HR leaders, it's not just you — the benefits buying process is absurd – HR Dive

Choosing employee benefits is a nightmare. Trust me, I know; as a serial entrepreneur I’ve been purchasing employee benefits for over a decade. Every single time I go through this process, my team has to answer the same frustratingly simple questions: 

What benefits are other companies like us offering?
Which benefits providers should we talk to, and which should we avoid?
How much should we expect to pay?

Getting answers to these questions is surprisingly difficult. It might take several months of meeting with a broker, going through RFP responses and sitting through demos with benefits vendors. And at no point along this journey is there a modern user experience. It’s just PDFs, email conversations and spreadsheets that our team puts together. 

It often feels like buying a used car, or trying to rent an apartment in a popular NYC neighborhood — the other parties have all of the information, while I’m flying blind, up against a deadline and need to make a decision.

For better or worse, we’re not alone. Employers large and small face the same challenges when trying to purchase benefits for their employees. 

Why is this so darn complicated? So many options, nowhere to go.

Funding for digital health start-ups totaled $14 billion in 2020 — nearly double compared to 2019. That means that dozens of new benefits companies are popping up every single week. It turns out no one is able to keep pace with this explosion of new benefits providers. Brokers struggle, HR professionals struggle, even VCs struggle to stay on top of who the latest providers are. 

With this high volume of new vendors joining the benefits space, this already complex buying process is getting more complicated by the day. And we all have more questions than answers. “Do these providers work with companies of your size?” “Do they operate where your employees are?” “Do they work with fully insured health insurance plans?” “Do they offer in-network reimbursements with your insurance carriers?” No one, not even the largest benefits brokerages in the country, has done an effective job of staying on top of this. 

The result? In every benefits buying process, you have to start from scratch. You turn to Google and search, hoping that something relevant pops up. You ask your broker for recommendations. You message HR groups you’re in for advice. The HR groups are great, but all that institutional knowledge disappears into “the feed” over time. Your broker only recommends what they’re most familiar with. And Google only shows you which vendors are good at getting onto the first page of Google. 

The problem is we’re lacking a central place to start our benefits search. We need an unbiased place to search and get feedback from peers, without the worry of funny-business and pay-to-place schemes coloring what they’re seeing. 

Last year, Nava started collaborating with members of the HR community to fix this problem. 

Introducing the Nava Benefits Search Engine.

The Nava Benefits team has produced the first (and only) community-driven, crowd-sourced benefits search engine. It’s available right now and it’s free to use.

We started out by collecting information on tens of thousands of digital health companies and curated that down into a list of vendors that a) operate in the United States, and b) currently sell to employers. 

Then we pulled together benefits data on thousands of technology startups to provide real-time benchmarks across the most popular benefits categories. This allows a 76-person tech startup to know how many other companies like them offer mental health, childcare or fertility benefits.

Finally, we pulled in the HR community to provide unbiased feedback on the vendors they’re using. You’ll find negative reviews, positive reviews and everything in between. This is about HR professionals sharing their knowledge to help other HR professionals make better decisions. 

Best of all? This is a community you can trust. Nava doesn’t charge any vendors to participate and we don’t (and won’t) offer the ability for them to pay us money to rank higher. Nava is a benefits brokerage — we make money when employers buy benefits with us. Our benefits search engine is designed to be fair, neutral and open to everyone (Nava customer or not). 

We’re doing this because Nava is on a mission to bring high-quality, affordable healthcare to all Americans, starting with the 150M who get insurance through their employer. And if we want to accomplish that big goal, we have to jumpstart innovation in the benefits space, then make sure it gets into the hands that need it.

This is a tool for the HR industry, by the HR community — but your peers need your help building this.

Here’s where you come in. If you could take a few minutes to add a vendor review, we’re that much closer to building the tool HR leaders deserve. The more reviews we add, the better the tool will become for all of us.