The Talent Management HRchitect Beauty Pageant – Smartify that Software!

The second HRchitect Beauty Pageant was last Friday and it was again a pleasure to attend. HRchitect has a great gig going on with these pageants, giving top HR suppliers the opportunity to pitch their wares in 7-8 minutes to a crowed of potential buyers, competitors, investors, movers, shakers and other industry folk.

The latest pageant was all about talent management, a nice segue from last week's talent acquisition pageant. The players were Halogen, Plateau Systems, Salary.com, Cornerstone OnDemand and Workscape.

Like last week, I listened to each presentation with primarily a marketing ear, but also as a potential buyer. Overall the presentations were better than the TA crowd – but still enough jargon already.

I'll come back to that. The takeaway themes for me were:

Yeah, there's the money shot – smartify. Love it. Now stop it.

I was surprised that the presentations static and dry sometimes, like they were presenting to an internal team. Only Authoria last week incorporated a live demo. Nobody did this week.

The winner for me – and the rest of the crowd – was Cornerstone OnDemand. Nice work.

Their product marketing theme of "Connect, Develop, Perform" was dynamic and really hit the pain points of potential buyers. The presentation was very conversational, but the big score for me, and what differentiated them the most, was their emphasis on workplace social networking for talent management – onboarding, shared training/learning, performance support, internal recruiting, etc.

Refreshing and well done. Time for turkey.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Post by Kevin Grossman

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