Press Releases

Authoria Talent Management Helps Enterprises Fill Leadership Pipelines and Close Talent Gaps

New Authoria Development and Succession Capabilities Provide Visibility into Corporate Talent, More Effective Employee Development

Waltham, MA – October 14, 2008 – 

Authoria, Inc., the leader in comprehensive talent management solutions, today announced an imminent release of Authoria Talent Management with innovative succession planning and employee-development capabilities. The new capabilities help employers drive succession planning deeper into their organizations – gaining visibility into a broader talent pool – and better align their employee-development activity with their talent requirements.

Authoria is demonstrating the new capabilities at the HR Technology Conference & Exposition, at McCormick Place in Chicago (booth #909). The new release will be available to customers in the fourth quarter of 2008, via Authoria's SaaS (software as a service) delivery model.

Authoria Development and Succession™ allows line-of-business managers and HR professionals to easily assess the bench strength behind critical roles, and to develop talent pools and create succession slates that will quickly fill those roles with high-potential, top-performing employees. It is a vital component of Authoria Talent Management, the groundbreaking solution that uniquely gives HR professionals and business managers single-point access to all strategic talent functions, including recruiting, performance management, and compensation. Integration with these other functions enables users of Authoria Development and Succession to draw on performance and competency information to assess talent, allocate compensation to retain key employees in critical roles, or recruit outside the organization to fill leadership gaps.

"Filling gaps in the leadership pipeline remains the number-one talent challenge facing large employers," said Tod Loofbourrow, Authoria Chairman and CEO. "Current economic conditions make it all the more important for enterprises to fill key roles with the talent they already have in their organizations. Authoria's solution, which combines traditional 'top-down' succession-planning capabilities with powerful tools for 'bottoms-up' employee development, supports our customers' efforts to identify, engage, retain, and deploy their highly skilled employees."

Key features of the new release include:

• Talent Pools — HR professionals can create multiple talent pools that identify people with high leadership potential, for critical roles within the organization. Drilling down into talent pools gives ready access to vital performance, education, work history, and other relevant information on potential successors. Managers can assign appropriate development activities to enhance successors' readiness.
• Succession Slates — Managers and HR professionals can build and maintain succession slates to fill key roles. High-potential employees can be added to a slate by a manager, from a talent pool, or they can be identified via a search on employees' Talent Profiles.
• Succession Organization Chart — In a significant extension of Authoria's patent-pending Positive Impact™ Organization Charts, managers and HR professionals can now see the availability and readiness of successors to key positions directly from their actionable org charts. Managers can drill down to see details on the source of potential successors and their Talent Profiles.
• Bench Strength, Bench Health, Diversity, and Utilization Analytics — Managers and HR professionals can gain valuable insights into the "bench strength" and "bench health" for critical positions. They can see the slate of potential successors, and evaluate the readiness and flight risk of those people. They can also report on the diversity of succession pools and slates, and the risk of "over-utilization" of key people slated for multiple roles.

This is the fifth major release of Authoria Talent Management the company will have delivered during 2008. Leveraging a centralized "core," shared data, and a single, award-winning user interface, Authoria Talent Management enables HR professionals and business managers to maximize the effectiveness of their workforce in achieving business goals.

About Authoria
Authoria® helps the world’s most competitive employers achieve superior business results, by optimizing the way they recruit, develop, compensate, retain, and engage top talent. Designed for business managers as well as HR professionals, the company’s talent management solutions enable more effective recruiting, performance management, compensation management, and succession planning across an organization. Authoria serves more than 300 large organizations and 4 million managers and employees with our on-demand Internet-based solutions. Customer companies include Aetna, Alcon and Boeing.