The Amazing HR Technology Conference – Come Join Us

Once again it’s time to start making plans to come to Las Vegas (not Chicago this year, thank god) to the annual HR Technology Conference. This conference (October 3-5, 2011) is by far the biggest and most educational place to go to learn about HR technologies of all shapes and sizes. Not only do all the major vendors appear and announce some of their newest products, but Bill Kutik, the conference co-chair, has worked with his team to arrange some fascinating case studies in the application of new tools and systems.

A few of the sessions I”m excited to see: Facebook’s Molly Graham is going to show how Facebook manages performance and uses tool like Rypple and many others to manage the high-energy, fast-growing staff among one of the most dynamic companies in the world.  Randy MacDonald, SVP of HR from IBM will talk about how IBM manages its workforce and implements global talent analytics.  Dan Jessup, the VP of HR from Groupon and Dan Finnigan, CEO of JobVite (one of the hottest new companies in social recruiting) will show how Groupon attracts candidates as fast as they sell coupons.  And Bill has invited many more.

New Solutions for Performance and Talent Management

By the way, we all know that performance management is one of the most important parts of management (and also one of the most disliked).  Our brand new research on this topic shows that organizations with feedback-rich, development-centric performance management outperform their peers 3:1.  (Join our membership program for all the details.)

This year there are a whole flurry of new companies who intend to “reinvent” this area through rich feedback, gamification, coaching, and alignment tools.  (These include Rypple, ILoveRewards (a new approach to feedback-based rewards and recognition), Small Improvements (rapid feedback, wiki-style), as well as industry heavyweights SuccessFactors (now completed its acquisition of Plateau), Taleo (starting to deliver on its promise for Talent Intelligence), Lumesse (growing rapidly in Europe), CornerstoneOnDemand (the fastest growing LMS company), SumTotal (now the largest LMS comany with a brand new end-to-end HCM offering), Saba (now delivering one of the leading solutions for social learning), PeopleFluent (launching its very exciting new mobile talent system), Silkroad (staking out a claim in Asia Pacific and the US), and yes, Oracle and SAP (all these companies will be exhibiting and most have presentations at the conference).

Bersin & Associates at The HR Technology Conference

To help you better understand this brave new world, I will be hosting an “expert panel” (Bill is generous with these names) on Performance Management at 3:15 on Monday October 3.  Last year we had about 75 people there and we had a very vigorous discussion about how to select a performance management vendor, how to integrate performance management with development and learning, and many other “how-to” topics.  I’m happy to answer questions about your favorite vendors as well.

By the time this conference takes place, we will also have our 2011 Talent Management Systems Customer Satisfaction research ready, and I plan to introduce some of the findings in this meeting.  This will be of great interest to all of you.

Speaking about performance management, this year we released the results of nearly two years of research on performance management, and our brand new Performance Management Framework (you can download this overview at no charge.)  Stacia Garr, our senior analyst in this area, is finalizing the publication of the best-practice research in this area, and I will highlight this at my session.

Fig 1:  Bersin & Associates New Performance Management Framework

In addition to these important topics, we have been selected as a judge for the Candidate Experience Awards on October 4.  As the research partner to the Talent Board, we will also be developing a series of case studies on the winners.   This will be an important new event in the industry, focusing on one of the biggest “left-out” areas of recruiting – the experience of the poor job seeker!  The Talent Board will be celebrating the winners at the conference, so this is another reason to come to Vegas.

Discounted Tickets Available

Please come join us.  Just use the Promo Code BERSIN11 (all caps) when you register online to get $500 off the rack rate of $1,795. The discount expires September 19 – which is less than 10 weeks from today.

If you do intend to come, please send an email to info@bersin.com so we can make plans to meet with you at the conference.  We will have a variety of our analysts at the conference, and a special meeting room for 1:1 get-togethers.

This will be one of the most enjoyable events of the year (second only to our own IMPACT conference of course :-)).  I look forward to seeing you there.