Imperative: Full Tech Ownership for a Breakthrough HR Platform
Client
Who do you turn to when you need to help your team up their game? In one word, it’s Imperative. In a time when the workforce is a mix of in-person and remote teams, there are certainly a lot of rough edges to smoothen. After all, a team that plays well together, grows together.
Imperative affords organizations the benefits of high-impact conversations and relationships, especially when employees are distributed across time zones and come from diverse backgrounds.
How exactly does this Seattle-based $6.4 million-dollar corporation achieve the impossible with your workforce? It applies an innovative approach known as peer coaching—a process that enables you (the employer) to positively influence employee careers and build a transforming workplace culture.
Those in the hiring and recruitment business at leading companies are happy to have such a relevant tool to meet the needs of the emerging workforce.
Customers have kept faith in Imperative’s platform. Zillow has used it to build community among managers, Service Express uses it to explore continuous change across its ranks, and Hasbro has built resilient manager networks via Imperative.
ICF uses Imperative to integrate its employees across functions and locations—a basic use case for many companies today. Boston Scientific is making innovation and inclusion a reality by using Imperative, while GSK is successfully reintroducing the human connection factor in a technical environment.
Other companies with glowing reviews of Imperative include heavyweights such as Airbnb, MetLife, and Sony Music.
Peer Coaching
Peer coaching, according to Imperative, is a fully automated video-based coaching paradigm that puts every employee in the shoes of an effective coach. It’s a way for two people to come together and ask each other questions, leading to a conversation where one person receives coaching that inspires them to take ownership of their expectations.
The system requires no training, but provides a dynamic and structured online environment. What does this achieve? Every employee becomes a coach at no higher cost than traditional coaching.
Peer coaching affords companies key benefits such as higher employee retention, development, fulfillment, and productivity. It combines interaction with structure and offers a level playing field to everyone involved.
One impact a peer coach can have is to put things in proper perspective, while focusing on the positive. In the process, relationships happen that allow everyone to reflect on critical areas in their professional life and things they want to work on.
Peer coaching guarantees a stronger organizational fabric and workforce. It naturally adapts itself to meet the needs of every employee.
The Industry
Imperative is a strong performer in the HR technology or HR tech industry. Human resources has taken on new dimensions over the last couple of years. These momentous developments include the increasing adoption of technology across the breadth of the industry. So we don’t jump ahead of ourselves, it’s appropriate to describe HR tech in some detail.
HR Tech
HR tech is a term that comprises technology tools—software and hardware included—employed to automate the various human resources functions in an organization.
Typical functions that HR tech supports include talent acquisition and management, employee payroll and compensation, benefits administration, performance administration, and workforce analytics.
The core aim of HR technology is to ensure that people and process specialists work more effectively to deliver a better employee experience, especially in the emerging hybrid workplace environment.
Modern HR tech such as Imperative’s peer coaching platform leverages bleeding-edge technologies like the cloud and AI to effectively match employees using predictive organizational network analytics and fulfillment profiling data.
Execution
Iterators partnered with Imperative to build a first-of-its-kind purpose-oriented peer coaching platform:
- Provided an enthusiastic team of developers, deeply invested in Imperative’s mission from the start.
- Continued to lead the development roadmap after Imperative relocated from New York to Seattle—even after the original technology team moved on.
- Offered full-spectrum presence across all stages, including ideation, direction, active development, and enterprise-level SLA support.
- Ensured the Imperative web app delivers a clean UI/UX for extended employee sessions—by design.
- Strategically built with Scala for robust enterprise support, leveraging deep JVM expertise to deliver more than generic HR tech.
Recognizing every employee as a potential peer coach, we embedded actionable analytics in the platform, unlocking organization-wide insights into productive connections and measurable impacts.
The Imperative platform, as built by Iterators, guides employees through a straightforward four-step cycle:
- Each employee creates a profile showing how they work best.
- Smart peer matching uses layers of data to recommend only high-impact connections—validated by “Imperative Proof” that 79% of conversations are rated “very helpful” or “breakthrough,” and 93% are described as “positively impacting” for employee success.
- Teams engage in three to five dynamic conversations to build trust, foster new connections, and collaborate to solve problems.
- After each cycle, employees are matched with new peers to deepen connection, bust silos, and strengthen engagement.
Working with a comprehensive partner like Iterators also means seamless integration of regulatory and voluntary compliance—bolstering the trustworthiness of both platform and brand.
- Embedded SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria—security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy—into the platform from the ground up.
- Custom controls were developed to meet the specific needs of Imperative’s SOC 2 report, ensuring transparency for users, regulators, investors, and suppliers.
In addition to the core platform, Iterators also delivered an assessment product and video-based product for Imperative, while consistently providing support for enterprise security and marketing web enhancements. Our team remains ready with server support whenever Imperative or its clients need it.
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