Press Releases

Authoria Wins First Integrated Performance and Recruiting Shootout at HR Technology Conference

Audience of HR Professionals Overwhelmingly Selects Authoria Solution Over SuccessFactors, Vurv, and HRsmart

Waltham, MA – October 15, 2007 – 

Authoria, Inc., the leader in integrated talent management solutions, won the HR-technology industry’s first Integrated Performance and Recruiting Shootout at the 10th Anniversary HR Technology Conference & Exposition. The HR Technology Shootout is the most visible and prestigious competitive evaluation in the world for HR solutions. The winners are chosen entirely by HR and technology professionals in the audience. Authoria has won the event both times it has entered, having beaten SuccessFactors, Vurv, and Workstream in the industry’s first Integrated Performance Management and Compensation Shootout held two years ago.

The more than 500 human-resource professionals attending and voting in the Shootout chose Authoria’s solution in all three real-world scenarios, after witnessing live demonstrations from all four competitors, presented by the firms’ CEOs. The demonstrations followed scenarios prepared by industry experts Leighanne Levensaler, Principal Analyst with Bersin & Associates, and Bill Kutik, Technology Columnist for Human Resource Executive magazine and HR Technology Conference Co-Chair.

“An effective talent-management strategy has to include the integration of recruiting and performance management, so all the information gathered about new employees during recruiting is not lost to the organization, as it is right now,” said Kutik. “We challenged the participants in this year’s Shootout to bridge the gulf between these two critical talent-management functions. Authoria deserves to be congratulated as the clear choice of our audience of HR executives and professionals.”

Hailed as the “world’s best conference on HR Technology,” Human Resource Executive’s annual HR Technology Conference is the world’s largest, designed to help senior HR executives and practitioners seize the business benefits of technology and ultimately improve their organizations’ bottom line.

All four Shootout participants were required to conduct live, real-time demonstrations of their software across the same three scripted real-world scenarios. The scenarios focused on each vendor’s ability to demonstrate:

• How an HR generalist identifies the attributes of a top performer (experience, competencies, and performance feedback) to create a position description/job profile, initiates a requisition for a new position, and communicates it to the recruiter;
• How a recruiting specialist reviews a pool of internal and external candidates, determines which sources provide the best talent (as measured by performance ratings and quality-of-hire metrics), and conducts a search for additional candidates; and
• How a hiring manager creates a personalized development plan for a new employee, based on the valuable candidate information captured during the recruiting process, and how the talent management solution tracks and provides analytics on the employee’s performance to drive ongoing recruiting of high-quality talent.

At the conclusion of each scenario, the HR professionals in attendance voted (with handheld electronic voting devices) for the company they felt provided the best solution to the scripted problem. Authoria won all three scenarios handily.

“The verdict from the HR Technology Shootout is clear and decisive,” said Tod Loofbourrow, Authoria Chairman and CEO. “The audience at the conference and the market overall are looking for strategic solutions to critical business needs for talent management. In our demonstration we showed how we solve the recruiter's need to quickly and cost-efficiently locate the best candidates, how we solve the business manager’s need to identify a strong performer and move a quality hire into a new position, and how we solve the IT problem of ensuring security, compliance, and integration with other systems. This win, coupled with our win in the Performance and Compensation Shootout two years ago, clearly demonstrates our leadership in the integrated talent management market.”

Also at the HR Technology Conference, Authoria introduced a new release of Authoria Recruiting, which furthers the company’s innovations in Quality of Hire by empowering hiring managers and recruiters to better define hiring requirements and by extending the hiring process to include participants who don’t use a dedicated recruiting solution.

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 integrated talent management (ITM) 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, Boeing, and Reuters.