We’re not talking here about the sandwich sign guys or even the athletic sign spinners you see on street corners pointing to check cashing businesses, tanning salons and new home developments. (Though you would be surprised at how much the jobs pay and just how cutthroat the business is.)

Nope. We’re talking about the president and founder of a technology sales lead company wandering around the showroom floor at SHRM’s upcoming conference in New Orleans handing out $100 bills. All you have to do is find Clay C. Scroggins, a/k/a Claydough, walk up to him and say “Hi, Clay” to get one of the five hundreds he’s going to be handing out.

There’s a hitch. (You didn’t think it was going to be that easy, did you?) You can’t be wearing the logo of any vendor, unless it happens to be CompareHRIS. You have to consent to having your picture taken with Clay, and having it posted to his blog. And you have to be among the first to greet him.

You’ll probably also have to listen to a pitch about CompareHRIS. In the long run, that could be worth more to you than the $100. CompareHRIS makes its money from selling leads to HR technology vendors, but don’t let that deter you. The site has a wealth of information about systems, features, and the buying process. I wrote about it a few weeks ago. To be fair, it’s not the only site that lets you compare and select systems, but it is one of the better ones. And Scroggin is pushing hard to promote the site and a new sister site for Europe, HRcomparison.com.

So now, how do you find Scroggin? It won’t be easy, given the thousands of people expected at the conference. He’ll be the guy wearing a logo of CompareHRIS.com on his polo shirt.

I preferred his original idea, which was to wear an LED-laced shirt flashing the logo and whatever else he thought of. But at $5k to buy it, plus however much for training and support, Scroggin figured his money would go further doing something different. “No $5,000 t-shirt for me,” he confessed today from his office in Florida. He was a little more florid on his blog, “I’m so bummed.”

So am I. Ever since seeing this (below) little confection from Wales, which made the rounds of the canine herding lists a few months ago, I’ve been hoping to see the real thing. They’re available from a few places. Scroggin got his quote from Lumalive.

I now return you to the Social Recruiting Summit.

The lucky beneficiary of the German electronics and electrical engineering giant’s decision to replace its multiple talent systems globally is SuccessFactors, which will see most of its performance and talent management modules deployed to Siemens’ 430,000 employees in 80 countries and 20 languages.

Dr. Norbert Kleinjohann, head of corporate information technology for Siemens, says in the press release announcing the deal, “The enterprise cloud computing business model is a strategic direction for us. It not only lowers IT costs, and creates faster end-to-end processes, but can also grow with our requirements both globally and locally.”

SuccessFactors says the Siemens deployment will include its compensation, goal, performance, and recruiting management, career development planning, variable pay, and succession planning tools. SuccessFactors willl replace Siemens’ existing multiple talent systems globally.

The deal — the value wasn’t released — is not only noteworthy for the size of the SaaS deployment, but also that it is one of the largest single-vendor HR selections of its kind. While Oracle/PeopleSoft and SAS have equally large employers as customers, they are sellers of enterprise, on-premises systems.  So signficant a deal is this for the still-developing cloud computing approach that tech site Zdnet says “this company wide rollout really draws attention to the maturity of cloud computing.”

Based in San Mateo, Calif. in Silicon Valley, SuccessFactors was founded in 2001 providing HR services over the web. The company today, before the Siemens deployment, serves 2,700 customers and 4.7 million users in 31 languages and 185 countries.

Before it settled on SuccessFactors, Siemens evaluated nearly 40 vendors and system providers. We conducted an in-depth market evaluation of 30 leading vendors and seven system providers Siemens already had over five months, with our end-users stress testing the software quality, global scalability, and innovation potential,” explains Marion Horstmanm, who heads corporate HR for the company. She says in a press release that, “SuccessFactors was the clear winner by a significant margin based on its usability, ease of integration, and rich functionality.”

The delight in being selected by so large an employer as Siemens, which last year did (US) $107.4 billion in business, is evident in the SuccessFactors press release and the comment by its CEO, Lars Daalgard. “For such an amazing company as Siemens to decide to eliminate so many systems and standardize on SuccessFactors in the cloud is obviously a testimony to SuccessFactors delivering more large business clients over the web than anyone else.”

Industry consultants may beat up on us for saying that, since the process of identifying company needs and finding and evaluating vendors is, or should be, far more complicated than checking off a couple dozen boxes. But, as the saying goes, when you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.

That’s what we like about CompareHRIS; it’s a starting place for those who don’t know where the trailhead is.

Clay Scroggin launched CompareHRIS in February 2008. At the time he owned HR Pay ‘n’ Time, Inc., an HR tech reseller, selling, supporting, and implementing software systems for a number of vendors including Sage Abra, for whom he had worked in sales. Scroggin sold off his HR Pay ‘n’ Time clients last fall to concentrate on CompareHRIS.

To be clear, it’s a lead generation service that makes its money selling leads and listing vendors. Consequently, not every system vendor is listed. Scroggin makes the point on the site that he’s tried to get them, but not all vendors participate. He also emphasizes that the system recommendations are based entirely on the choices buyers make when they use the site’s selector survey tool.

What’s especially useful about CompareHRIS is that it will get you thinking about features to address HR functions that may not be top of mind. The swarm of resumes now coming in by email, fax, by hand, and your local post office may be the impetus for going tech. Or it may be the flood of inquiries you’re getting about benefits, accrued vacation, certification upgrades, and what not.

Whatever the reason, CompareHRIS is going to ask you about a range of HR functions. Your company may not be ready to invest in a workforce management component or succession planning module, but the site will get you to make a conscious decision. And if you aren’t sure just why you might want these features, the site has a deep — and we mean deep — library of articles covering nearly aspect of system buying, including vendor directories and listings. There are even articles on how make a business case for a new system.

One more thing not to miss: The RFP template. For systems novices, the 68-page(!) document can be intimidating. Unless you are half Geek, you’ll need to get IT involved to explain if you should even care about a vendor’s answer to questions like: “Describe your multi-layered architecture for scalability and extensibility.” It’s thin in some areas, especially in the post-sale support assessment, which is an area that will be covered in a future issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. Still, you should make the template part of your homework.

SInce launching, CompareHRIS has had 50,000 visitors. The company crowed about that achievement in a press release today that also says the company will soon be offering a European version of the site.

To be fair, there are other software comparison sites and buying guides online, all of them making money by selling leads. Many, like Capterra or Technology Evaluation Centers are not exclusively HR focused, but provide good information.

New logo

Kenexa

Here’s a math teaser for you: i X e = s. Solve for “s.” The answer is success, which is what Kenexa promises from its solutions that multiply the individual by the environment.

Like math or not, you’ll be seeing that formula wherever you see Kenexa since it’s a key ingredient of the HR software company’s rebranding.

In a press release today, the company says, “The formula will be rolled out in the company’s website, collateral, and other materials. Kenexa has also unveiled a modern corporate logo that reinforces its new look and feel, and emphasizes the “X” in the formula. The new logo is reinforced by the tag line: ‘HR Success Multiplied.’”

The old and new Kenexa logos are shown here. And if you want even more, check out the company’s new print ads. You can ignore the pop-up box unless you want to provide your info.

TweetMyJobs

Barely five months old, this Twitter-based job service is hitting on all cylinders. Besides thousands of job channels that tweet and retweet jobs fitting an industry and an geography, TweetMyJobs actually has a modest business model charging as little as 99 cents to send a job posting to specific job channel followers. Recruiters can also get resume tweets if they choose, and anyone can follow the general message group.

Now comes TweetMark, a cool service that lets an employer incorporate a brand with their tweet. For $99 a year — free until the end of June — a company gets a custom Twitter page that incorporates its logo or whatever branding message it chooses. When a job is tweeted to the appropriate job channel, the branding element gets incorporated with the 140-character text and appears on the recipient’s device.

Thought you couldn’t get images with Twitter? So did we. But TweetMyJobs founder Gary Zukowski is clever enough to have figured out a work-around. Here’s his explanation: “The logo is not in the tweet, but since it’ll be tweeted on the custom Job Channel, it will be associated to the tweet by default.”

OneWire

Startups, especially job board and candidate matching startups, don’t usually launch ad campaigns that involve TV and radio. A little SEO, some keyword buys, and maybe a press release or two. But OneWire is making a bigger splash with a commercial that’s supposed to be launching today in New York City and a few other major, east coast financial centers.

OneWire, you may recall from our earlier post, is a job matching service for the finance sector. It works on brute force, getting as granular in its data collection as asking for GPA scores, and details about the specific size and reach of the deals an experienced financier handled or an analyst covered.

OneWire is the product of F.S. von Stade & Associates and its founder and president F. Skiddy von Stade. FSvS is one of the leading search firms for the finance industry.

HighFlyer

Speaking of job boards, this one’s a bona fide job board and the latest of the ever-expanding number of ever-so-hopeful challengers to the Monster and CareerBuilders of the world. Now a new job board launch is hardly big news. In fact, it barely qualifies as news at all. But with a seven-day Bermuda vacation as a come-on to job seekers to register, what’s to lose? Especially since the site practically swears that registration will take under a minute. (The press release announcing the launch actually says it will take less than 30 seconds.)

The bad news for job seekers is that we only found nine jobs on the site.

Buy a Domain

That may be a clue as to the decision behind the UK’s Employ Holdings Ltd. to abandon its plan for a network of U.S. job boards under the “Employ” banner. How do we know the UK job board operator has given up its U.S. hopes? Because it wants us to help it auction off its stock of employ-related domain names. These are such exciting names as EmployCaterers.com, Employlabor.com, and EmployConstruction.com. (Don’t bother clicking into them, they’re all parked addresses.)

Scott Taylor, director of Employ Holdings, emailed us saying, “My company was planning to tackle the USA online Digital Recruitment Marketplace in 2010 to capitalize on the economic recovery and establish ourselves throughout the USA, however as we have various projects underway it has been decided that we are best served concentrating on the UK and European markets at this point in time.”

You can contact him if you’re interested in buying the package — which is the way they’d rather dispose of the 40-odd domain group. If you bid, keep in mind that dot-com addresses for job boards may not be worth a whole lot. Especially once Employ Media starts selling dot-jobs addresses.

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.

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.

Recruitment process outsourcing is increasing, despite the macro outsourcing trends, according to Marcon. More staffing providers are offering outsourced recruiting solutions to customers, and many have made acquisitions of existing RPO firms to enter the market. Because RPO is still a fairly new concept, a standard service model has yet to emerge. The flexibility to customize services under the contracts, such as only outsourcing hiring processes for hourly workers or contracting strictly for exempt personnel sourcing, is enticing early adopters and easing the trauma of handing over the services to an outside provider.

Software as a Service

With as much as 80% of the early adopter market already penetrated, HR technology firms, including applicant tracking system and talent management providers, are consolidating and offering new products for mid-size companies in order to boost revenues. Employers have been waiting for leaders to emerge in the highly fragmented space, and thanks to a slowing economy, the process seems to be well underway.

“What’s hot is software as a service and talent management suites via SaaS,” says Marcon. “Everything else is cooling.”

Software as a service, which consists of hosted software solutions accessible via the Web for monthly subscription fees, reduces the financial barriers to entrance and opens the door for medium and small companies to manage talent through automated solutions. Access to more sophisticated tools may level the recruiting playing field between large and small employers. Taleo’s new product release is further validation that solution providers are looking for growth outside the enterprise marketplace. Taleo Edge was unveiled at the SHRM conference and is targeted toward the mid-size market, which Taleo defines as employers with 2,500 to less than 10,000 employees.

While industry consolidation may be a good thing in the long run because the surviving vendors will be financially stable, and customers may finally receive the comprehensive talent management suites they’ve been seeking, Marcon cautions talent acquisition leaders to review a prospective vendor’s financial strength before committing.

Says Marcon: “Right now talent acquisition managers should absolutely select vendors based upon their ability to withstand a protracted downturn.”

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.”

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.

Once you find a job that interests you, select it and CareerBuilder emails you the link so you apply when you get home. More than one job of interest? Add it to your favorites and you get sent the whole list.

Check out the online demo to see for yourself how it works.

CareerBuilder’s Jennifer Grasz tells us the service will launch any day now and when it does, all jobs on CareerBuilder.com will be accessible. Employers don’t pay extra and jobseekers pay only for the data transfer, according to their ATT contract.

Although iPhone users represent a small percentage of mobile users in the U.S. (in part because of Apple’s deal with only one carrier, ATT), they are among the heaviest consumers of mobile content. How extensively they will use the new service is anyone’s guess. “We are getting in the door early to tap into the potential of a user base that is expected to grow at a substantial rate,” Grasz says.

Mobile job searching and even applying is more common in other parts of the world, especially in Asia where cell phones are more common than landlines and personal computers.

HIRE stock is booming.

Only one year ago, it went public.

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.

Jeff Littlejohn, vice president and general manager of The Employment Guide, says younger job seekers have better resources through college campus job fairs and other career helpers.

For recruiters interested in the life skills and experience that older workers bring, WiserWorker.com bridges this communication gap, explains Littlejohn.

The home page offers a bright “Font +/-” button that can make the font size really, really big or really, really tiny, depending on your vantage point and bifocal strength. Certainly a nice touch for those “wiser” workers, indeed.

The site has launched with more than 53,000 job listings, but a few search strings for random keywords (i.e., director, writer, editor) brought back an overwhelming number of postings from the same company, Talent6 Casting Network. This employer is of the “Actors, Extras, Models, Dancers (full and part time)” posting variety, so we’re not sure that 53,000 is entirely brag-worthy.

Still, searches for other keywords (i.e., business, marketing, nursing, IT, engineering) brought back a variety of postings from scores of employers and staffing agencies.

The site certainly has a lot of potential, but it could be improved with more content (i.e., more blog postings, links to actual job fairs under the Job Fairs button), and more interactivity overall.

And in this day and age of $4/gallon gas and more and more smart employers embracing the power of telecommuting, there is a noticeably absent option to search for “telecommute only” jobs. Not a necessity for job boards, but certainly a nice green touch.

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.”

Smart MBAs Look for Perks…

Then there are those definitely seeking more than $50,000.

Take MBAs, for instance, who are still quite hot for Google. (The Mountain View, California-based company says it gets 1,300 resumes a day, but some top management has recently jumped ship for Facebook. Decide for yourself here whether the company is still hot or not.)

This is the second year in a row Google has won the top honor in the IDEAL Employer survey of 5,769 students from the nation’s top 52 MBA programs. Following Google, which won 24% of the votes, was McKinsey & Company (16%); Goldman Sachs (15%); Apple (14%); and The Boston Consulting Group (12%).

As for career goals, it’s a tie at 58% for “being competitively or intellectually challenged” and “having a work-life balance,” followed at 55% by “being a leader or manager of people.” Another 37% aspire toward “being entrepreneurial or creative/innovative” and 28% strive for “being dedicated to a cause or to feel that they are serving the greater good.”

This talent doesn’t come cheap, either, with most MBAs expecting $90,232 after the first year and $180,030 after five years.

Job Corps Changes Ahead…

Expect some changes to the nation’s 44-year-old federally funded Job Corps program.

U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao released a new report from a blue ribbon Advisory Committee on Job Corps that recommends enhancements to education and training policies and management.

The Labor Department notes these changes will help make Job Corps more successful in “preparing students for real-world jobs in the 21st century worldwide economy.”

Along with recommendations for better “real-world” career and technical education and training curricula, the report also urges more postsecondary education for students.

Another recommendation is to build better partnerships with educational institutions, and especially high-growth industries, to showcase Job Corps youth as highly sought after students and employees.

Job Corps trains approximately 62,000 young people between ages 16 through 24.

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.

As part of the branded entertainment sponsorship package, show producers have created a recurring character called Dice Man, a super-hero who saves people from taking jobs for which they are over-qualified, helps people find fulfilling employment, and assists companies in search of valuable talent.

Dice Man also fights against the evil antagonist, Doctor Drudgery, and his henchmen Pink Slip and Dead End.

National Lampoon Lemmings: Diceman To The Rescue

Powered by maniaTV.com

Amber Lawson, maniaTV head of comedy, says producers are excited to integrate Dice Man and the antagonists into the plot lines. Lawson notes that “it is fantastic working with a brand that gets the power of integration because it has empowered us to develop a set of characters that will maintain comedic integrity and achieve the goal of creating a lasting impression.”

Others find it, well, rather lame. One poster on the Dice.com message boards sums up his feelings by stating that “National Lampoon is great, but it looks like they whored out a spot in order to make a couple of dollars, not their fault, money is money.”

Dice Man (played by actor Andy Goldenberg), made his debut on the May 26 episode.

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.

Beaker’s New Science ‘Hood…

We first chatted about this new online community back at the ERE Expo Spring 2008, and now Beaker.com has launched its community for professionals in the life sciences industries.

The site merges social networking, career advice, multimedia education, and online recruitment catering specifically to the life sciences industry.

The Beaker management team includes CEO Jeffrey Clark (former president/COO for Ken Clark International); VP of Sales Josh Akers (formerly with Monster.com and Direct Employers Association); and Chief Information Officer David Evans (formerly with America Online, CareerTours, Jobing, and Cendant).

Changing Face of Microsoft…

Watch for Microsoft to soon launch a campaign to showcase the diversity in its employee ranks, and ultimately attract more women and minorities to the company. (Todd Raphael has a more in-depth look at diversity coming up in the July Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.)

In partnership with ad agency Worktank, Microsoft conducted focus groups of both internal and external employees to understand what was important particularly to Native Americans, females, Hispanics, and African-Americans. It learned to put authenticity first, and to ditch the corporate speak.

In search of authenticity, the campaign is featuring rank-and-file employees, rather than Microsoft execs or an emphasis on Microsoft HR people. Among the employees featured prominently: one of the top-20 females in gaming in the country, as well as an African-American general manager who handles a 79-country region in the Middle East and Africa.

Microsoft will kick it off with a May 29 webinar.

TheLadders.com Says Bye to Bios…

TheLadders.com has unveiled new resume functionality, saying good-bye to “bios” and hello to the old-fashioned term resumes.

It’s essentially a matter of semantics, of course, but the change now gives candidates a chance to upload or create a resume in one step before letting recruiters skim through the latest postings. Candidates will still have the option to keep their personal and contact information confidential.

However, the company is making a plea with candidates on behalf of recruiters. In a letter to job-seekers about these new changes, it says “we have heard loud and clear from recruiters that they much prefer to know your name and current company. If you must, please use this confidentiality feature; but please do realize that it comes at the cost of making your resume a bit less transparent to those who are looking for you.”

• 24% have their resume posted on one to two job boards.
• 29% have their resume posted on three to four job boards.
• 18% have their resume posted on five or more job boards.
• 29% do not have their resume posted online.

Of the professionals who currently have their resume posted online, 54% said geographic and industry-specific job sites are most effective when searching for a job, while the remainder chose general job boards.

Sure, you may be thinking that job boards have been absorbed left and right by larger boards, but let’s face it: more keep appearing and the growth is not slowing down. No question, the use of niche-specific job boards has grown, so now the question remains whether — and for how long — general job boards can remain effective.

Peter Weddle, who came out this week with his 2008 Users’ Choice Award winners, says most job seekers use a number of different sites, usually about five boards. In an interview with Fortune magazine, he shared his advice for how today’s candidates should approach the job hunt:

“I recommend using two of the big general sites like CareerBuilder.com or Yahoo! HotJobs and three specialty sites — one that concentrates on your career field, one industry site, and one that focuses on the location where you live or want to live. That way you’re covered from all angles,” said Weddle.

Under the “niche” category, he acknowledged the following best-of niche sites: CareerBank.com (accounting, finance), ComputerJobs.com, Dice (IT jobs), HealthEcareers Network, and JobsInLogistics.

New Niches

Here are a couple more that have sprung up recently.

If you’re looking for computing or engineering professionals, read on. The IEEE Computer Society’s newly launched job board is in partnership with the American Institute of Physics, a great way to scour the market for computer scientists and engineers. In addition, the site has a career center that offers candidates a “Build Your Career” option with career news, articles, online courses, and more.

If you go there in search of your dream whiz kid, you’ll probably have luck: the Computer Society has more than 85,000 members around the world, while the AIP serves a global audience of 120,000 scientists and engineers.

Meanwhile, the newly launched JobsForPTs.com leaves no guesswork as to what niche it serves, with its specific focus on reaching physical therapists and physical therapy assistants.

These licensed physical therapists and physical therapy assistants may be interested in full-time traditional employment or hourly per diem or contract assignments. One cool feature is that the site links directly to every state licensing board and state professional PT association chapter.

JobsForPTs.com says it accepts payment through PayPal, with job posting packages starting at under $100. Annual membership subscriptions can be purchased at various levels as well. JobsForPTs.com is a service of JobsForAllTherapists.com, based in Greater Binghamton, New York.

And if you’re looking for more established best-of healthcare-niche boards, Weddle’s list of the best by this industry in 2008 includes Absolutely Health Care, AllHealthcareJobs.com, Bio Space, Hcareers (hotels, hospitality), HealthCareerWeb.com.

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.

What we don’t like is how the company charges a fee when they want to reveal the contact information of the matching and interested candidate. On the other hand, RealMatch says its technology powers about 1,000 job sites, so a nominal fee may turn out to be money well spent.

HireVue Competitor?

Todd talked with Calgary-based Darryn Severyn, the CEO of InterActive Applicant (it’ll be at this link, but don’t expect much now beyond a construction site). Severyn hopes to launch in the next couple of months, marketing to a Canadian audience, and to the United States by year’s end.

InterActive will be a video-and-audio-interviewing competitor to HireVue, though Severyn says he’ll add features in 2009 that will differentiate his product. Also in this genre: interviewstream.com and interviewstudio.com.

]]> http://www.ere.net/2008/05/13/chatter-a-realmatch-for-interactive-applicants/feed/ 7 http://www.ere.net/2008/05/12/new-platform-for-vurv-customers/ http://www.ere.net/2008/05/12/new-platform-for-vurv-customers/#comments Sun, 11 May 2008 23:34:00 +0000 Elaine Rigoli http://www.ere.net/2008/05/12/new-platform-for-vurv-customers/ 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.

“Vurv’s CEO, Derek Mercer, has great ideas and has been highly innovative, but Taleo has been the better-run organization with stronger professional services and customer support. Taleo is a very disciplined organization, while Vurv is a much more free-thinking organization,” says Fletcher.

“One environment fosters innovation, while the other may offer stricter processes. The merger of the two cultures may ultimately be a really good thing for both existing sets of customers,” says Fletcher.

And Newman points out that he expects Taleo (profile; site) to throw away as little as possible.

“Keep in mind, Taleo has two platforms today, Enterprise and Business edition. The parts that don’t fit with Enterprise may well fit with Business Edition, making both platforms more complete in terms of the talent management spectrum,” says Newman.

For its part, Taleo says its goal is to incorporate the best of the Vurv intellectual property and product line into the Taleo Platform, delivering a unified recruiting, performance, and compensation solution.

Taleo says its “new” customers will have a simple upgrade path to a unified talent management platform.

“Taleo will continue to leverage cross-company domain expertise to fuel innovation and product leadership as we drive toward product integration, which will likely occur in late 2009,” says Dave Michaud, Taleo’s VP of product marketing.

“Upon closing the acquisition, we will work closely with Vurv customers on appropriate migration strategies based on their business requirements,” says Michaud.

Vurv’s Strengths

Taleo says Vurv’s Jacksonville, Florida, location will be a key North American operations hub for Taleo, including but not limited to, engineering, production, and support resources.

“We will be working through the entire portfolio of facilities over the next several months to determine how to best optimize our assets. In regards to staffing, we expect synergies between the two entities and some duplication of functions. We will not be able to give more specific information about any redundancies until after the close of the deal and organizational structures have been finalized,” says Michaud.

While the company remains tight-lipped on the future of Vurv’s current staff, Fletcher says he hears that some “Vurv people are out looking for positions, but I would love to see Taleo keep a lot of the R&D people from Vurv, and add some of Vurv’s customer service representatives to Taleo in order to meet their increasing combined customer demand.”

Business as Usual?

Taleo runs a well-disciplined machine, says Fletcher, though he points out Vurv’s several strong areas.

“Vurv has stronger compensation, competency management, and workforce transition software, which is primarily an offboarding system,” says Fletcher.

“I believe Taleo will throw everything else away. For them to support two applicant tracking systems makes no sense, so you go with the more stable one, which is Taleo’s Enterprise ATS. And Vurv Express will also be wiped out by Taleo Business Edition,” he says.

They have 48 of the Fortune 100 when you put them together, Fletcher points out. He also says there is room for both the talent management suites and the pure plays in the marketplace.

In fact, Fletcher says that when you merge Vurv and Taleo, it actually helps out other ATS pure-plays.

“Peopleclick, iCims, First Advantage, and even Sonic Recruit, for example, are going to end up ranking higher on the list and getting more market attention as you consolidate some of these top-tier companies,” he says.

Taleo’s Michaud notes that the company “will be working with Vurv counterparts to develop a detailed roadmap over the next several months to ensure we leverage the best capabilities of both companies. Once we have completed this roadmap, we will communicate our go-to-market plans.”

Newman points out that this is certainly the biggest news we have had in our industry in quite a while, and the most substantial in terms of consolidation.

“Overall, I think this is quite an aggressive move and a decision that I am sure was not made lightly. As with everything though, success is about 10% decision, and 90% execution, so the ultimate outcome remains to be seen. I certainly hope it’s a raging success,” adds Newman.

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).

The company employs about 25 people in India to comb through the extensive Internet job postings and help executives target positions they really want. Executives pay a fee of about $44 to peace of mind. This is a company to watch, if only because of the origin of its founder, Sanjay Sathe. He used to be part of the top brass at Sabre Holdings before being jettisoned overboard. Sathe reportedly was inspired to launch RiseSmart after enduring endless scrolls of irrelevant jobs openings.

Slipping under the radar is Mzinga’s acquisition of fellow social networking site Prospero in March. Both companies offer SaaS models designed to let consumers (and corporate customers) run polls and other interactive features. Therein lays an undeniably powerful recruiting tool: directly appealing to would-be/potential employees, while building a recruiting brand at the same time.

Mzinga clients include AOL, ESPN, Johnson & Johnson, Chevron, and a slew of other household names. Helping fund the takeover of Prospero: $32.5 million secured from private investors. Armed with the new cash, we expect Mzinga to roll out new offerings. And it’s not unreasonable to assume Mzinga will be on the prowl for other takeover targets, especially in the ever-growing social networking game.

Speaking of CareerBuilder: the Washington, D.C.-based site is among five businesses being sued for patent infringement by software developer GraphOn Corp., based in of Santa Cruz, California. GraphOn alleges its “unique method of maintaining and automated and network-accessible database” has been copied and used by the “popular and widely used Web sites” of CareerBuilder, Yahoo, eHarmony.com, Match.com, and Classified Ventures, which is a joint venture of five major newspaper publishers.

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:

ERE: Do you think these acquisitions aid, or simply confuse, the typical recruiter?

TL: Short term, the consolidation from 45 to a handful simplifies recruiters’ technology choices. But the factors driving the consolidation — the broader talent management opportunity — will force recruiters to go beyond a recruiting-only mindset, and come to grips with more strategic organizational needs and talent management opportunities such as quality of hiring; filling gaps in leadership pipelines; and retaining high performers.

ERE: What is “border-less HR” and how does it affect recruiters?

TL: Border-less HR is forcing recruiters to look beyond simply headcount metrics to business impact. In other words, successful recruiters already know that they must align to the business needs of the hiring manager. Likewise, next-generation recruiting approaches must be part of a more comprehensive approach to the full lifecycle to talent.

ERE: You say it’ll be a $2.3 billion software business in 2008. Where is it headed in the next 5, 10 years?

TL: Industry analysts agree that talent management solutions will remain one of the fastest-growing segments of enterprise software. Employers are inescapably drawn to the value of optimizing one of the last and largest assets classes within their organizations, their people.

ERE: How does Authoria differentiate itself in the marketplace?

TL: We have three key areas of differentiation. [First, a] focus on the manager’s success through simplicity and ease of use; breadth and depth of our comprehensive offering across Recruiting, Compensation, Performance, Development and Succession; and 11 years’ experience meeting the complex talent management needs of the world’s most demanding employers.

ERE: Any other insights you wish to share about the future of talent management?

TL: Authoria believes talent management will prove to be the largest software category ever. We see tremendous momentum with customers, and industry activity such as this is further evidence of the value organizations attach to optimizing talent.

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.

It’s tough standing out from the crowd, especially if you’re a niche job site. But RiteSite.com does offer a number of twists. For one thing, membership is not required for an executive to post a resume. RiteSite.com may be the only site to date to separate jobs by both industry and function. Recruiters don’t have to pay to post jobs or review available candidates, and they can post as many jobs as they choose for free.

RiteSite.com actually consists of two databases of executive resumes, with preferential treatment shown to retained recruiters. They get to see an “identity-revealed” database that provides not only list of an executive’s credentials, but also direct contact info.

Contingency recruiters aren’t treated quite so generously. Although they are able to view jobs in RiteSite’s “identity-concealed” database, they are restricted from the more exclusive listings. Still, Lucht estimates half to three-quarters of jobs listed on RiteSite.com are posted by contingency recruiters. This sounds surprising until you consider that RiteSite.com does not charge other sites to republish its internal listings.

Thus, recruiters can toss a dragnet around larger pools of candidates. Lucht boasts: “Nobody has the sorting system that we have. It’s a great benefit to finding the jobs you want” if you’re an executive, while recruiters are able to target specific industries.

Recruiter Larry White of Staffpointe tells me he receives more “measurable candidates” from RiteSite.com than all other Internet recruiting sites combined. He sends these people out for job interviews and almost always gets great results. That’s quite an endorsement. This seems like a more-than-fair deal for recruiting professionals.

It’s too bad RiteSite.com isn’t a little more aesthetically pleasing. That probably would get people to linger longer. As it is now, the heavy black-and-red homepage is forbidding and a bit intimidating to first-time users. Some of the job descriptions also suffer from being a little too generic at times. Also, if you elect to use the site, be prepared for relentless self-promotion of Lucht’s recruiting book. But if you’re a recruiter, it’s at least worth taking a look.