I recently attended the HR Tech Conference at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago.  My initial impression is WOW!  I have to admit, this was my first time at this conference and I had pretty low expectations.  It’s nothing against the organizers, the vendors, the sessions… it’s just been a rough past 12 months if your title has anything in it where you are not adding revenue and incurring cost.  You don’t need me to speak about that!

So why was I surprised?  The vendor booths were nice, very nice.  I’m talking island booths that had 10-20 seats in front of 60 inch flat screen TVs, nice.  I have been going to trade shows for 20 years in a variety of different industries.  I watched a national sporting goods show have vendors with dual level booths that had full bars and hall of fame athletes completely vanish 5 years later.  I have seen booths like these at technology shows for several years, but not on the “non-revenue” side of business.

Even more surprising was that there were quite a lot of people at the event.  I haven’t gotten the numbers from HR Tech, but overall the sessions seemed pretty full and the exhibition hall was very busy.  At a few booths I went to visit, I had to wait in a line several people deep before I got to speak to someone.  A few vendors were throwing some small happy hours, but I didn’t see anything like there might have been before the credit crunch.

I noticed three main themes:

1. SaaS (Software as a Service) – While this genre has been around for a few years, it seemed that almost every vendor was either exclusively SaaS or had a SaaS version of their product.  Those vendors that didn’t appeared to have some of the quieter booths.

2. Integration – Taleo’s API called Taleo Connect seems to have made a huge impact in the industry and for some reason really caught people off guard.  When I spoke to people at Kennexa (Brass Ring), they acknowledged that they now had an API in the works, and it was pretty much in response to Taleo’s success.  More and more small or niche vendors are working with employers and integration is a key component in the decision process.

3. Looking at Tech to Help – I spoke with countless attendees that all had a similar response when I asked how things are looking.  “Somehow we are expected to put up similar or better numbers, with a staff that’s at most, half of what we used to have.  Oh and my budget is cut.”  Everyone was looking at technology solutions that will save them time as they are even more time poor than they used to be.

I’ll really be excited to attend next year’s conference.  I think it will be really interesting to see how many of these companies will still be able to attend next year as I think there will be a bunch that will bow out and merge with competitors.  There is obviously a huge competition right now between ATS vendors and Taleo really upped the bar with the new Taleo 10.  I look forward to seeing the response from companies like SAP, iCIMS, and Kennexa.  Only time will tell.