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Ron Hanscome’s serious thoughts of moving from HRchitect to Kenexa (profile) began during Kenexa’s “analyst day” this past April. But Hanscome, the new veep of product strategy, met Kenexa’s CEO more than five years ago, when Hanscome was at the META Group, and always had in the way back of his mind that Kenexa could be an interesting future employer.

At the analyst day, “the connection got rekindled,” he says. The company was looking for someone who could “bring it all together, think holistically” — with “it” referring to the company’s diverse group of products.

Hanscome’s name and face are as familiar to recruiting-conference-aholics as Jason Corsello, Sammy Jo’s Pop, and stress balls. Before Kenexa and HRchitect (profile), he was an Oracle VP, overseeing its HR tech products.

Hanscome had joined HRchitect about a year ago, and led that company’s creation of the “The Suite Life of Integrated Talent Management” report.

“Ron is not the kind of resource that is easily replaced, and he brought a lot to the table,” says HRchitect’s bizdev director Matt Lafata. “Fortunately, everything we do at HRchitect is done in a very collaborative manner so one person doesn’t make or break any project, or practice. Ron worked with a team of consultants who are continuing on projects without skipping a beat. Ron was very good at sharing knowledge and working as a team player. As a result of all of that, we are certainly keeping our eyes and ears open for a similar-caliber person to lead our strategic planning group and in the meantime, our VP of Consulting Services, Dan Katavola, is overseeing the handful of people we have involved in strategic planning projects.”

Hanscome found Kenexa attractive partly because of its emphasis on the science of assessment and “fit”; it brags about its 100 I/O psychologists on staff. “They’ve got science around measuring fit, measuring assessment, that really adds to the technology as the delivery vehicle,” he says. “Case study after case study.”

Three Favorites

In a recent report for Think Panmure, Nate Swanson analyzed Kenexa and its competitors from a Wall Street perspective, writing:

Our best three HCM ideas are Taleo, SuccessFactors, and Kenexa. Taleo and SuccessFactors, pure-play on-demand vendors within the HCM space, are pulling away from competitors such as Oracle and SAP with product depth, breath, and functionality. We see Taleo and SuccessFactors creating innovative ways to further extend their product reach through the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and the integration with new social networking sites. With recurring revenue contract terms lasting three to five years, Taleo and SuccessFactors should have some near-term insulation even if the current economic environment gets worse. We expect each company to meet or beat our estimates. We like Kenexa as an attractive value play within the HCM space, but note the company’s recruitment outsourcing services may be more sensitive to the current economic headwinds. The company’s recently announced acquisition of Quorum should help diversify this risk as the company is able to expand and strengthen its services in EMEA, an area previously identified as a weakness.

At mid-year, employers are choosing to dip their toes in the outsourcing pool, rather than jump in feet first. Attempts at wide-scale HR outsourcing haven’t been successful, mainly because vendors are underestimating the costs and companies won’t settle for cookie-cutter solutions.

A more selective outsourcing approach allows vendors and employers to tackle each function independently, understand the requirements, and then customize the implementation and refine the processes before moving on. At least for now, that’s the direction managers are taking.

“Comprehensive outsourcing of HR administration hasn’t worked out as expected for either party,” says Mark Marcon, senior research analyst and director for Robert W. Baird & Company, Inc. “I think most of the vendors under-estimated the costs and the profitability of these contracts, so there’s been significant pull-back and a more selective adoption approach.”

A survey of 182 U.S. companies by consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide validates that selective, rather than comprehensive H.R. outsourcing is the clear preference among employers, with 6% of the respondents indicating they plan to outsource recruiting in the near future. keep reading…

Peopleclick SVP Ginny Gomez says five clients are testing out the company’s new onboarding product, and it’ll more generally available in Q4. Also, she says, “we’re not really seeing the big downturn” — and that the company’s European business is going strong. …

Personified (the new CareerBuilder subsidiary) has about 110 employees and is charging roughly $120,000 to do employer brand consulting, roughly $50,000 to evaluate a company’s applicant-tracking needs, and roughly $3,000-$10,000 monthly for outsourcing work, such as hiring people to staff a small part of a company. Mary Delaney, the endearing president of Personified (shown), says there’s a “very thick wall” between Personified and CareerBuilder to reduce conflicts-of-interest when companies are looking for sourcing advice and Personified is in the position of recommending and not recommending CareerBuilder. …

From the booth-size battles: Ultimate Software’s booth and People-Trak’s booth are surprisingly similar in size given that the former is a company with somewhere around a billion-dollar market cap. … People-Trak’s Jim Witschger, a former USC baseballer, says “I thought we’d see a lot of the whole gloom and doom thing” at the SHRM conference, but instead he found the opposite — people doing demos at his booth 15 minutes after the close Monday. He said the vibe at the conference was “very encouraging.” …

Enough talk of gloom and doom — onto boom: Jobing (a company we mentioned yesterday) held a blowout party Monday night, complete with fireworks off a barge near Navy Pier. It was a scene right out of … 10 years ago. …

Over at HRworks (profile), president Kurt Ronn says that companies are “falling asleep at the wheel” right now. Instead of using the slower economy as a chance to grab newly available talent they’ll desperately need soon, they’re cutting. Ronn realizes there’s pressure to cut costs and improve short-term earnings, but, he says, “you might as well miss it [earnings] a little bit more and get the talent.” He’s also working on some pilot programs with companies interested in hiring disabled veterans. …

Newlyweds AIRS (profile) and The RightThing (profile) seem to be adjusting to life together quite well. During the SHRM conference, the company closed a 6,000-hires-a-year outsourcing deal, and recruiter training is up about 10% over last year. Says AIRS prez Chris Forman: “Life is good in Internet sourcing.”

“You cannot not be here,” NuView CEO Shafiq Lokhandwala says, laughing at the double negative, about SHRM. NuView, an HR tech vendor, doesn’t get many leads here, but feels like it’d look bad if it didn’t show. The company is growing by about 70% a year (and may ask for funding in the coming months if it decides to grow even faster); a significant amount of its new business is global work, and it recently signed Hill International. Hill has offices in Iraq, UAE, Saudia Arabia, and elsewhere … About half of NuView’s clients get the recruiting module … The 5,200-square-foot Jobing booth (shown) is reportedly the largest booth in SHRM’s history; Oprah wasn’t in the booth, just the next-best-thing … Says Scot Melland, Dice’s CEO: “I find it amazing when companies spend so much money on a trade show booth” … Melland says 70% of Dice users are employed, a metric he’s convinced compares favorably to Monster and CareerBuilder; Dice “rarely runs into HotJobs” at all, he says … Dice will change its site to a more content-and-community heavy version in about a month (now in beta) … Yahoo HotJobs says its new Smart Ads offering, which delivers targeted job ads to candidates as they surf the web, is achieving 5 to 10 times higher click-throughs than typical post-n’-prays … Todd McCormick, president of CareerBuilder’s Recruiter Business Unit, says Yahoo HotJobs has, in theory, an awesome opportunity to capitalize on its data on consumers (i.e. job candidates), but, he asks, “is that stuff accurate?” … McCormick says users often sign up for Yahoo and give little to no thought when identifying their profession or other demographic data … more on product announcements and on the popular Monster charity promo …

CareerBuilder (profile; site) has just bumped up its coolness factor and raised the stakes in the competition to be the No. 1 job board in the U.S.

Soon, jobseekers with an Apple iPhone (the epitome of techno-cool) can search for a job on their phone as easily as on their MacBook. And actually, it might even be easier, since CareerBuilder uses the iPhone’s geolocation to identify your city. All you do is enter the relevant keywords and up pops a list of jobs. Scroll the list, jump back and forth, narrow the list with more keywords or change location, should you decide Las Vegas would be more fun than Topeka.

keep reading…

HireRight and USIS merging.

HIRE stock is booming.

Only one year ago, it went public.

The Employment Guide has launched www.WiserWorker.com, an employment website dedicated to job seekers age 40 and older.

It says its mission is to connect older workers with appropriate jobs, but since when did 40 become old?

If by old they mean “experienced,” or perhaps simply, “wiser,” then time will tell whether baby boomers and fringe Gen Xers find the site worthwhile.

keep reading…

The Money Niche…

Some shoot for 100K+ jobs, other shoot for just half of that. And it’s this market, those seeking a starting salary between $50,000 to $100,000, being tapped on the new 50kandup.com niche board. The company says this job board can help you filter out individuals who are under-qualified or over-qualified. The site is helpful, though not signficantly full of drastically different features that separate this niche board from its competitors.

Still, the full-service site has been up and running for a month now and is gaining steam. John Ruppel, president of 50kandup.com, says he had no doubt this was a critical demographic “but there was just no predicting the amount of attention we would receive from human resource managers and recruiters around the country who wanted to find candidates within this salary range.”

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Dice.com (profile; site) has signed on as “brand integration partner” with the National Lampoon, Inc. comedy franchise. Why would a niche IT job board partner with a company best known for Animal House?

Dice.com, which is sponsoring maniaTV’s new sketch comedy show, National Lampoon’s The Lemmings, gets some pretty unique branding out of the deal and a new way to talk directly to engineering and IT professionals.

And Dice will definitely attract more of these professionals online, as maniaTV, a new trend in online viewing, has nearly 4.1 million unique visitors a month, according to ComScore.

keep reading…

Fries with My Software…

Kronos has launched Kronos for Dining, a software platform designed to help restaurants recruit and retain the best people, forecast and schedule to meet customer demand, track time and attendance, and manage absences.

Beyond the recruitment and scheduling features, it offers a way to automate compliance tasks, which can help to reduce liability and let managers focus more time on taking care of hungry guests.

keep reading…

Ever wondered how many online job boards — and which sites — professionals post their resume to when searching for a job? Beyond.com recently asked more than 6,400 visitors, “How many online job boards do you have your resume posted on?” and here are the results:

• 24% have their resume posted on one to two job boards.

keep reading…

An eHarmony of Recruiting?

RealMatch says keyword matching is so yesterday, so it’s out with a new profile-matching system that compares profiles of jobs with the profiles of candidates. While that seems potentially confusing, the company says it just means that the profile matching considers industry experience, title, and the skills that are associated with each job and each candidate along with their preferences.

What we like is how RealMatch’s interface lets anonymous candidates see jobs in real-time, while recruiters can see candidates filtered and ranked according to their suitability for the position, all in real-time and without any cost.

keep reading…

Consultants continue to talk about whether the Taleo/Vurv deal is particularly good for the Vurv customer base, as one of the risks in becoming the customer of a rapidly growing private software company is not knowing what the ultimate exit will be for the investors.

“Being acquired by a leading talent management solutions company is a very solid outcome, and the customers should have confidence that their interests will be held in high regard,” says Ed Newman, founder of The Newman Group (profile; site).

However, consultant Rick Fletcher with HRchitect (profile;site) mentions that some Vurv customers consciously chose to go with Vurv, instead of with Taleo, because Vurv has traditionally been the more innovative firm with some unique leading-edge product features. Some Vurv customers may initially balk at being asked to migrate to the Taleo applications over the coming year.

keep reading…

Startup RiseSmart of Dallas recently landed a small infusion of new capital from angel investors. The $1.5 million lays the groundwork for a probably pursuit of institutional investment sometime later this year. It’s also additional evidence that, despite economic clouds dimming the horizon, the recruiting sector continues to attract investors.

Among the private investors is Craig Stamm, best known as the former chief financial officer for CareerBuilder (profile). Said to be joining Stamm are fellow investors Mark Hamdan, founder and chief executive officer of HRsmart, and executive Louis Ramery of Sears Holdings Corp.

RiseSmart helps executives by providing personal “job concierges” that match their credentials to lists of vacancies. That’s why RiseSmart markets itself as a “human-powered” search engine. The service is designed to take the drudgery out of searching through the passel of executive job boards, which as any experienced job hunter knows will indiscrimately return thousands of available opportunities. Thus far, RiseSmart has been extremely hush-hush about the news, perhaps not wanting to tip off competing job sites like ExecuNet (profile) or TheLadders (profile).

keep reading…

Authoria’s (profile; site) president and CEO, Tod Loofbourrow, chatted with ERE about Taleo’s recent acquisition of Vurv. He says this acquisition, part of an ongoing consolidation from 45 recruiting technology vendors to a handful, represents what customers want: a complete talent management solution.

Three best-of-breed vendors, Authoria, Taleo, and SuccessFactors, are going after that market seriously, but he says pure-play recruiting software vendors will not survive.

Here he offers additional insights into this latest round of talent management drama:

keep reading…

In the hot and heavy world of executive recruiting, less sometimes is more. Of course, the “more” has to really be more — as in more (and better) candidates with longer staying power. And not all executive-recruiting sites are created equal. (Who hasn’t seen the Ladders tennis ball commercial, after all)?

Then there is RiteSite.com, which is to bells and whistles what Sparta was to Greek hedonists. Aimed at C-suite executives, the site is clunky and extremely non-intuitive - especially compared to sleeker, more streamline executive boards like eKornFerry.com or Heidrick & Struggles.

Obfuscation is part of the business plan at RiteSite, which was founded by Manhattan executive recruiter John Lucht in 2001 — about the same time executive-recruiting websites were gaining momentum. Lucht fashioned the site to give C-level execs another option among the job-board scrimmage. Only execs looking for their next $100,000-plus gig need apply. They get membership to RiteSite.com for a yearly fee of $94 — the same amount Lucht used to pay his secretary years ago to put together recruiting lists. For that nominal sum, members get e-mail alerts, job-hunting advice and other free information every week.

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Gobble, gobble.

That’s the sound you just heard as Taleo (profile; site) swooped in and gobbled up Vurv Technology (profile; site) for approximately $128.8 million in cash and stock.

Taleo says it opted to acquire Vurv to enhance its position in talent management and be able to meet the growing market demand for talent management solutions.

keep reading…

Challenging the Google Gods…

The new Fetch Footprint is promising recruiters “deep Web extraction technologies,” which is a really fancy way of saying the company will scour public-data sources and lurk on social/professional networking sites to gather information.

The company’s president, ex-ADP exec Jerry Thurber, says Footprint is designed to intelligently parse data relevant to hiring decisions.

keep reading…

For a company that must be happy to put 2007 in the past, this week’s Peopleclick user conference seems well-attended (about 175 registered), in a stunningly pretty but not-too-accessible oceanfront Ritz in Orange County … Ed Newman asked the crowd, “Who thinks their company is doing a decent job of workforce planning?” and maybe two hands in the whole audience went up, sheepishly … John Sullivan lists some of his favorite companies for workforce planning: Microsoft (partly because of its willingness to move people to partner companies), Intel, Aimco, Booz Allen (for its strength in moving people internally), Valero, and Sodexo … At lunch, one customer tells ERE that Peopleclick’s VMS is improving enough that he feels like he could someday scrap Fieldglass, which he says offers inferior reporting … A Peopleclick partner says the apparent recession isn’t all that severe; meanwhile, CareerBuilder, as usual, didn’t seem to be tight on money either, as evidenced by the money it spent on a martini party … Who cares that the labor market is tight in Montana? Peopleclick client GlaxoSmithKline does, as it has critical operations there and is playing up the lack of traffic and outdoorsy lifestyle to candidates.

Neal Bruce, who recently departed Monster to join the Bedford, Massachusetts, office of First Advantage, will serve as the senior vice president of product management for the Employer Services division. He chatted with ERE about innovating in his new gig, his renewed focus on talent acquisition products, his blog, his legacy at Monster, and more.

ERE: Congrats on the move to First Advantage! Were you looking for a new opportunity, or were you pursued?

NB: I received a call about joining First Advantage, and the timing was right for me to take on a new challenge.

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