There are few things we enjoy more here at Acuity than getting to interact with 100s of other forward-thinking tech lovers, and that’s exactly what we got to do this week at the Zenefits HR|One event in New York City. For those of you that couldn’t make it – you missed out. But not to worry! We are giving you a behind-the-scenes recap of some of our favorite moments from the event.

Join our founder and COO, Matthew May, as he wanders the halls of the Waldorf Astoria (along with a few of our favorite partners) in search for the future of HR as we know it.

The Future of HR, Revealed!

When we arrived in New York City, flying in from Atlanta, Clay and I were welcomed by a flurry of snow. We scoped out the exhibit hall inside the Waldorf Astoria, where we were about to meet over 500 folks interested in streamlining their back office.

We almost immediately ran into our friend Lyla from JazzHR – a tool we use internally to streamline our recruiting and interviewing processes. We started using Jazz when we hit about 20 people and were adding about two per month, making it difficult to keep up with the pipeline. We asked Lyla to talk a bit about how companies of different sizes would use the tool:

Later in the day, we got a chance to hit up one of our favorite partners, Expensify, to explore what’s new on their roadmap. We have been hearing so much about AI recently, and wanted to understand how that would eventually play into their platform. Here is what Matt had to say:

Next up, we had a chance to chat with a partner near and dear to our hearts, Xero. A lot of folks don’t fully understand where Xero ends and Acuity begins, so we asked Rafael from team Xero to take a stab at the answer:

We then turned our attention to the hosts of the day, Zenefits, to break down why they decided to throw this event. They recently launched their Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum pricing and are trying to get the word out about key features of each tier: Employee Management, Benefits Administration, Premium HR, Payroll, and Certified HR Specialists.

Because a lot of our clients fall under the 5-10 person team range, we made our way to the QuickStart booth to learn about getting started with HROne. We actually hijacked the QuickStart team while they were in the middle of signing up a new customer…sorry to crash the party:

We really wanted to get to the core of their Documents feature next, so we tracked down one of the engineers working on documents and compliance at Zenefits (side note: that is how we roll – we skip marketing and sales and go straight to the engineers themselves) and she walked us through what their team has been working on:

Our grand finale for the day? Meeting Bud, the self-proclaimed “oldest person working at Zenefits.” We let Bud talk about whatever he wanted because…well, he’s Bud. We learned about the #AskBud blog at Zenefits (the HR version of #AskAcuity). I later learned that there are actually #AskBud t-shirts at Zenefits and I hope to acquire one in the near term (hint, hint). This was probably my favorite interview of the day because…you’ll see.

That about sums up our Zenefits HR|One recap. A big thanks to the Zenefits team for letting us join, exhibit and talk with so many wonderful folks about what we do! If you’re interested in Zenefits, learn more here. Here is the final recap:

For more insights into brilliant HR tips for your business, tune in for our live webinar with Zenefits, February 16 at 2:00pm EST. Save your spot right here.