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:
- How TM vendors are really trying to develop integrated end-to-end solutions sans the recruitment module.
- Acknowledging the current economic situation and the workplace realities/pressures of their customers.
- Off-the-shelve/on-premise vs. SaaS solutions – SaaS is the winner (sorry, Lawson).
- Longevity. Will they be around in 5-10 years? Most of them have already been around for around 10 years and weathered the 2001-2003 bust, but this is a different story. (More on that when I blog about my recent interview with nowHIRE president, Joseph Impastato.)
- Smartifying the software. Really.
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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2 comments:
Informative post. I was searching for some information on onboarding and came to this blog. I am also engaged with the onboarding activities of my company and i needed some stuff related to the softwares related to onboarding.
Hi Kevin,
Interesting to find so many links of TA firms at the same place. You can also check HireLabs presentation to see its amazing products and solutions for talent management.
http://www.hirelabs.com
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