The HRchitect Beauty Pageant series of webinars, which has become the buzz of the industry, returns after a two month summer hiatus.

This series of webinars covers a different area of HR technology with each event. The concept allows attendees to see presentations from up to six leading vendors in a fun and informative format where the audience votes on the winner at the conclusion.

In November, iCIMS won the Talent Acquisitions Systems pageant and Cornerstone OnDemand won the Talent Management Systems pageant. Then in December, GeoLearning won the Learning Management Systems pageant. In January, we had our Mid-Market Talent Acquisitions Systems pageant and iCIMS was crowned the winner and our Onboarding pageant where SilkRoad was the winner. In February we covered Employee Performance Management where SumTotal Systems won and then mid-market HRIS where Spectrum HR was the winner. In March it was all about Workforce Planning Systems and Infohrm walked away with the crown. April brought us Compensation Systems where Workstream walked away with the crown and then we finished up the first leg of beauty pageants with Time & Attendance Systems in June, where Legiant was crowned the winner.

To view any of these past pageants, please visit the beauty pageant part of our website. We have a full schedule of 2009 beauty pageants on our site for the remainder of the year, and several vendors have asked that we create beauty pageants around additional topics, which we are currently in the process of scheduling.

The next exciting pageant, the eleventh in the series, will be on the ever popular Talent Acquisition Systems and will take place on Friday, August 21. The participants will be top vendors in this space, Hodes IQ, HRsmart, iCIMS, SilkRoad, and Taleo.

The 90-minute webinar agendas will look like this:

Intro by HRchitect
Overview of the marketplace by HRchitect
Short vendor presentations (vendor order will be determine at random)
Q&A of vendors from the audience
Crowning of the Winner
Wrap-up

The sessions are moderated by Matt Lafata, VP of Sales & Marketing for HRchitect.

HRchitect developed a format to help guide each vendor with an outline of what should be covered during each portion of the pageant. Since we have billed this as a beauty pageant, we tried to come up with pageant categories for vendors to loosely follow. Of course each vendor is free to follow their own format as this is simply a guideline:

Evening gown – To start off each portion, we are asking the vendor to come out in their best ‘outfit’ – corporate overview, history, specific identity, financial viability, marquee clients, leadership team, etc. This will be the grand entrance.

Swimsuit – Here the vendors will show some skin in this portion – usability, configurability, etc.

Talent – This portion will cover functionality, technology/integration, global ability, etc.

Interview – This will be the Q & A section from the audience.

These beauty pageants are designed to give the audience a quick overview of the leading vendors and we are looking for creativity in presentations. Some of the past participants have gotten extremely creative in their presentations and we thank them for their time and efforts in doing this.

Watch this blog for updates and visit http://hrchitect.com/News/Pageant for a listing of upcoming HRchitect Beauty Pageants and to register so you won’t be left puzzled by HR Technology!

Matt Lafata, HRchitect