It’s not often that you see a CEO launching a Change.org petition drive and a Twitter hashtag campaign over a dispute with another company. But that’s exactly what Parker Conrad, the CEO and co-founder of the cloud HR software company Zenefits, has done in a battle of words with the payroll processing giant ADP.
In his blog posts about ADP’s move to cut off clients’ access to data through Zenefits, Conrad also directed customers to a Change.org petition directed at ADP’s CEO Carlos Rodriguez and asked them to air their complaints on Twitter using the hashtag #ADPeeved. But ADP has responded by filing suit against Zenefits and Conrad, claiming that statements by Conrad accusing ADP of anti-competitive practices are defamatory.
Zenefits offers businesses its human resources management services for free and is funded by commissions from insurers and other benefit providers. The company ran afoul of ADP, according to statements issued by ADP, because of its unorthodox approach to integration with ADP’s data. An ADP spokesperson has issued statements accusing Zenefits of poor security practices that could have exposed the personal identifying information of clients’ employees and taxing ADP’s systems by using “screen scraping” to get access to payroll data rather than through a partner data interface.
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