ICIMS, HRCHitect and Beauty Pageants- Is it All Just Skin Deep?

By Ian Alexander

I just saw a press release touting ICIMS’ win in the HRchitect Mid-Market Applicant Tracking System Beauty Pageant. We also participated in this pageant. It was a lot of fun to be involved.

These pageants allow vendors to present their solutions and the webinar audience to vote.
The audience vote format works great as long as the vendors don’t stack the audience with their own voters.

So when ICIMS won, and by a huge margin, myself and other vendors couldn’t understand it. Most people I talked to didn’t think ICIMS presentation was all that compelling. So I had to figure out what happened.

According to the webcast numbers, 36% of the attendees voted for ICIMS. That’s a landslide. (Note: By request, I have removed the actual absolute numbers for this post since it was first published).

But nearly half of those votes came from New Jersey residents, another 13% came from NY residents and an additional 7% came from PA residents. ICIMS is located in Hazlet, NJ.

Altogether, potential votes from ringers in the immediate geographic area represented 71% of the total ICIMS votes (forgive me, I am a marketer. I segment in my sleep). And that’s not to mention votes that could have come from field offices and voters that were thoughtful enough to cloak their locations. To be clear, votes were discounted that came from any emails from a vendors' domain. These are hotmail/gmail type audience members.

Now, New Jersey represents about 2.5% of the U.S population, yet it represented almost 20% of the total audience of this webinar.

I got several WTF? emails from people who viewed the presentations, some biased and some unbiased. The consensus was that ICIMS came in third.

So did we get outmarketed? Yes and no. We spent more time on the quality of our presentation than the size of our audience, as I am sure some of the other vendors did as well. And it showed. In my highly biased opinion, our presentation killed. In hindsight, though, that was not the right decision. In all honesty, I was not too surprised because I had watched the previous pageant that ICIMS won months earlier and clearly thought that Silkroad gave a vastly superior presentation.
But in the long run, this kind of stuff inevitably hurts your brand. Your company and product brand is based on what you do, not what you say. So, in that sense, we stayed true to our brand.

I can’t give you a direct link to the recorded pageant because it is currently unavailable on the HRchitect site, but here is a link to the pageant site: http://hrchitect.com/News/Pageant. Perhaps the link will get fixed and you can judge for yourself.

As for HRchitect, I feel bad for them because I believe they really are trying to provide useful information to their audience in an entertaining way. When vendors try to rig the system, it’s not fair to the hosts and sponsors of the webinar who go out of their way to provide an unbiased forum to their audience. Based on my conversations with them, I know they are looking at ways to prevent this kind of thing in the future, which is good. They are potentially hurt the most by this kind of thing. I would like to see these beauty pageants succeed, and would love to participate in the future, once the kinks get worked out.

In the meantime, look for Cytiva to participate in an HRchitect Web Mingle call in Podcast on April 10. More details as the time draws nearer.

2009 Outlook

By Ian Alexander

It has been a busy fourth quarter and I have let the Sonic Blog languish. My first New Year’s resolution is to get back to regular posts for 2009.

First a couple of 2009 predictions:

-Barack Obama will be inaugurated as this Nation’s first African American President
-The world’s economy will see an unprecedented upheaval
-The Arizona Cardinals will face the Pittsburgh Steelers in the SuperBowl

Enough voodoo, here is an update on Cytiva:

The New Year holds a lot of new initiatives for the Sonic line of products. Most significantly, we are holding our first SonicRecruit / SonicPerform user conference October 22-23 in San Francisco. More info on that conference is available here. SonicSummit will be a two day event and include a private hosted dinner at Forbes Island, a floating restaurant off of Pier 39. We are still putting together the program which will include case studies, in-depth product workshops, talent management industry trends and more. If you have any ideas for presentations or would like to participate, contact me here.

We are finishing up our beta for our new enterprise version of our SonicPerform employee performance management software to be released this quarter. We worked with a couple companies, including a 3500 employee cable services organization that completed their end of year evaluations without a hitch. Look for a case study over the next couple months.

Cytiva is also in the process of rolling out our new integrated eVerify, I-9 tool and new resume parsing technology for our SonicRecruit recruiting software.

We recently competed in the HRchitect Mid Market Talent Acquisition System Beauty Pageant. That was a lot of fun and we got great feedback on our presentation. Someone asked me if SonicRecruit is really the old Projectix applicant tracking software. I wondered if that is a rumor going around or if someone got us mixed up with First Advantage, who acquired the product a few years ago. For the record, SonicRecruit was built from scratch by Cytiva and is not Projectix. I think the best recap of that particular event can be found here.

Finally, we are coming off of a record sales year in 2008. Though we are coming into 2009 strong, it looks like this will be a tough year for a lot of businesses. Certainly hiring will be down in some industries, but resume volume will be up and retention of needed skills to do more with less will become even more important. Hiring and retaining the right people will become even more difficult. In that environment great talent acquisition and employee performance review and performance management tools are as vital as ever.