Your guide to selling against Zenefits [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Your guide to selling against Zenefits [pdf]

info.maxwellhealth.com

84 pointscgoodmac35 comments

"Give the illusion of self-service, but actually have a very high-touch, highservice model - Feedback we’ve gotten from groups that have left Zenefits to come back to the broker + Maxwell model is the increasingly poor level of service and responsiveness to urgent issues."

This rings true for us. We're a small company who would've blindly walked into zenefits if they had simply walked us through our enrollment process smoothly. Instead we had repeated paperwork glitches which always left out a few of us (from a very small group already) employees out of the quote/enrollment process.

We started looking at Trinet in parallel and to our astonishment found that the comparable health plans, from the same provider, available on Trinet, were significantly cheaper... (as in ... ~30%) for our situation. The Zenefits glitches were really a blessing in disguise for us.

(The key to these discounts was that with Trinet you're getting into a group plan... while Zenefits simply enrolls you as individuals if you're a small startup).

Right. I'm biased since I work at Justworks, but I'd argue that going w/ a PEO like Justworks (or Trinet in your case) offers both a better setup experience and a better software experience.

People talk about the fact that PEOs let you basically group-buy benefits (which is how you were able to get ~30% off your health plans), but the other nice thing about the PEO model is that it lets us bring everything (payroll/benefits/compliance) in-house, so we have full control over the entire experience and you don't have to worry about integrations.

This matches with my recent (April) experience doing benefits shopping.

I evaluated TriNet, JustWorks, Zenefits, and individual brokers.

We decided to go with a PEO for the same reasons. Not only is Zenefits just a broker, their quotes for insurance (which were MORE expensive for WORSE coverage) had a note at the bottom "These are just an estimate; prices subject to change based on <reasons> upon enrollment".

TriNet and JustWorks gave me firm pricing, had historical data on price increases, and gave me a contract stating they wouldn't rise above X%. Zenefits gave me none of these.

As a small business, our largest non-salary expense is benefits. The small price per employee per year for TriNet or JustWorks was more than paid for in cheaper, better benefits and peace of mind that I wasn't going to get HR sticker shock next year.

Yes, Zenefits has a slick, nice web UI - TriNet's is terrible - but a) I hardly need to go into it and b) neither does anyone else.

> Give the illusion of self-service, but actually have a very high-touch, highservice model

100% true.

We've used Zenefits for one year and it was very, very painful. It looks like self-service, but whatever you do in the UI is then processed manually. Out of 10 employees, 6 got big mistakes in their benefits. I had to delay a treatment because I was not sure I would be covered. It tooks 6 months to get everybody's benefits right.

I can second this. We've been with Zenefits for over a year now and the issues don't stop. Many of their "integations" occur in meatspace: when a change is made on the Zenefits dashboard, a Zenefits employee then manually updates the related service(s). This has resulted in a number of errors over the course of a year.

Additionally their are still issues with validation on their dashboard. We had a problem where the dashboard allowed an invalid value to be entered for a monthly 401k contribution that was a big pain to unwind.

So true. We tried Zenefits a while back, and the experience was terrible for our admin. Lots of missing info, uninformed reps, etc. However, we are back since we want, even need something better. It has been an improvement, so I chalk it up to growing pains.

When we tried Zenefits out last year, they were very transparent about this. The rep I spoke with told me upfront that a PEO would be more cost effective for a company of our size.

Is waiting until they implode from bad management a viable strategy? I remember reading on Quora, a prospective hire had offers at Zenefits and Uber, and asked for guidance in making his decision and the CEO of Zenefits came in and publicly revoked his offer.

http://www.businessinsider.com/zenefits-ceo-rescinds-job-off...

I guess there's an argument to be made against doing things like that publicly, but the prospective employee sounds like someone I wouldn't want to work with.

I agree. It sounds bad, until I RTFA. If I saw what the person said as an employee at Zenefits, I would've told my boss to rescind the offer.

If you expect all incoming outsiders to be excited about your company and have decided you can't convince those who aren't to become excited, you've got a cult, not a company.

Dissenting views? Skepticism? Interests that might not align completely with our delicate, fragile startup? Shun! Shun!

It's incredibly insecure. Maybe for the first ten hires you need that kind of alignment to get the culture vector pointing in the right direction with a significant magnitude. But after that? Having to defend your ideas to internal skeptics makes you stronger. Hiring rose-glasses yes men might let you coast for a while, but when the end comes, it will be swift (see e.g. RIM).

EDIT: I can maybe see doing this quietly, though it would be pretty hard to swoop in as CEO and rescind an offer without letting your employees on the interview loop know. I really think it's the public aspect of this behavior that bothers me.

Just think: what kind of chilling effect does this have on employee speech internally? It really projects a "get in line or get out" mentality.

I don't expect incoming outsiders to be excited. But I expect them to be open and curious, as opposed to looking for a buzzword. Seriously? Google is buzzword-worthy?

What are you talking about? The employee's issue was that Zenefits is not buzzy enough and he wants to work at Google.

The fact is, there are a set of universities and employers that open doors. Did you go to Harvard or MIT? Grad school at cmu? You get an interview. You're not necessarily hired, but you get an interview. Google is one of the employers that open doors in the same way; Zenefits isn't and probably never will be. There's nothing wrong with employees acknowledging reality and mapping out a career path.

We get that. And, don't work at a startup.

That shenanigan would be reason enough for me not to use Zenefits. How unprofessional.

I'm the benefits administrator for our startup (ahhh, the joys of being a cofounder) and we started before Zenefits was available. I might migrate there for the ease of management...

But I have to say, it really is hard to replace a good, responsive broker. They don't cost anything (they take the same commission Zenefits takes) and it's easy to get someone on the phone if the inevitable insurance mishap occurs. Then dealing with the insurance company is their problem, not yours.

If we started today, we would absolutely be on Zenefits. Now? I don't know if it's worth the migration.

Honestly, I'd mirror the comments in that PDF. I was one step removed from dealing directly with Zenefits at a small (<20 employee) company that switched to Zenefits. The experience was fairly negative overall; lots of manual work they had to do on their end, outdated plan offerings, broken integrations, etc. Basically self-serve for us was nonexistent because every time we tried to do something there was some exception (not code exception, just exceptional circumstances) that meant we had to contact a person anyway, and they weren't any more (or less, I guess) responsive than just going directly to a broker.

Sigh - I hope this marketing crap isn't what Hacker news turns into, marketing wars from startups.

If this was some actual customer experience, so be it, but its posted from

cgoodmac - PM from justworks.com - a "payroll and benefits" company...

If you agree with me, feel free to click 'Flag' on the parent post.

Hi nartz, the link isn't to any customer experience, just a .pdf I happened to find online and shared.

I agree it's slightly shady for a direct competitor to be posting anti-zenefits posts (at least without an acknowledgement). But fwiw, this thread is bringing out a bunch a people's own customer experiences so that's nice at least.

I disagree with you. I found the document somewhat interesting and the discussion so far really very interesting. Motivations of poster, who cares?

> Why would an HR person or a CFO EVER give up 1) expert benefits consulting 2) protection against the ACA 3) access to long-standing carrier relationships that allow for renewal negotiations 4) ability to support complex benefits strategies

I'm really not buying their case here.

1) Expert benefits consulting seems like something that could be made easily accessible via research online 2) Obamacare FUD? 3) Haggling is a feature? 4) This seems like expert consulting re-worded

> Rumor that they may have struck a deal with ADP to be their benefits administration system and replace TotalSource

Heh, guess not (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9679312)

Big reason we have a broker is time savings - just have them handle it and get back to work. It took me under an hour to get set up with a broker. It took me longer than that to figure out what the Zenefits cost/benefit was.

> 1) Expert benefits consulting seems like something that could be made easily accessible via research online

If you have the time to sort through it all and become an expert on the various products in the market. Oh, and if you make a mistake, you bear all the risk. Also, remember that most HR departments collect people who were terrible at every other job they've ever had -- these are not people you trust to do things correctly. You'll likely end up paying less in the long run if you pay someone else to do it where that is their entire job.

> 2) Obamacare FUD?

There is a lot of FUD around the ACA, but some of it is warranted. You don't know what changes the GOP is going to try to force through, and Obama himself keeps delaying implementation of certain requirements.

> 3) Haggling is a feature?

For a business it is. It's not even an inconvenience, you just hire a professional negotiator and if you save more than his fees (which is usually the case), you come out ahead. If you're not big enough for hiring a negotiator to make sense, you're not big enough to have leverage to negotiate in the first place.

> 4) This seems like expert consulting re-worded

It mostly is, but employment / tax law is not somewhere you want to read a few tutorials on the Internet and call it a day. Again, if you're big enough to worry about this, it'll be worthwhile to pay an expert consultant for the risk coverage alone.

> Rumor that they may have struck a deal with ADP to be their benefits administration system and replace TotalSource

If these discussions were going on, I suspect ADP's move to block Zenefits today was either a result of these negotiations breaking down, or a bezos-style move to get more leverage on this negotiation :)

I read this as Zenefits business model is so good that it's pissing off the entrenched lazy incumbents.

I read your comment as not knowing how sales works. These documents are standard practice.

You're both right (without the lazy part) Zenefits is doing so well that it's now viewed as a direct threat by incumbents who are putting together sales collateral to compete against them.

We're using Zenefits and like many of you here super disappointed by the experience for many of the same reasons listed over and over. The main reason we haven't moved away is that they've really automated the onboarding process. Gone are all those email/word doc/PDF's that get passed back and forth as you manually set up a new employee. (To the best of my knowledge) you can't replace that via a broker (which we had before)

Link is broken. Anyone have an archive?

The Google cache of the link still works.

I too am hoping to access the PDF.

Here's the battlecard: http://cloudoru.com/battlecard.html

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