The Puzzling World of HR Technology

Our beauty pageant series of webinars has become the buzz of the industry. This series of webinars covers a different area of HR technology with each event and is presented two times a month. The concept allows attendees to see presentations from up to six leading vendors in a fun and informative format where the audience votes on the winner at the conclusion. In November, iCIMS won the Talent Acquisitions Systems pageant and Cornerstone OnDemand won the Talent Management Systems pageant. Then in December, GeoLearning won the Learning Management Systems pageant. So far this month we had our Mid-Market Talent Acquisitions Systems pageant and iCIMS was crowned the winner and our Onboarding pageant where SilkRoad was the winner.

To view any of these past pageants, please visit the beauty pageant part of our website. We also have a full schedule of 2009 beauty pageants on our site and several vendors have asked that we create beauty pageants around additional topics, which we are currently in the process of scheduling.

The next exciting pageant will be on Performance Management Systems this Friday, February 6 where the participants will be Workscape, Sonar6, Cornerstone, SumTotal Systems, and Salary.com.

HRIS will take place on February 20 and at this point we have Lawson Software, NuView Systems, Salary.com HRMS & Payroll and Spectrum HR. Several other invites are out but we know how hard it is for some vendors to get up on stage and strut their stuff.

The 90-minute webinar agendas will look like this:

Intro by HRchitect

Overview of the marketplace by HRchitect

Short vendor presentations (vendor order will be determine at random)

Q&A of vendors from the audience

Crowning of the Winner

Wrap-up

The sessions are moderated by Matt Lafata, VP of Sales & Marketing for HRchitect. HRchitect developed a format to help guide each vendor with an outline of what should be covered during each portion of the pageant.  Since we have billed this as a beauty pageant, we tried to come up with pageant categories for vendors to loosely follow. Of course each vendor is free to follow their own format as this is simply a guideline:

Evening gown – To start off each portion, we are asking the vendor to come out in their best ‘outfit’ – corporate overview, history, specific identity, financial viability, marquee clients, leadership team, etc. This will be the grand entrance.

Swimsuit – Here the vendors will show some skin in this portion – usability, configurability, etc.

Talent – This portion will cover functionality, technology/integration, global ability, etc.

Interview – This will be the Q & A section from the audience. 

These beauty pageants are designed to give the audience a quick overview of the leading vendors and we are looking for creativity in presentations. Some of the past participants have gotten extremely creative in their presentations and we thank them for their time and efforts in doing this.

Here is the schedule of upcoming beauty pageants along with instructions for registering:

February 6 – 11am CST – EPM (Employee Performance Management)  
February 20 – 11am CST – Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS)
March 6 – 11am CST – Time & Attendance 
March 27 – 11am CST – Workforce Planning
April 10 – 11am CST – Compensation Management
April 17 – 11am CST – Succession Planning

Watch this blog and our web site for updates on all of our upcoming beauty pageants and register today so you won’t be left puzzled by HR Technology!

Matt Lafata, HRchitect