colour of a button is A/B tested before release) and quantify the impact of new feature releases on product engagement and retention metrics. CCOs can accurately predict how long a deal will take from an initial meeting to close, or how likely a lead is to convert at different stages. CMOs are expected to quantify the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and user acquisition channels. Whereas most CHROs today would struggle to assess which talent acquisition channel is bringing in better performing employees or to quantify the potential impact of a 10% pay raise on employee retention.

How do I make sure that I spend money where it’s most needed? How do we create exciting career paths? How do we create equal pay and development opportunities for everyone? Which skills do I invest in? What skills gaps exist in my team that would prevent me from achieving objective x? Who should I hire, or let go? Which office should I close down? Why is attrition at this level? How can we solve the retention problem? What’s the current level of employee engagement? How can we increase it? What should be our talent agenda to become a high performing team?

These are just a small sample of questions that Business Leaders raise to HR Business Partners on a daily basis. HRBPs “often don’t know the answer” and tackle these questions by using “a mixture of common sense and knowing the person who knows the answer”.[1]

HR professionals often don’t know what data is available (and accessible) or how to use the power of data in answering most critical human capital questions. This issue is perpetuated by the fact that the HR tech market has grown vertically over the past years, becoming both specialised and fragmented. Companies usually use the likes of Workday, SAP, Oracle, HiBob for their core HR system; Degreed, Udemy, Edcast, Hive, How.now for L&D; Jobvite, Workable, Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters for recruiting; Peakon, CultureAmp, Glint, Qualtrics for engagement, and the list goes on. As a result, the typical HR function now has 11 systems of record[2], which means there is more people data available than ever before, yet this data has also never been more disintegrated. HR functions need to bring data from these disparate platforms together in order to drive insights, which is a task that requires a product, not a project.

The People Analytics market is at a tipping point, and companies are at different stages of their journey

Even though people analytics has been theoretically talked about for over a decade, it has become a reality in the past few years. With 80% of dedicated people analytics teams having been put in place within the last 3 years and many companies being in the process of building their internal capabilities, people analytics is now the fastest growing sub-domain of HR[3]. A growing focus on diversity and inclusion, the supposed ‘Great Resignation’ and the talent war it’s creating, are also creating tailwinds for the people analytics market. These issues all require HR professionals to answer strategic people questions with data and get to the bottom of issues with hard evidence.

Companies and HR professionals are waking up to the power of people analytics, but the adoption of software solutions specifically designed for people analytics is a journey. Companies usually start with a ‘build it internally’ approach by borrowing an analytics resource from another department and asking them to use generic BI tools to drive insights from people data. Even though this kind of project might be a success for a single use case and at small scale (e.g. specific team or location), issues quickly arise as the scope extends: discrepancies in names/codes, GDPR issues, data ingestion challenges, people analytics talent shortage and more. (Despite HR professionals with data analysis skills having almost tripled in the last 5 years[4], the increase is not sufficient to meet the demand, and companies are having to compete to fill people analytics roles.)

Usually after 10-20 months of work and some serious investment, companies realise people analytics requires a product, not a project, and start looking for software solutions. They might initially try analytics functions embedded within their core HR systems, given they are ‘readily available’. However, these functionalities usually are an afterthought for providers, and despite lacking user friendliness and customer support, come at very high prices.

Pure-play people analytics solutions are the answer to enabling data-driven strategic organisational decision making. These solutions are designed for HR professionals and their high priority use cases and have user-friendliness and ease of use at the core of their offering and provide the required high quality customer support (of course, some much better than others).

We’re proud and excited to join Crunchr’s journey and back them in accelerating their global expansion. Our style is to invest selectively in a small number of European SaaS leaders, and back them all to be category-defining winners - and we’re confident Crunchr is well on their way to becoming the global leader in people analytics! Oxx Principal Bob Thomas will join Crunchr’s Board. We’re delighted to support Dirk and the Crunchr team as they help many more enterprises worldwide unlock the value of their people data.

Learn more about Crunchr here!

Want to discuss data refinery and convergence, people analytics, or are you a SaaS company that wants to talk about funding? Get in touch with the Oxx team on [email protected] - or leave me a comment below and I’ll reply to you directly!

[1] Oxx interviews

[2] Josh Bersin, HR Tech Market 2021

[3] Josh Bersin, HR Tech Market 2021, Thomas Online Benefits Innovation Generation: the big HR tech disconnect 2019/20 report, Oxx analysis

[4] LinkedIn Global Talent Trends 2020