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Today’s announcement out of Santa Monica that Cornerstone OnDemand is launching a “recruiting cloud” may end up being a successful one due to the company’s strong track record, but it’s too early to say for sure, according to one stock analyst.

Scott Berg, senior research analyst at Feltl and Company, is one of the few stock analysts with a special interest in human-resources related companies like Taleo, SuccessFactors, or even the private firm Workday.

He emailed me some thoughts today on the Cornerstone announcement, one that adds recruiting to a company better known for other human resources technology like performance management and learning management. keep reading…

The flurry of activity among human resources technology companies — from the big SAP/SuccessFactors news to Oracle/Taleo —  has left customers “somewhat confused and concerned about near-term vendor viability.”

That’s the word from Scott Berg, senior equity research analyst at Feltl and Company. After attending a regional HR technology conference last week in Minnesota, and “speaking with many customers, consultants, and vendors from the far reaches of the country,” here’s what he reports. keep reading…

Oracle announced this morning it will buy HR software vendor Taleo for $46 a share, a deal worth about $1.9 billion.

It’s the second major acquisition of an HR firm in three months, and continues an Oracle buying spree that’s so far added some 70 companies at a cost of about $40 billion, according to Bloomberg.com. Last fall, Oracle bought RightNow Technologies, a cloud-based CRM provider.

The Taleo deal, however, falls far short of what SAP is paying for SuccessFactors. The German tech firm announced in December it would pay $3.4 billion for the HR vendor. The acquisition is key to “accelerating SAP’s momentum as a provider of cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure,” the company said in making the announcement.

SAP has run into delays completing its acquisition. The deadline for the deal has now been extended for a third time to Feb. 15th while regulators, principally the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., investigates the transaction. SAP said today it was waiving the requirement the investigation first be complete before the expiration of its tender offer. The company said it already has been tendered 86 percent of the SuccessFactors, enough to close the deal. keep reading…

What would you do if the person interviewing you fell asleep? What Irwin did turned out to be worth $100. You’ll find out more if you read through this week’s roundup. And, as a little incentive to make it to the very end, there’s a link to some nifty free marketing analytics tools.

One suggestion: You might want to keep a glossary of acronyms handy. Those of you who can correctly identify ANSI, ATS, SaaS, and SMB — you are excused from the glossary requirement.

Freshening Stale Resumes

When a resume is stale, but the skills and experience are just what the hiring manager ordered, what do you do? You call, you email. You don’t hear back. Or if you do, you find out they’re perfectly happy in the new job they started six months ago.

There goes your time-to-fill right down the drain. keep reading…

A new site launching today is described by its CEO Suki Shah as “Job board ATS video audio social recruiting.”

It’s called “Get Hired,” it’s backed by private equity investors, and it’ll be free, at least for now.

The company, which has raised $1.75 million, has been building up a list of job-seekers and employers, and then contacting signers-up to send them a distinct URL to use in spreading the word via Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. “The more friends you invite, the sooner you’ll get access,” Get Hired tells them.

To explain what this site does, it helps to provide a super-brief history. Suki Shah had started a company around the time you don’t want to start a company — about when Lehman Brothers collapsed. Called Statacor Biosciences, it specialized in nutritional therapy and dietetics.

Not only were the times challenging, but Shah realized while hiring people that HR practices were, too — “even more archaic” than physician practices, he says. He found the job boards’ prices to be “mind-blowing” and found himself inundated with many hundreds of applications when hiring for his new firm, which has grown to 25 employees in seven states.

So Shah had applicants record an audio, minute-long explanation about heart disease, to see how they’d sound to a patient, or to a sales prospect. Instead of hundreds of applicants he now had maybe 30 good ones for a job, and could go through them quickly. He added video, too.

This takes us into 2010. Shah felt that he was onto something. In 2011 it was time for his brother to run the other company and for Suki to focus on making money off of this video-audio-more-to-come business.

What is launching today is supposed to replace a job board and an applicant tracking system — particularly for a company that finds that about $400 for a job listing on a job board to be expensive. keep reading…

Today’s end-of-the-week roundup begins with a quiz and ends with a quickie update on OneWire, a clever, and certainly — as an investment report says — intriguing take on candidate matching.

So let’s get on with it: Guess who says they want to grow their influence at the top corporate levels?

HR you say? Sorry, not the answer we were looking for. The answer comes from MarketingCharts, which says, ”An overwhelming majority (79%) of global CMOs say they want their influence in business strategy and development to grow.”

Here’s another factoid from the article, which is based on a survey from Forrester Research and Heidrick & Struggles: 89 percent of CMOs identified visioning and strategic thinking as a top competency. There now, don’t you feel better? keep reading…

A $5 million investment in a company that charges nothing for its product would seem to have the same shot as a straight bet in roulette. Yet the Mayfield Fund just gave SmartRecruiters a $5 million boost to fund new development in its SaaS-based free ATS.

It’s certainly a vote of confidence in the company and the business model launched by Jerome Ternynck. He  introduced SmartRecruiters to the SMB market in 2009 when he still owned and ran MrTed, a European ATS company that was entirely SaaS.

MrTed was an enterprise system. SmartRecruiters was intended for smaller companies, many of whom had either no ATS or rudimentary products. Promoted as “Free and Easy” — which it was and is — so resonated with recruiters and hiring managers that Ternynck quickly had hundreds of customers paying nothing. keep reading…

HR talent software vendor iCIMS has a new business partner and $35 million to spend on expansion. The company announced this morning that private equity fund Susquehanna Growth Equity has taken a minority stake in the firm.

“The company,” says today’s announcement, “plans to significantly increase investments in marketing, product development, and additional acquisitions that will further accelerate the organization’s rapid growth and expansion plans.”

Founded in 1999 by its CEO Colin Day, iCIMS offers SaaS-based talent acquisition, onboarding, performance and talent management tools. The company has made the inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies for six consecutive years, finishing 2010 with revenue of $25.6 million (2011 rankings won’t be released until later this year). keep reading…

Thinking of heading to the cloud in 2012? Everyone seems to be, including some of the biggest HR vendors in the world.

Just a few weeks ago, when SAP snapped up SuccessFactors, the buzz was all about the cloud. A similar buzz ensued when Oracle bought RightNow Technologies.

Even though Wall Street reacted to the SAP/SuccessFactors deal as if the cloud had just been discovered, the reality is cloud computing has been around almost as long as the Internet itself. What the excitement is about is how HR software services are delivered, and the big deal is that increasingly, companies aren’t buying systems, they’re licensing seats.

For HR, that means SaaS. SaaS, the acronym for software-as-a-service, is the type of cloud computing with which HR professionals are most familiar. Yet, like the cloud itself, SaaS has about as many different flavors as there are vendors offering it.

Before discussing what you should know before going SaaS, let’s take a moment to talk about just what it is that distinguishes it — and the cloud — from other forms of computing. keep reading…

When we said VisualCV was shutting down at the end of the month, we hedged with a Hail Mary closer: “unless, we suppose, a buyer swoops in.”

So this morning we discover that Talent Technology did the swooping and scooped up the site for job seeker portfolios. Financial details weren’t in the announcement, but Talent Technology made clear the site would continue. “The service will continue to operate as a standalone offering,” said Talent Technology.

Just in case you don’t recognize the corporate name, Talent Technology is the Canadian firm that sells the HireDesk ATS, and a sourcing system it calls Talementry. A new version of the latter was just released.

Even if you’re not a job seeker, and don’t plan on being one, VisualCV is worth a look. It’s a great place to showcase work for anyone building or managing their personal brand. It supplements your LinkedIn profile.

As Amybeth Hale wrote on our sister site, SourceCon, the site enables professionals “to easily build and manage an online career portfolio that comes alive with informational keyword pop-ups, video, pictures, and professional networking.”

All good for VisualCV, but what’s in it for Talent Technology? The announcement doesn’t really say. There’s only this: “As part of Talent Technology, users can also look forward to new innovations to help them create even more engaging online resumes faster and easier in the future.”

For users of the site, VisualCV says everything will stay as is, except that it will now be free. The premium service is being discontinued. Subscribers should already have gotten a refund.

You’ll see how many people are looking for jobs; how the Swedish military is advertising; and who beat out Booz Allen in a Best-place-to-work list, all in today’s roundup.  keep reading…

This morning, three days after the news that SAP is acquiring SuccessFactors, comes the announcement that SuccessFactors is buying recruitment marketer Jobs2Web for $110 million.

SuccessFactors says it will combine its “social, mobile, and collaborative recruiting management solution with Jobs2web’s leading recruiting marketing platform, creating an end-to-end recruiting system.”

Saturday’s SAP SuccessFactors acquisition touched off a rally Monday among the publicly traded HR tech vendors, as well as speculation about further consolidation in the industry. However, no mention was made of Jobs2Web.

Based just outside Minneapolis, Jobs2Web specializes in enhancing employer job postings to boost their findability by job seekers. The company optimizes job listings to improve their position on search results pages by, among other things, building micro-sites for each listing. Listings are also redistributed to multiple job boards, aggregation sites, and other places, with codes inserted for each listing so recruiters can identify the most effective marketing channels. keep reading…

There’s nothing like a big-buzz acquisition to lift the boats in the HR SaaS harbor. Taleo, Kenexa, and even pricey Salesforce saw jumps in their stock today as investors reacted to the weekend news that ERP vendor SAP was buying SuccessFactors.

Taleo and Kenexa were both up by double-digits. Salesforce, trading well over $100, was up 4.5 percent. SuccessFactors, as to be expected, was the big winner, catapulting nearly 52 percent to close just below the $40-a-share SAP will pay.

The rally was to be expected, given the speculation about who might next be an acquisition target in the talent management/HR software sector. It was mere minutes after the conference call SAP held Saturday morning to discuss the sale that analysts began speculating about which company would be next to get bought up by whom. keep reading…

Intel is working on a flurry of online recruiting activity, with the biggest being a new technology for its recruiters to manage college recruits, a new mobile application for all job candidates, as well as changes to its Facebook pages.

First to college recruiting. Tavish Ledesma is one of the key players on this one. He comes from a software-engineering background, with less than a year on the human resources side. What he found when starting with HR, and going to campuses last spring, was a “laborious process for processing resumes.”

Intel receives 20,000 paper resumes per year in the U.S. “They were were shipped to a Intel shared service center where they were processed,” says Allen Stephens. “The candidate data would not be available in our system for a couple of weeks, resulting in a delay before our candidates would hear back from us.”

Ledesma put together a proposal, with some screen shots, for streamlining that process, and Intel, up to the CIO’s office and the HR VP, bought in.

Among the goals is to help recruiters collect information from candidates, and shorten the time between when a candidate and recruiter meet, and that candidate gets an email from Intel about applying for a job. keep reading…

For a thought experiment (and to encourage creative conversation), I recently asked a few recruiting friends, “If you were left with only one method or tool for recruiting talent, what would you use?”

I’ve listed a few responses below and included some dialogue regarding pros and cons of each. Hopefully this discussion will help recruiters and recruiting leaders focus their energies on those tools that actually bring value to their organizations. keep reading…

The experience was exceptional.

I was impressed with the high level of professionalism.

Very professional interviews that provided me an environment in which I could be myself.

It made me want to work there even more.

Let’s hope that’s what your candidates are saying about your organization. Let’s hope that’s what they’re saying about your recruiting processes. But they may be saying stuff like this:

The worst and most unprofessional experience I’ve had.

You’ve yet to follow up with me.

The interviewer had absolutely no idea of what the position called for.

The reality is that candidates are probably saying things that cover both ends of the spectrum about your organization. What’s important is whether the first set of statements is more prevalent, or the second set is – and what you are doing about it.

There’s a lot of focus in our industry on finding and engaging passive candidates, developing a strong employment brand, using social media, and building talent communities, but a poor candidate experience can derail and minimize the impact of each of those efforts. My company did something about the problem. keep reading…

It is the best of times; it is the worst of times, for recruiters. Millions of high-quality potential candidates are out of work, actively seeking employment. Millions of high-quality potential candidates are employed and won’t budge for fear of LIFO.

Hiring managers can afford to thoroughly assess candidates, but they still need to proactively recruit.

Successful recruiters can manage this unique employment market by melding the initial assessment and sourcing through a dual-purpose recruitment tool: ideal profiles.

The ideal profile is not about elevating nice-to-haves to must-haves in your list of job requirements. It’s about using your knowledge of a top-performer KSAs and competencies to target your recruiting and do a more thorough, objective assessment of candidates.

What Is an Ideal Profile?

keep reading…

LinkedIn said there would be surprises at its Talent Connect conference in Las Vegas this week. The company didn’t disappoint.

During a keynote session this morning that had more in common with a Hollywood spectacular than sober recruiting kickoff, CEO Jeff Weiner wowed the audience of 1,800 with Talent Pipeline. Now it might be that the biggest applause — and some actual cheering — came when he uttered the magic word Free, as in free for those licensing LinkedIn Recruiter. But, those cheers would have been equally appropriate for the product itself.

Weiner left the driving to his VP of product, David Hahn, who tour-guided Talent Pipeline on five massive screens, demonstrating its ease of use, its utility, and a little less obviously, its potential to replace the most basic of ATS programs in use.

Hahn said the development of Talent Pipeline was driven by the challenges talent specialists face in managing pipelined prospects over many months. And not just prospects sourced from LinkedIn. Talent Pipeline, declared Hahn, is the single place to manage all your talent prospects, whatever the source.

What’s particularly special about Talent Pipeline is how it connects prospects and information. Any old ATS will take applicant resumes and sort them into a searchable database. More sophisticated systems provide notes fields, calendaring and scheduling functions, automated messaging, and the like. What Talent Pipeline also does is to pull information from a prospect’s LinkedIn profile, match up their connections, essentially building a portfolio private to the recruiter and tracking all activity between the prospect and employer.When a prospect in Talent Pipeline updates their LinkedIn profile, the recruiter is alerted. In the rare event that a prospect isn’t on LinkedIn, a profile-like portfolio is built from the resume employment history. keep reading…

In this hour long webinar, we will discuss how to drive change through your Talent Acquisition organization, from the earliest stages of articulating your vision and strategy, to the tactics that are important to implement and sustain change, to measuring and analyzing metrics.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Bernard Hodes Group is selling Hodes iQ to a company called Technomedia. The new company will be called Technomedia-Hodes iQ in the U.S., and Technomedia elsewhere. Like many other human resources vendors, it hopes to sell customers on the idea of what it calls a “complete talent management suite.”

You may be saying, “Techno-who?” keep reading…