KrASIA is a media partner of the event.
The Dutch brewing company HEINEKEN concluded its first-ever HR tech-focused competition called HEINEKEN HR Brewhouse last Friday.
The event, organized in collaboration with Accenture and TheNextWeb, aimed to drive tech-enabled innovations within the global HR sector to find solutions to real-world HR challenges.
HEINEKEN HR Brewhouse was centered around four real-life challenges that the company has identified:
- Recruitment
From making employee referrals easier to sourcing candidates using artificial intelligence. HEINEKEN looked for solutions to improve recruitment procedures for both candidates and HR.
Finalists: Mya Systems, SmartDreamers, and SAP. - Onboarding and transition
HEINEKEN looked for solutions to make the onboarding process easy, seamless and stress-free.
Finalists: Peoplewave, BrioHR, and Appical. - Employee engagement
HEINEKEN looked for solutions to draw actionable insights from employee feedback, to understand employee sentiment, and promote company-wide recognition of employee success.
Finalists: Social Seeder, EngageRocket, and Appreiz. - Wild Card
This is an open category for solutions that do not fit into any of the above three categories but address other pain points of HR.
Finalists: BetterUp, Snaphunt, and Pulsifi.
The Dutch company called for tech disruptors and industry experts to submit applications to the above-mentioned four challenges in September. In a short span of two weeks, the company received 143 requests from 106 companies around the world.
The three finalists in each category gathered at the Singapore Accenture Innovation Hub on Friday to pitch to a panel consisting of five judges, four of which are senior executives at HEINEKEN and one is Naomi Cranswick, a publisher at Human Resources Online.
The winner of the Recruitment category was SAP, a team consisting of platforms Eightfold.ai, Sonru, and Plum. For the HEINEKEN HR Brewhouse competition, the team pitched a career site called SuccessFactors. The site combines Eightfold.ai’s intelligent matching recommendations, Sonru’s technology for online video interviewing, as well as Plum’s artificial intelligence-driven organizational psychology screening.
For the Onboarding and Transition category, the winner was Appical, an Amsterdam-based company that offers a mobile application to help employers welcome, support, train and hold onto their new hires. It claims to have reduced new hires’ time-to-productivity from three months to slightly more than one month (45% reduction). It has grown rapidly since its founding and counts Pepsico and HEINEKEN amongst its clients today.
The winner for Employee Engagement was Social Seeder. The Belgian startup offers corporations a platform that works like a community where employers are able to share corporate news with the employees. The platform also allows employers to build a corporate reputation through the employees amongst other features.
The final winner for the Wild Card category was Pulsifi, a Singapore-based company that uses data analytics for HR management. Pulsifi’s platform combines organizational psychology and artificial intelligence to help companies hire, retain, and develop talents. The company raised USD 1.1 million in an angel round in 2018 and made two strategic appointments in its leadership team.
The winners of each category will be piloting their solutions with selected HEINEKEN subsidiaries in the Asia Pacific region. Specifically, the winning solution for recruitment will be piloted in Cambodia, onboarding in Indonesia, engagement in Singapore, and wildcard in Vietnam.
At the end of the piloting period, some innovations will be selected to be rolled out regionally and even globally.