Press Releases

Authoria Wins Industry's First Integrated Talent Management Shootout at HR Technology Conference by Wide Margin

Company Garners More than 60 Percent of Votes -- Three Times the Votes Received by Any Competitor -- in Unprecedented Third Shootout Victory

Waltham, MA – October 20, 2008 – 

Authoria, Inc., the leader in comprehensive talent management solutions, has won the HR-technology industry's "First Talent Management Shootout" at the 11th Anniversary HR Technology® Conference & Exposition.

The HR Technology Shootout is widely regarded as the most prestigious competitive evaluation for HR solutions, with winners chosen entirely by senior HR and technology professionals in the audience. Authoria secured its third Shootout victory in as many competitions, defeating CornerStone OnDemand, Salary.com (Nasdaq: SLRY), and Softscape. The company won last year's "Integrated Performance and Recruiting Shootout," besting SuccessFactors (Nasdaq:SFSF), Vurv (now Taleo, Nasdaq:TLEO), and others, as well as the "Integrated Performance Management and Compensation Shootout" held in 2005.

"Enterprises evaluating talent-management solutions are increasingly focused on the ability of their managers, executives, and employees to use these solutions quickly and easily to drive real business results. We challenged this year's Shootout participants to demonstrate that their solutions meet the critical requirement of employers to retain, develop, reward, and effectively deploy their employees. Authoria deserves to be congratulated, once again, as the clear choice of our audience of senior HR and technology professionals."

– Bill Kutik, Technology Columnist for Human Resource Executive
magazine and HR Technology Conference Co-Chair

After viewing live demonstrations presented by all four competitors' CEOs, an audience of 835 HR executives and professionals (voting in real time, using handheld voting keypads) overwhelmingly selected Authoria's solution in all three real-world scenarios. Authoria received three times the number of votes of any of its three competitors.

Similar to prior years, the demonstrations followed sophisticated scenarios developed by industry experts Leighanne Levensaler, director of talent management research for Bersin & Associates, and Bill Kutik, Technology Columnist for Human Resource Executive® magazine and HR Technology Conference Co-Chair.

"Enterprises evaluating talent-management solutions are increasingly focused on the ability of their managers, executives, and employees to use these solutions quickly and easily to drive real business results," said Kutik. "We challenged this year's Shootout participants to demonstrate that their solutions meet the critical requirement of employers to retain, develop, reward, and effectively deploy their employees. Authoria deserves to be congratulated, once again, as the clear choice of our audience of senior HR and technology professionals."

Renowned as "the best conference in the world for attendees to learn about HR technology," Human Resource Executive's annual HR Technology Conference is the largest gathering of its kind, designed to help senior HR executives and managers leverage technology to achieve bottom-line business results.

During the competition, Shootout participants were required to conduct live demonstrations of their software performing the same three real-world scenarios, designed to highlight the experience of business users – employees, managers, and business leaders – in performing talent-management tasks. Specifically, the scenarios focused on:

• How an employee can be self-sufficient in identifying and expressing interest in the best-fit job opportunities within the organization. Shootout participants were required to present how they support talent profiles, job profiles, profile match-up, interest indicators, and internal candidate pools, as well as the feedback loop to managers and HR;
• How a manager allocates funds from a bonus pool to five direct reports. The manager must also identify top performers with high potential, for inclusion in a talent pool for development and succession-planning activities;
• How a business leader can use analytic tools and dashboards, to drive better performance across an enterprise and monitor progress on performance across multiple business units and geographies. The business leader must be able to diagnose problem performance areas, to differentiate high and low performers in a structured way, and to develop talent pools to improve bench strength and workforce performance.

Following each scenario, attendees voted for the participant they believed provides the best solution to the scripted problem. Authoria won all three scenarios by significant margins, garnering 55 percent, 64 percent, and 66 percent of the total votes cast for the four competitors.

"Conference attendees, like enterprise employers in general, are looking for solutions that best enable their workforce to meet talent challenges which drive demonstrable business results," said Tod Loofbourrow, Authoria Chairman and CEO. "This third Shootout win validates that our focus on manager success is a groundbreaking paradigm for talent management."

Also at the HR Technology Conference, Authoria introduced the latest release of Authoria Talent Management, with innovative succession planning and employee-development capabilities added to its integrated platform for recruiting, performance, compensation, development, and communications. 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.

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.