Deanna Shimota 00:00:05 Welcome to The HR Tech Spotlight podcast. I'm Deanna Shimota, CEO of GrowthMode Marketing. The HR technology market is crowded, and we know it can be hard to find the best software solutions for your business in the sea of sameness. On this podcast, we shine a spotlight on some of the best up and coming technology options out there. Check it out if you are interested in learning about new, innovative solutions available in the market. And if you are with an HR tech company and interested in being considered for a guest spot. Stay tuned for details at the end of the show. Hello, hello, I'm this episode of the HR Tech Spotlight. We are exploring Wishlist, a rewards and recognition platform that allows organizational leaders to recognize and reward employees using a top down recognition strategy while allowing peers to recognize each other using a peer to peer approach. Here to talk about Wishlist is CEO Skylar Elysburg. Hi, Skylar.
Skylar Elisberg 00:01:08 Hi, Deanna. Thanks for having me.
Deanna Shimota 00:01:10 Yeah, thanks for coming on the show.
Deanna Shimota 00:01:12 So tell us about your background in the HR tech space.
Skylar Elisberg 00:01:16 Yes, so I like probably a good portion of people that get into HR. Tech did not intend to get into this industry when I started out, but I started my career in the space. So I joined a very early stage tech company that's actually related to Wishlist has the same founding members back in 2014. It was my first job out of my master's program. It was my first attempt at being a career professional, and I didn't quite know what I was doing, but I joined a team that was really like in the midst of defining what their product was. It was pre-revenue, so there was no revenue coming in, and it was a phenomenal insight into how to build a company from the ground up. So I started there in 2014. The company is called Thrive Pass that the original value proposition was around corporate wellness or corporate wellbeing, which is certainly a market that's seen a lot of undulations over the last couple of years. But we and they have since expanded more into traditional benefits provisions and are still doing well.
Skylar Elisberg 00:02:21 So they were founded in Denver, Colorado. I worked for them for a number of years, started in product and product development, and moved into more of a business development type role and eventually management to finish out my career there.
Deanna Shimota 00:02:35 Very cool. There are a lot of leaders in this space that will say, I actually didn't start out in HR tech, I just landed in it and we're all in this crazy rat race now. It's true.
Skylar Elisberg 00:02:46 Absolutely.
Deanna Shimota 00:02:48 So give me the elevator pitch for Wishlist and what it does.
Skylar Elisberg 00:02:54 Yeah, so Wishlist. What we really believe in here is meaningful, giving, meaningful moments. Which of course, as you mentioned in the intro, the market would define us in playing in this rewards and recognition space. It is a space that was it's actually very mature. It's probably been around for over a hundred years and has certainly seen evolutions, with software becoming more and more relevant in the 2000 and the 20 tens. What we really believe in is the meaningful component behind it.
Skylar Elisberg 00:03:28 So when I took over Wishlist in 2022 and I looked at what the market was doing, how companies were using software providers like this, what the real point of all these programs was. A lot of what we felt was missing was the intentionality behind giving. And giving can be certainly monetarily driven. It can be an actual monetary gift, or it can be non-monetary a gift, a giving an appreciation or giving a thank you or a shout out in a public or private forum. And we really believe that a lot of that had become transactional. So what we're doing at Wishlist is focusing on those micro interactions and trying to make them more and more meaningful for both the person who is sending that gift or that shout out or that thank you, and for the person who's on the receiving end.
Deanna Shimota 00:04:24 Very cool. So I know before we hit record, you and I were talking and you indicated that the company was founded 13 years ago and you joined Wishlist in 2022. But tell us a little bit about the story behind the founding of the company and the pivot that you guys did back a few years.
Skylar Elisberg 00:04:42 Yeah, absolutely. So it's actually how I got involved in the company in the first place. But the founders of Wishlist met in business school in Spain, which is also the same school that I went to. I was just a couple of years behind them, and what they saw in Spain was actually an interesting concept. It was a B2C concept at that point, and you could go into a grocery store or a department store and buy essentially a gift box that contained options for recipient to redeem. And all the options were experiential driven. So if I wanted to give Diana $100 for her birthday or for some other occasion, I could give you this box, you could open it, and you could choose a horseback riding trip or a wine tasting tour in Rioja or something like that. And they thought that both the element of choice as well as this element of experiential gifting was very interesting. So they hadn't seen that in the United States. They graduated, came back, tried to launch that on the B2C side.
Skylar Elisberg 00:05:46 And I promise these are their words, not mine. They knew nothing about B2C marketing. So weren't, quite successful in that customer acquisition process. But what they did notice over time was that HR leaders were buying it on behalf of their employees. So what Wishlist was founded on initially was this concept that experiences are more powerful than things. And as the company evolved over the years, they really started to own that niche with one other provider. Now, obviously in 2020 and Covid happens, those experiences are a lot harder to provide for teams. People go remote, people go more hybrid. That's becoming a little bit less relevant to a lot of the employee population that they were serving. So they made a choice to both launch a recognition product which focused on non-monetary interactions that I was alluding to earlier, as well as broaden the catalog of options for redemptions to elements other than experiences.
Deanna Shimota 00:06:48 That's really interesting. And I could see where Covid got in the way of that. And suddenly we were all in lockdown and couldn't have those experiences, right? Totally.
Skylar Elisberg 00:06:56 Yeah. Grateful that I wasn't in charge at that point. That was probably pretty disruptive. I wasn't quite a CEO at that point, but I am not envious of anybody that led led the journey. We were in unprecedented times, right? There's no playbook for how you accomplish that. You're just trying to listen to your customers and continue to add value and hopefully ask for a little bit of grace.
Deanna Shimota 00:07:16 So speaking of adding value, what is a big challenge or problem that you see facing HR departments today? That Wishlist can really help solve.
Skylar Elisberg 00:07:28 It's probably a similar problem to a lot of other guests have talked about on this. If you level up and ask yourself what is the point of a rewards and recognition program? Most people will argue that it has to do with talent attraction retention or employee engagement, potentially both, and certainly all the studies that are continuing to come out, even before Covid. But Covid exacerbated a lot of these trends that we were seeing is disengagement or lack of engagement or declining engagement, however you want to characterize that.
Skylar Elisberg 00:08:03 So really, the broader issues that anybody in this space should be solving has to do with the relationship between the employee and their organization. Now, in my opinion, solving talent retention is very, very difficult because it's a multivariate equation. There are a number of variables that a company has to get right to truly solve for talent retention. And any technology vendor that's going to say we saw retention. I'm not sure I, I buy that. I think what we can do is compartmentalize that that equation and attack certain variables within it. So at Wishlist, if company X has a poor compensation strategy and isn't at market rate for a lot of their employees, we can't really address that. There's compensation consultants out there. I know a couple of great ones that I can recommend, but you've got to get that in order. Comp is always going to come up on exit interviews when people leave organizations now where we feel like we actually can very much address this issue is bad management, right? Managers or your relationship with your manager always comes up as a top reason why people either stay, don't stay.
Skylar Elisberg 00:09:19 And I think anybody that's been on this podcast and anybody in your personal life probably also feels that what it's like to have a great manager who's an advocate, who knows you as a human being and conversely, maybe knows a manager who treated you transactionally or didn't advocate for you in those key situations. And at the end of the day, we're still all human beings, and humans want to work with like minded humans. And so if you can drive those connections between human beings at an organization, that's really the broader problem that we feel like we can solve within a broader context of a much larger issue.
Deanna Shimota 00:09:57 So obviously, the rewards and recognition space, there's no lack of competition and options for companies to choose from. I'm sure you deal with that battle every day out in the market. How is Wishlist different from the other options that companies might be looking at?
Skylar Elisberg 00:10:16 Yeah, I'm smiling because we have a couple of channels set up in our slack where, you know, competitive intelligence or whatever else, and it does feel every single day we're getting another ping in that channel.
Skylar Elisberg 00:10:28 And somebody that I haven't heard of before, and I'll hit the splash page on their marketing side and the product is very similar. So to your point, I absolutely think this is a saturated market. I think there's not been a tremendous amount of innovation as opposed to iteration. There's some iterative features that are being pushed. But real innovation I think is lacking in our space in general, which is also the opportunity. Right. So in my opinion, a lot of rewards and recognition is done. Transactionally. So if you think about the actual provision of a reward itself, so we can focus on the monetary elements to start. A lot of gifting is done through gift cards. And gift cards have become our antithesis for what we stand for here, because everybody has the gift card drawer in their kitchen where these stupid little plastic cards go into the kitchen drawer, and they sit there sometimes for a while. And if you look up gift card non redemption rates, there's some super interesting statistics about the amount of money that's on these gift cards, the percentage of gift card non utilization etc. it's very high right.
Skylar Elisberg 00:11:37 It would be exactly what you would expect. But the other real issue that I have with gift cards is that they're highly impersonal. It's like a lazy attempt at saying, hey, Deanna, I see that you've done something interesting or you've stayed at the company for five years. I want to reward you. Go find something meaningful for yourself. Better than nothing, don't get me wrong. But for me, a huge missed opportunity to deliver something that's actually meaningful to you. However, to deliver a meaningful gift requires a bit of effort, right? You have to know who Deanna is. And what's fascinating to me is we do this in our personal lives, right? Like, I don't know many people who give their spouse or their child a gift card. Like, we're not doing that to maybe you get one from your crazy aunt that lives half a world away, but the people that really know you in your life know enough about you to deliver you something that makes you feel something. And again, what our kind of mantra is at Wishlist.
Skylar Elisberg 00:12:38 Behind this meaning is there's intentionality, or there should be intentionality behind giving. So you have to know your employee. You have to know your direct report, whomever else, what makes them tick, what makes them excited, what makes them passionate, what drives that passion? Whatever else. And you have to know at the time in which it's meaningful. And to get that right is very difficult. But that's absolutely where we feel like we've found our niche and what resonates really well in the market.
Deanna Shimota 00:13:05 That's really interesting because I think you're right. I've never thought about it in that perspective of If I'm going to give my mom a gift, I don't want to give her a gift card. It might be easier, right? But how much thought does it feel like it's. Here's exactly how much I spent on you and how much effort I put into you. Same goes with employees. It's become very common for gift cards to be a form of rewards and recognition currency, but it doesn't give them the warm and fuzzy feeling.
Deanna Shimota 00:13:32 Probably that if you had hand-picked that gift out for them based on their likes and interests and hobbies.
Skylar Elisberg 00:13:39 Totally. Yeah. And you bring up another really good and interesting point, which is the other issue with gift cards is you're associating a monetary value with that award. And I'll tell you from personal experience my wife that she worked on a big project and she got a $50 gift card and her immediate reaction was like, wow, they thought it was worth $50. I wonder how they came to that number. Like, it's just a very arbitrary amount, and it probably has nothing to do with what their manager thought the impact was. It was like related to the program structure or whatever provisions HR or finance had put in place. But the immediate correlation, of course, is the dollar amount, because what else is there? Right. You're not exactly getting inspired by Amazon, which is a compilation of brands. It's not like they've thought about the gift itself. And what I also find very interesting is most psychology around giving in general proves that the giver receives as much, if not more, of a psychological uplift than the recipient.
Skylar Elisberg 00:14:43 It feels good to gift. It's the same reason why it feels good to do charitable actions. You're missing completely out on that with a gift card. When you're transactional in that element, there is no virtuous circle that kind of completes the life cycle of that interaction or that connection with your direct report or with your employee.
Deanna Shimota 00:15:05 Yeah, that totally makes sense. So what type of companies would you say are the perfect fit for Wishlist then.
Skylar Elisberg 00:15:15 Again Chuckling because this is one where all the sales intent data companies that want to sell us software and things like that, they never have the data points that I actually really want. But I'll tell you, we want to work with organizations that value their employees. And everybody would sit there and tell you that when but you there's some very demonstrable characteristics that we find as relevant. So I'll give you one, one big example when I know that HR reports to the CFO, that tells me something very different than when I understand that HR reports up to the CEO, because if they're reporting to the CFO, in all likelihood that organization is looking at their employees as anonymized line items on a spreadsheet.
Skylar Elisberg 00:16:04 And that's a really tough uphill battle to fight with finance, because, as I mentioned, retention is such a multivariate equation. To correlate this with ROI is difficult. The organizations where HR reports up into CEO means, in my opinion, they have a very intentional strategy around their people. They're the ones that truly give culture a fighting chance. So there are some other variables like that. We are a global solution. We do focus primarily in North America, but we certainly serve populations across EMEA. We have a big presence out in, out East in India, which is a great growing market for both talent and talent acquisition. our average client size is between 500 and 1000 employees. We can flex upwards, we can flex downwards. But that's really like your classic segmentation that maybe some of the other marketers out there would want to hear.
Deanna Shimota 00:17:02 Love it. So what impact have you seen organizations that work with your company experience.
Skylar Elisberg 00:17:09 So impact is it really depends on the data sets that you're looking at. So there is obviously there's data around engagement in general.
Skylar Elisberg 00:17:18 Right. What you have to keep in mind if I take a step back is that we are a B to B to C company, as a lot of organizations are in the HR tech space, which means that we both need to serve HR as an entity or as administrators, and then also as employees. Impact. At the HR level, very easy to quantify and to explain. A lot of people are doing these programs manually, and this is going to sound like a joke, but plenty of our clients that we work with are sending somebody in air to the local grocery store to pick up gift cards off of a shelf, and they're handing them out. And I promise you that drive to the grocery store and back is not the best utilization of that person's time. So there's a lot of, you know, with most software providers, there's a lot of efficiency that's gained with automating these processes, right? So picking up these inflection points automatically through an hour's feed, whatever else, there shouldn't be really any manual work for administrators if they implement Wishlist.
Skylar Elisberg 00:18:19 Right. It does require obviously a bit of work during implementation to get the stuff set up, but on an ongoing basis, what I would like to say is if you pay your bills, you really don't need to do anything else. We'd love for you to look at the data sets, but if you don't want to, you don't have to. So on the HR side, I think it's fairly quantifiable. On the employee side, there's a couple of things that I find very interesting. One is shifting mentality away from gift card redemptions to meaningful items. So we can see with quantifiable impact, individual employees redeeming for other items besides gift cards and that data as to what's relevant to that population is super interesting. We also collect what we call user preferences, which is really just a profile of an employee, and we present that to managers and we can correlate who are the most engaged versus the most disengaged managers at an organization based on their level of engagement with the recognition tool or the reward tool that we offer.
Skylar Elisberg 00:19:24 So that gets back, obviously, to what we were talking about with the manager to employee relationship and then being a linchpin in the retention. So I find that very interesting. And then maybe one other data point that I'll call out explicitly here that when I first started, I didn't maybe necessarily understand the full value. But we also track what we call thank you notes. reciprocity of the gift. That's the like closed loop for us in terms of you've been given a recognition, you've been given a reward. And to look at the qualitative data that then comes back from the employee or from the recipient to the manager or to the organization is really special because they have expressed feelings that they feel seen, that they feel appreciated, whatever else, it's the core of what you're trying to accomplish. So that is more of a qualitative data point that we certainly include in our QBs and our reporting packages. Back to our clients.
Deanna Shimota 00:20:24 So, Skylar, what is your future vision for the company?
Skylar Elisberg 00:20:30 Yeah, the future vision is we will be world class at the mantra that I shared earlier.
Skylar Elisberg 00:20:37 So meaningful giving at meaningful moments. To get that right at a global level requires a couple of, key elements that we need to continue to focus upon. So one is this balance of supply versus curation. So what I mean by that is when you log in to a Wishlist and you want to select something, or when you want to give somebody something in particular, there's a balance between having supply that's relevant to a very broad population without being noisy. And that is a fight that any big e-commerce giant is going to have as well. Right? It's a lot of algorithmic recommendations that are required to cut through that noise. No different than how your Amazon homepage looks different than mine, right? They've developed a profile on you and their backend, whether we want to believe that or not. And they're serving you the products that they believe to be most relevant to you. So that is certainly something that I believe will never be fully accomplished. You can always get better with that, more relevant to that employee, maybe even uncovering things that they didn't know they needed wanted.
Skylar Elisberg 00:21:53 Nice to have whatever else. So that is certainly one element that I think we need to continue to focus on for the next couple of years.
Deanna Shimota 00:22:02 So as we come to go ahead.
Skylar Elisberg 00:22:05 I think just to round out that thought, the other one is timing. What I find very disruptive about the industry right now is a lot of people have to then log in to another tool to send a recognition or to send a reward. Of course, there's so with other platforms, but we've got some hypotheses of how we can make that less disruptive and more natural as well. That's also tricky with the nature of hybrid work and digital folks versus non desk workers. So anyway those are the two big focuses for us in the coming years.
Deanna Shimota 00:22:39 Awesome. So as we round out this conversation, Skylar, what final thoughts do you want to leave our audience with?
Skylar Elisberg 00:22:49 That's a good question. That's probably the hardest one for me to answer. I think, like at the end of the day, if you're interested in a rewards and recognition program, I would say that the way that we think about it and what drives our passion is just applying the same principles that makes effective recognition or gifting or giving in your personal life.
Skylar Elisberg 00:23:11 Apply that to the corporate space. Just remember, we're all human beings, right? Like we we talk a lot about not believing in the concept of work life balance. I don't know that binary really exists in a lot of industries anymore, in some potentially, but in a lot with the provision of technology, with the nature of hybrid and remote work, you're really just living your life and work is a big part of that. And so I think sometimes we can forget that these are all just human beings who have very similar desires, were much more similar than we are different. Right. And if we can remember that and if we can remember the things that drive us and give us passion and make us feel seen, that's really how technology should be working for us to support others that report to us or that work for us. So that's, I guess, what I would leave the conversation with.
Deanna Shimota 00:24:04 Excellent. So one last question for you. Where can our listeners go to learn more about Wishlist?
Skylar Elisberg 00:24:10 Obviously they can hit our marketing site that's enjoy Wishlist.com.
Skylar Elisberg 00:24:14 We also have social media presence. We'd love to talk to you. In general, I think our our sales team is the least pushy group of folks I've ever been around. I have really no tolerance for for most sales people. So we have a really high bar of folks who will tell you right away what we're good at, what we're not good at, and if we're not a good fit, we're not going to sit there and try to convince you we are. I'm really proud of the team that we've built over the years, and I'm happy to connect with anybody that wants to learn more about how they can build a program from the ground up, or optimize what they're currently doing.
Deanna Shimota 00:24:48 Awesome. I will put the links in the show notes for this episode. We are out of time for today, so this wraps up this show. But Skylar, thanks so much for coming on the HR Tech Spotlight today. It was great to have you.
Skylar Elisberg 00:25:00 Yeah, I enjoyed it. Thank you so much, Deanna.
Deanna Shimota 00:25:08 Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Tech Spotlight podcast, where we showcase some of the best up and coming HR technology options in the market. If you are an HR tech company leader who would like to be considered for a guest spot on this program. Please contact me via GrowthModeMarketing.Com or reach out to me, Deanna Shimota, on LinkedIn. And if you found this show informative, subscribe. Connect with us on social media and leave a review. This is Deanna with GrowthMode Marketing signing off. Thanks for listening. We hope you'll tune in again next time.