Building GraceBlocks

A few months back, my husband Mike and I got to experience the sale of SmashFly, a company Mike founded back in 2007. We both had the fortune of working together and growing SmashFly, it was an amazing experience, one I wouldn’t trade for anything. We have only high hopes and well wishes for everyone at SmashFly and their new owner, Symphony Talent. While some may have marked this moment with a nice trip to Hawaii, we are builders at heart. So naturally, we welcomed this change with the transition of Mike officially joining a venture that we are starting here at GraceRock.

A little background:

GraceRock is a consulting business. I’ve said to colleagues that work at GraceRock has been like rummaging through boxes of old photos in my closet. Most of our work is with HR practitioners who have adopted varying HR systems (some of which we helped to build). We work to help optimize integrations, training, adoption, deployment and governance. Like those old photos, sometimes the experience is cringe-worthy:

• Is that green and orange color scheme from Y2K still in use? oh yes it is, if you know where to look, it is very much alive and well.
• Does it still take me 10 seconds to get the search results to load? afraid so.
• Why did we think it was a good idea to combine the location and department fields? that one is likely my biggest embarrassment.

These products are serving their purpose, but they also caused us to ask the question, is there a better way? If so, should we focus on it? Answering those questions has put us on the path to building GraceBlocks.

So what is GraceBlocks?

GraceBlocks will be an inter-operable system for building amazing software, block by block. It will be ideal for recruiters simply because we intimately know this use case, but the solution is about more than that. Every feature is walked back to its core, and from there we build the best foundation possible. For example, instead of building a purpose built job requisition module, GraceBlocks will offer administrators building blocks. Use them to define requisitions, candidates, message exchanges, tags, folders, companies, places, templates, buildings, manufacturing parts, trucking orders, rental properties, you name it. These GraceBlocks will be built using modern user experience design and 2020 technology frameworks. They will easily connect to one another and/or other systems. Our approach is inspired by the emerging low-code/no-code movement we believe is revolutionizing software as we know it. We believe with the right focus and a little luck, GraceBlocks will change the face of HR tech.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be discussing our beliefs about core tenets of business software systems and how these are impacting how we build GraceBlocks.

Initial goal:

Early beta later this year. Request early access here.

In the meantime:

GraceRock’s team of consultants are still going strong delivering HR technology consulting services. If you have a need, we can help you optimize it, integrate it, automate it, train it, you name it! In doing so, you’re also helping to fuel the next generation of amazing HR technology.

‍