New Announcements at the HR Technology Conference

By Ian Alexander
Vice President of Marketing

We just got back from the HR Technology conference in Chicago where Cytiva exhibited. Though I heard talk that attendance was up, it felt like there were approximately the same number of attendees as last year. The big topic was integrated talent management suites and most all of the sessions focused on this to one degree or another.

This certainly validates Cytiva’s direction, as we launch our new SonicPerform performance management product in Q1 08.

While HR Technology has not historically been a great conference for Cytiva in terms of acquiring new clients, it is a great conference for HR professionals to attend to get their finger on the pulse of where HR technology is going. I attended one session where the VP of HR for Charles Schwab said that they have been bringing a team of people to HR Tech for the last four years and it has been invaluable to them in mapping out their talent management technology strategy.

During the show, we also announced the November availability of our new quality of hire tools that let clients track and report on the following hiring metrics:

· Percent of “first choice” hires. Companies will be able to track what percentages of the candidates they hire were at the top of their list of desired candidates.

· Tenure of new hires. SonicRecruit will track how long new hires stay with the company, and let organizations track reasons for leaving to help address issues regarding retention and success rate of hiring decisions.

· Percent of employment offers accepted. SonicRecruit will track what percentage of employment offers were accepted along with what percentage were rejected and why. This allows companies to measure the effectiveness of their offer packages and adjust them for maximum success.

These three metrics will be visually represented in SonicRecruit’s Analytics Dashboard, so that clients can not only track traditional metrics like time to hire, cost of hire and process bottlenecks, but they can get a clear representation of vital metrics for measuring just how effective they are at bringing in top talent.

In a recent study underwritten by Cytiva, AberdeenGroup found that “Best in Class” companies had three traits in common:

· 100% increased “quality of hire” in the previous 12 months
· 48% decreased “cost of hire” in the previous 12 months
· 54% hired their top choice candidate in more than half their hires in the previous 12 months

Finally, while at the conference, we were notified that Cytiva once again made Software Magazine’s list of the 500 largest software companies in the world. Once again, HR Technology was a busy conference.