HR lacking oomph? Wondering if a more proactive salesy approach will pay off for you? Then you should definitely check out the  ‘Coffee is for Closers’ webinar June 3 (Thursday) 10-11 am PDT.

This one’s being brought to you by Jobvite – an extremely cool ATS – and co-presented by Kris Dunn, who’s one of our favourite HR people.

Register for the Coffee is for Closers webinar.

Looks like it’ll be a killer session; we thought you’d appreciate the heads-up!

Our next color paper takes a closer look at the talent ‘asset’ and the problems it’s given businesses in the past. We also look at new and improved ways for managers to keep track of who they’ve got working for them (and what they’re up to) in order to make better decisions.

Read the ‘Talent Science’ color paper online or download from

http://www.sonar6.com/colorpapers/talent-science

In the second of our color papers we look at ways performance reviews can be made more motivational (it is possible!) and useful for all involved…

Read the ‘Motivational performance reviews (and other oxymorons)’ color paper online or download from

http://www.sonar6.com/colorpapers/motivation

Sonar6 has recently undergone an internal restructure so we can increase focus on development capability and customer service. There have been some staffing changes and we have some new staff members to introduce…

Read the rest of this entry »

In our inaugural color paper we present 5 key reasons why performance management isn’t quite working, and introduce a few ways to fix it…

Read the ‘I Met Expectations’ color paper online or download from http://www.sonar6.com/colorpapers/i-met-expectations

Or if not faster, more enthusiastically. Attractively? Creatively?

Gleefully?

To celebrate the end of a successful financial year, Sonar6 piled onto an America’s Cup yacht down in Auckland’s Viaduct (care of these guys). One of our company tenets is of course ‘Does it make the boat go faster?’, so the outing was a chance to get literal.

Much adventure was had, and nobody was injured, fell overboard or spent the trip hanging over the rail.

Good times (more photos on Facebook).

We thought we’d share this cool idea for engaging your teams with Sonar6. This one came from Amanda at Vitaco, one of our Kiwi customers.

Teams race each other along the performance review track, completing tasks that range from learning the Sonar6 basics to reviewing competencies and having the performance conversation. Everyone gets their own gummi to race with – the best looking personalised gummi gets a prize – and the first team across the finish line takes top honours.

A great way to have bit of fun while keeping everyone on track!

On April 13 we experienced an unprecedented issue with access to our servers that impacted some of our customers for several hours, especially in the US and Europe.

Firstly an apology. The sort of outage that we experienced is just not supposed to occur. We know this hurt several customers who were trying to complete reviews. The whole team at Sonar6 take this stuff seriously and personally. We are sorry. The following is an explanation as to what actually occurred. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of our ongoing efforts to bring Sonar6’s awesomeness to the world, we had a go at making a corporate video. But not just any corporate video; we made one that doesn’t suck!

Performance reviews are awesome…

John, Mark and Mike receive some creative direction from Kai.

The actors (now collectively referred to as ‘talent’) proved surprisingly responsive to direction, and the process wasn’t at all similar to herding a horde of recalcitrant cats.

Pete interviews some random passers-by, who all agree Sonar6 is exactly what they’ve been waiting for all this time.

When asked to comment, Director/Producer/Filming Success Manager Kai Crow stated, “It was a lot of fun, and I’m surprised we pulled it off in three hours.” Here ‘surprised’ is shorthand for “not at all surprised, having (as I do) complete faith in the ability and professionalism of our talent”.

We were also thrilled to have Jason Jones join us for the shoot, all the way from San Francisco. He thought we were joking when we said he’d have to sit in a box – evidence of a breakdown in international communications? – but we soon set him straight.

We will of course make a grand announcement when the movie is set to premiere…

Cloud computing, SaaS, on-demand computing… more and more software is moving off hard drives and onto networks. Even these guys are getting in on the act. You know by now that Sonar6 is SaaS – but what does that mean?

What IS SaaS?

SaaS is software that’s hosted by a vendor and delivered to clients via a network (in Sonar6’s case, delivered via the internet and accessed with a web browser). Unlike ‘traditional’ software, there are no CDs, no DVDs, nothing to install.

Why not do it the usual way?

SaaS has a couple of major advantages over locally installed software: it usually costs less, and it’s far more flexible:

• You pay for the actual software, not for production and distribution costs
• You always have access to the latest versions, updates, upgrades and bug fixes
• You can influence the software’s evolution. Flexible development means SaaS solutions can easily adapt to the ways actual users interact with the software
• You avoid getting locked in to one product or one vendor. SaaS is usually subscription-based so if your needs change it’s relatively painless to switch to something different. It’s a little bit trickier to be that flexible if you’ve spent thousands of dollars on software and the tech to support it!

What do you need to know?

In our 5 Weeks to Really Useful Performance Reviews, we suggest some questions to ask vendors when you’re looking at performance management software. We go into specifics, but the things you need to know are the same regardless of the type of SaaS solution.

As a starting point, we quite like this list of considerations from Xactly Corp (a Sonar6 customer and a leading provider of on-demand sales compensation solutions, so they know whereof they speak!)