Besides spending like it was 1999, Jobster changed, enhanced, modified, enlarged, annexed — choose your favorite adjective — business models often enough that the enterprise resembled Mrs. Winchester’s house. All of this playing out quite publicly via leaks, corporate PR, and the CEO’s own (defunct) blog.

In fairness to the now departed Jason Goldberg, he was a visionary. When Jobster launched in 2004 it tapped into the then-unnamed and not even  recognized phenom we now all know as social recruiting. To briefly, and only inadequately, explain it, Jobster was a corporate recruiter’s tool to tap the connections of the company’s employees; a digital employee referral program.

Over the next three-plus years Goldberg made well-timed investments, buying a job search engine called WorkZoo, a job tagging service called Jobby, and the blog Recruiting.com. Jobster would eventually relaunch as a career networking site, loosely tying in the referral program of its youth and bits and pieces of the acquisitions. Much of the best parts, however, languished, suggesting the visionary lacked a vision.

Now, just about two years after Goldberg announced he would leave the company, Jobster has been reborn as a recruiting services provider with the name Recruiting.com, which it adopted in the spring. Jobster.com lives on as a classic job board where you can pay to post.

The product now that is the hope of the investors who have poured some $55 million into Recruiting.com nee Jobster is a sourcing, searching, and organizational tool. It’s an ATS without the jobs; candidates only.

The key job of Recruiting.com is to quickly search your talent database (Talent Bank), which can be imported from multiple sources, including an ATS. A recruiter drives — there’s no job matching here. The process relies on keyword combinations or Boolean search to produce relevancy ranked lists of candidates. These prospects can be organized into folders named as the user desires.

Pull up a prospect and you can see from where they were sourced and see if there’s any contact history. You can add a note yourself.

Now what does this sound like? Say it with me, “ATS.” Or, if you prefer, “talent acquisition system.”

Jeff Dixon, the VP of product who handled the demo, was insistent that Recruiting.com is not an ATS. For one, he says, there are no jobs in the system. And without a req and the candidates associated with it, there is no tracking.

In that sense, he’s quite right. He’s also right that many of the systems on the market do a poor job of sourcing. Some of course, do a fine job. The bigger, beefier, and costlier ones can search internal and external candidate databases, social networks, and the web at large, creating lists of prospects and handle the contact management. Just this week a new tool from Jobvite was released that can do the same.

Dixon, though, says Recruiting.com’s market research revealed that even users of these systems find them intimidating. That’s my word, not his. What he actually said was, “What you hear (from recruiters) is ‘My ATS is a necessary evil’.”

Recruiters either can’t source from their ATS (very unlikely), find it too difficult (much more likely), don’t know how (?), or simply don’t. The latter is my choice for the most probable explanation for a datapoint from Dixon that one of Recruiting.com’s test companies discovered that 40 percent of its hires sourced externally were already in the ATS.

Think of the waste, even if the percentage was half that.

Considering that many companies have decimated their recruiter ranks, Recruiting.com may have just caught the tide of another trend, not as glamorous as social recruiting, but eminently more marketable in this economy: efficiency.

“Our tool is much more of a how-do-we-make-the-lives-of-recruiters-easier approach,” Dixon said.

My demo didn’t cover all the ground, but compared to some ATS search demos I’ve seen, Recruiting.com is simple to use. Once, that is, you have built the Talent Bank index. Some ATS databases are easier to port to Recruiting.com than others. Inbound resumes still go through your ATS or can be processed by a Recruiting.com connection, which I didn’t have time to see.

Capturing and parsing data from LinkedIn I did see and it was a snap. Dixon told me it was equally easy for resumes found elsewhere on the web. As a pure sourcing tool, it’s not as versatile as some of what’s coming on the market now, but it does the job.

Oddly, Recruiting.com shies away from the social networks. Certainly the unpredictability of formats and the content, as well as the accessibility issues are all, undoubtedly, part of the reason. But Recruiting.com CEO Jeff Seely’s belief that social networking is not  recruiting’s “secret sauce,” as he put it, is a factor.

“I just don’t get it,” he candidly said during a conversation earlier this week. “I’m a reluctant participant in Facebook. I’m not on Twitter.” He believes that the social networks will never be fertile ground for recruiters.

So in the year after he assumed the CEO job, he decided the company’s best bet was focusing on products to improve business performance. With Recruiting.com, that’s what he has done. It’s a bet that needs $55 million just to cover.

You can see Recruiting.com for yourself if you are heading to Chicago next week for HR Tech. The company will officially unveil the new product at the show.

The Dublin, California-based company has been on a tear this year, tripling its stock price as it declared itself officially on a shopping spree. As if to prove it isn’t just blowing smoke, Taleo, Tuesday, spent $16 million buying its strategic partner Worldwide Compensation Inc., which sells global compensation planning solutions.

The deal was announced in Las Vegas at the annual TaleoWORLD user conference, where the company also unveiled Taleo 10, the newest iteration of its integrated talent management platform. Taleo unabashedly describes its new platform as “the fastest, most social, and mobile talent management system on the planet.”

It’s a major play for Taleo, giving it a product with which it can correctly claim it has an end-to-end solution.

The new Taleo 10 incorporates some of what was missing in earlier platforms, particularly a development module the company, appropriately enough, calls Taleo Development. It is planning oriented, including classic succession and personal development planning tools as well as what Taleo calls “social learning,” which is a form of internal networking.

It works with learning management systems, but Taleo, through a partnership it announced Wednesday at TaleoWORLD, is connecting Development to Learn.com. The integration will allow Taleo Development to link directly to Learn’s training courses.

Taleo 10 has one of the tightest Outlook integrations on the market, making it possible for recruiters and managers to access candidate information and even do performance reviews right from Outlook. Its still-to-come mobile uses, via Blackberrys and iPhones, will make it possible for candidates to browse jobs, apply, and even track their status.

All of that, and the other features and enhancements in Taleo 10 (Taleo says there 100-plus new ones in recruiting alone) alone would make it worth a look, but the Talent Grid piece shows the company has been paying attention to the market and figuring out how to leverage its already substantial presence.

Taking a cue from the talent network AllianceQ, Taleo has developed Talent Exchange where candidates and Taleo customers can share job openings and resumes, which the Grid calls Universal Profiles. The potential is up to 13 million candidates a quarter and as many as 500,000 jobs, should all 4,100 Taleo customers participate.

There’s also a knowledge base, built around a social network, and an iPhone-like applications store of ready-to-use products and services from Taleo, its partners, and customers. All of that handy and undoubtedly useful stuff, but the Talent Exchange may be the most valuable as companies begin hiring again.

Josh Bersin, in his overview of Taleo 10, calls its release “a very important announcement for the HR software industry.”

Buying Worldwide Compensation now enables Taleo to offer a performance management solution that directly integrates with compensation planning. The company has historically been strong in recruitment. Its roots, after all, are in talent procurement, having started life in Canada as a job board, before moving to the U.S. and introducing an ATS.

In the last several years Taleo has moved aggressively toward a complete lifecycle solution, and toward growing its market share. Acquiring Vurv in 2008 achieved both objectives. Vurv had a strong talent management platform and 1,700 customers.

Michael Gregoire

The expansion of pay-for-performance compensation was already well underway before the recession took hold, and if anything it has made companies look ever more carefully at how they dole out raises and bonuses. Having a comp management component can only strengthen Taleo’s position in that area, a goal that was clearly on the mind of company CEO Michael Gregoire when he discussed the acquisition with a Reuters reporter.

“In the performance management market we are relatively nascent and have less than 1 percent market. We would like to see ourselves (increasing the share) to mid to high single digits over the next couple of years,” Reuters quotes Gregoire as saying.

Worldwide can accurately be described as a leader in the compensation planning field. Gartner positioned Worldwide in its Performance Management Magic Quadrant, recognizing the firm’s “Best-in-Class Global Compensation Functionality, and Deep Global Compensation Expertise.”

Gregoire foreshadowed the acquisition — and probably others — in an interview with the Oakland Tribune in August. He told the paper Taleo might spend as much as $50 million to buy companies with the technology it wants. It has $62 million in cash to shop and could, the paper reported, go to the equity markets to raise more if it needed to.

It’s a long way from the dark days of last November when the company had nothing but bad news to report. It’s third quarter financials released at the beginning of the month showed an $8.2 million loss. That was followed in rapid succession by a notice that its financial filings would be delayed pending an audit of its income recognition practices. Over the next few weeks it was hit with class action lawsuits over its accounting practices and its financial disclosures.

On Nov. 4th, the day after the financials were released, the stock closed at $14.94. The loss, though sizable, was explained by costs associated with the Vurv acquisition. By Dec. 1 Taleo was trading at $5.69.

The company has since come current with its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and resolved its accounting problems with an $18 million adjustment. It’s still facing three shareholder class action suits. A hearing on the company’s motion to dismiss it is schedules for Nov. 13th. Another lawsuit over patents is being waged with Kenexa.

Financially, the Vurv acquisition continues to be a drain. Most of the $2 million Taleo lost in the first six months of the year is due to costs associated with Vurv. But the $100k profit it eeked out in the 2nd quarter is a hopeful sign that the worst may be behind.

Yahoo Finance says Wall Street analysts are expecting Taleo to earn 16 cents per share on $49 million in revenue for the current quarter, which ends Sept. 30.  Since the beginning of the year, Taleo’s stock has been upgraded by several of the firms that follow the company with the consensus leaning toward it being a “buy.”

For now, let me give you some of the highlights.

This is all based on a survey Bersin & Associates did of talent acquisition professionals, HR practitioners, and recruiters from organizations of all sizes across all industries; the final count was 320 responses. The purpose of this survey was to obtain opinions from talent acquisition customers about the performance of their primary talent acquisition systems, to obtain information on customer satisfaction, implementation challenges, and to identify industry trends.

Time to Deploy

Through our research, we found that the average time for implementation (click on the graph to enlarge it) ranged from three months to more than a year. Since the talent acquisition market is very mature and many companies have implemented talent acquisition systems several times, the majority of organizations (36%) were able to implement this system in three to six months and few organizations took longer than a year for implementation.

Challenges to Successful Deployment

Before an organization implements a talent acquisition system, they need to understand and evaluate all of the potential challenges that may occur during deployment. While the majority of organizations that we spoke to during our qualitative interviews expressed frustration with the solution providers during implementation, many of these obstacles are a result of the lack of preparation and planning from the organization itself. Organizations need to standardize processes in their talent acquisition process before deploying technology. Many organizations cited the lack of a well-defined process and process changes as the top challenge during implementation. We recommend that an organization carefully review best practices in implementation and use initial benchmarks before embarking down this path.

The most common challenge that organizations face during implementation is the system’s support for all of the organization’s requirements. Similar to other talent management systems, early adopters of technology typically implemented the basic features during the implementation period. Today’s talent acquisition systems support many advanced features and can support more requirements. There is enough self-configuration and solution provider configuration options to support these hiring requirements. As a result, in our research few organizations cited “the system is too hard to use” as a top challenge.

One challenge that companies should consider during selection is the “right cultural fit” of the solution provider. During implementation, the provider and organization act as partners during this process to work together to meet requirements, roll out the system, and train employees on using the system. In this respect, the organization needs reassurance that their provider understands their business requirements and will truly act as a partner during this process.

Additional Costs

Most organizations need to set aside additional budgeting for training, configuration, and services that are often associated with implementation. Ask about additional costs not only during your solution provider evaluations but also during customer reference interviews.

The majority of organizations indicated that the amount of additional costs were minimal compared to what they expected, while 20% indicated more than expected and no additional costs. One area of concern is the 12% of companies that “don’t know” about the additional costs. Organizations and talent acquisition professionals especially should be fully aware of what they are spending on these systems in order to show the value and ROI or any discrepancies.

Integration

Integration is an essential component of talent acquisition systems. Best practice organizations consider integration during the implementation stages. Some solution providers provide integration toolkits to handle data structures and make a more seamless process. More commonly, integration should be examined on a case-by-case basis and needs to be custom-built depending on the needs of the organization.

Several years ago, the majority of organizations were not considering integration when selecting and implementing talent acquisition systems. They were making decisions without thinking about a more strategic view of talent. If integration is done correctly and can easily transfer data, organizations do not need to consider one large platform but rather individual systems that can work together. Unfortunately, integration is not a seamless process for most organizations and can cause problems for organizations that did not consider transferring this data during implementation. Today, organizations seem to be more mature in their view of identifying, developing, and retaining talent but still are not making integrating various systems a top priority. This is evident in the number of “N/A” responses with satisfaction in integration (see the graph, click it to enlarge). We recommend that organizations consider their current HRMS, talent management providers, third-party recruiting providers, Outlook, and social media when implementing their talent acquisition system.

Organizations can solve most of the challenges with integration if they begin this process during the implementation timeframe with a full team to support them including the implementation team and additional training and support.

Delivery Models

Although many of the solution providers offer multiple models, the majority of companies we research in both of our qualitative and quantitative survey results use an SaaS delivery model. Seventy-eight percent of companies access their talent acquisition over the Internet where the data is hosted externally, while only 22 percent have the ATS installed locally and running behind their organization’s firewall. The three main industries that have systems hosted internally are banking/finance, aerospace, and technology. These industries have high security needs and need to have more sensitivity around data privacy. As a result, they can not afford to take any chances in hosting these systems over the web.

SaaS has many benefits for both mid-sized and enterprise customers including affordability and scalability, but organizations need to perform due diligence and ask the following questions when implementing their systems:

1. Is there a license fee cost up front? Although SaaS allows for regular payments, some providers require a large amount of money and commitment upfront.
2. Is the data readily available? Organizations need to make sure they have all the information they need on their solution provider’s data center.
3. Internet availability? Does your organization have Internet access for every employee in the organization?
4. Does your provider offer a free trial? Many SaaS providers will offer a 30-day trial.

Global Implementation

As companies become more global in scope, implementing a talent acquisition system across multiple countries requires additional planning and support. Global implementation of a talent acquisition system can create a new set of challenges for organizations. In order to overcome obstacles such as localization and data privacy, we recommend that organizations understand both their global objectives and their local needs for each county they will be rolling out the system. Also, organizations should expect a longer implementation time when rolling out the system to various locations in order to address various across different geographical regions. Some of these global implementation challenges include:

• Differences with labor markets
• Differences in technology adoption
• Security issues/data privacy issues
• Translation resources
• Compliance and legal issues
• Gaining support from local offices

Despite these challenges, organizations will find great value in implementing a global system. Some of the benefits for organizations to implement a global system include:

• Standard quality of hire
• More consistency in the recruitment process
• Reduced costs using one system
• Increased reporting capabilities
• Increased communication

Organizations also need to plan for the future and consider what decisions and choices they will be making around their global workforce. How many languages will they need to support? Where will they expand? What support will be available? What is the level of technology adoption from region to region? Organizations should create planning committees and include representatives from each country to participate prior to implementation.

Making the Business Case

Implementing a talent acquisition system can provide results in streamlining the recruitment process and improving overall efficiency. McDonald’s UK is one example of a company that moved from a paper-based process to an online recruitment system. Shortly after, McDonald’s experienced a 30% reduction in 90-day turnover.

Although most organizations like McDonald’s UK will be able to measure this efficiency shortly after going live with their system, within the first few months of implementation, organizations need to continually evaluate and measure this efficiency to make a case for this system. The most common efficiencies experienced with the implementation of a talent acquisition system include time savings and compliance, two critical drivers of an organization’s decision to automate.

After taking a whirlwind tour through some of the things OrcaEyes can do, I have no hesitancy in admitting that “I’m not smarter than those 4th graders.”

Of course the significance of those reports was lost on the kids. Hilbert just wanted to make sure the navigation was easy to use and the red-yellow-green alert system easy to understand. And they are.

But it’s those reports that make the $200k a 20,000-employee firm can spend on OrcaEyes seem like a bargain.

Before I get into how, here’s a bit about the what, as in just what is OrcaEyes? Hilbert describes it as HR System Management Software. You can think of it as ERP for HR. Either way, the system provides an overarching view of how human capital impacts the enterprise. It does this by connecting to a company’s existing business systems — hooking into finance, sales, operations, supply chain, or an ERP (if there is one), the HRIS, HRMS, and whatever others may be there.

OrcaEyes crunches the data it extracts from these systems and combines it — for certain uses, like recruiting and salary setting — with data Hilbert obtains from such external sources as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census, and private data providers. Thus, in an instant, literally, an HR recruiter and a division VP can tell the cost in lost business for staffing shortages in the North Sea unit of Exult Energy’s refining and petrochemical division.

I thought that was nice information to have, but no special feat since any CFO can do revenue averages per year-end headcount. But as every CFO and line manager knows, being down one position doesn’t translate into a direct or immediate loss of revenue. Depending on the size of the unit, other workers will pick up the load.

Here’s where the magic of OrcaEyes comes in. The system is too smart to simply say you’re in danger of losing $1 million in revenue just because that’s the average. Nope. It knows, because you’ve told it during the setup, that losing one worker for a short period will have a minimal impact. But as the number of vacancies increases and the vacancy time lengthens, the bigger the effect and more bars on the OrcaEyes report turn red.

This is also a modeling program, not just a “what is” program. So OrcaEyes knows that besides the current vacancy, the attrition rate is such that there’s a high probability of losing more employees in the unit soon. And retirements will add a few more. Now OrcaEyes can tell you what the impact of all those things occurring — or some of them — will be.

That’s but one example of what this data-based analytics program can do. Even though OrcaEyes has only just recently come out of the incubator, there are plenty of other examples of its value from the 10 Fortune list companies that have been testing it now for several months.

I asked Hilbert for a sampler and here’s what he sent:

• A global manufacturing company discovered that when overtime for operators, maintenance, and skill trade workers exceeds 12.5 hours for three weeks, accidents increase by 105 percent. When the company added staffing to reduce the OT, the savings from fewer accidents came to $370 million in just two quarters;
• A retail company discovered there is a correlation between store clerk overtime and theft and customer complaints. When OT begins to exceed an average of 11.8 hours for three consecutive  weeks, thefts increased by 41 percent and customer service complaints increased 52 percent. The retailer loses one customer for every 2.6 complaints.
• That a manager with poor ratings by their staff affects bottom line performance is not an “Aha” moment. But just how much? Hilbert tell us that a retailer found store sales revenue dropped by 1.2- 1.8 percent for each 10 points below a 75 percent manager approval rating.

OrcaEyes, says Hilbert, provides “just about every metric you can imagine.” And many you might not have thought of.  Another example: Our mythical oil company Exult Energy needs chemical engineers. Where in the U.S. are prospects the best for finding engineers who are most likely to come to work for Exult? Would you believe Bay City, Michigan?

OrcaEyes was born out of Hilbert’s years with the much lauded Valero Energy. He was Global Planning and Talent Lead for the fast-growing oil company, landing the job with almost no direct HR experience, but a broad business knowledge from having CEO’d tech firms. During his four years at Valero Hilbert won award after award for his programs, including five from ERE alone.

It was during those years he came to appreciate the integration of HR and business purpose and metrics. In the process, he turned Valero into a poster child for data-driven recruitment. Dr. John Sullivan, a recruiting thought leader, industry consultant, and proponent of scientific recruiting, wrote of Hilbert and Valero:

“its primary differentiator is that the company takes a business-like, almost scientific, approach to recruiting. Most recruiting departments treat recruiting as an art. Valero, in direct contrast, utilizes and directly borrows from other successful business systems like supply chain, IT, Six Sigma, and process reengineering to craft a function whose performance can be measured (and improved) down to the minutest degree.”

Some two years in the making and months in the testing, OrcaEyes is Hilbert’s effort to bring the same principles and discipline he used to transform Valero’s recruiting to the rest of the world.

Because of its price tag and the system’s hunger for business data, OrcaEyes is clearly not a tool every company can afford or can use. But if you get a chance to do an OrcaEyes demo, do it just for the chance to see what recruiting will be like in the future.

And to ask Hilbert how he came up with the name of the company. (Hint: He didn’t. A marketing acquaintance did. And it has something to do with the fact that orcas — killer whales, as they are often known — don’t ever completely sleep and have sonar vision, just like the program.  And it’s a name people don’t forget.)

In the aftermath of ERE’s successful social recruiting summit two weeks ago, we might assume that talent acquisition professionals are on the cutting-edge of the latest and greatest in recruitment technology. Many best practice organizations are turning their backs on traditional sourcing tools in favor of mobile recruiting, social networking, and search engine optimization. One thing is certain: the talent acquisition system market is one of dramatic change and innovation. Both during strong and weak economies, investment in talent acquisition systems remains a priority for best practice companies looking to gain competitive advantage and secure a solid talent pipeline of both active and passive candidates.

When it comes to technology, companies have a unique advantage in today’s economy. They are in a position to ask more from their current technology providers and competitive options abound. Solution providers are responding by offering more features both through product development and strategic partnerships with companies such as Jobs2Web and Jobfox.

Yet, such opportunities raise critical questions. Are more features truly better? Do companies need innovation or just improvements in existing features and functionality?

In March 2009, Bersin & Associates launched a research study about talent acquisition systems to answer these and many other questions. We conducted a survey to obtain opinions from talent acquisition customers about the performance of their primary talent acquisition systems. We also wanted to delve into customer satisfaction, implementation challenges, and general trends. The research initiative also included interviews and briefings with 17 talent acquisition vendors.

Highlights from this research will soon appear in our upcoming newsletter on talent acquisition.

Here’s a brief preview of what we found.

Traditional Improvements

Our research found that many organizations are not interested in advanced features available in talent acquisition systems. Organizations need to consider their unique hiring needs and overall talent processes before feeling pressured by the glitz and glam of today’s talent acquisition systems. Many companies want the basics — requisition management, improved user interface, applicant tracking, and search capabilities.

Improvements in ease of use and configurability remain a priority for the majority of organizations (see chart at the top of this article, or email me if you have trouble viewing it). Although not always a “must have,” every survey respondent identified enhanced search features as a priority. The good news is that many of the solution providers are focusing on search functionality and enhancing to give users the ability to search for duplicate candidates and to save searches.

Even though many organizations today operate on a global playing field, more than 20% of respondents said they were not currently interested in global capabilities such as multi-language support, time zone support, or localization and currency support.

Innovative Improvements

However, our research also found that some organizations, such as 7-Eleven, are eager to bring innovation to their talent acquisition processes and looking for technology to support search engine optimization, web 2.0 career sites, and social networking.

The use of social media has exploded in the talent acquisition arena over the past few years. While most solution providers avoided this area in the past, they are beginning to see customer demand in support for features leveraging video, social networking, and RSS feeds.

Forty-one percent of respondents indicated that Web 2.0 capabilities are a “must have” when it comes to advanced features. While Web 2.0 capabilities, particularly integration with social networking, are one way to improve employer branding, talent acquisition departments are also beginning to recognize the benefits of search engine optimization when improving the quality and volume of traffic to your corporate career site.

As today’s talent acquisition system market continues to evolve, solution providers are making dramatic changes to their product roadmaps in order to meet the current and future needs of their customers. Companies are looking to technology solution providers to act as partners rather than suppliers, and listen.

I’d welcome hearing what changes would you like to see from your talent acquisition system provider.

The Canadian company, which trades on the Venture Board of the Toronto Stock Exchange, reported today that it lost $148,000 (CAD) on revenues of $1.88 million (CAD). Revenue for the same period in 2008 was $1.52 million (CAD), with a loss of $299,000 (CAD).

Cytiva first reported its financials in May. The current release is of audited financials, which are nearly unchanged from the initial numbers.

“Despite a highly challenging selling environment, Cytiva’s first-quarter results show strong growth in our key success indicators: Revenue, deferred revenue, and positive cash flow from operations,” said Jason Moreau, CEO of Cytiva Software.

The press release announcing the first quarter results doesn’t include any financial numbers. The numbers used here come from InvestorPoint.

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.”

• Which recruiting-technology vendor is the “red-hot category killer”
• How the economy’s doing, when it comes to the recruiting field
• What ever happened to Vurv customers
• How to tell if your potential vendor is in bad shape
• Vendors such as SAP, Workday, Deploy, Taleo, Kenexa, iCIMS, nowHIRE, SilkRoad, HRsmart, and others
• What Kronos is doing right
• Buying a niche product vs. a talent-management suite of products

“We are blown away by the response of small businesses to the launch of SmartRecruiters,” says Jerome Ternynck, CEO at MrTed.

Undaunted by the recession, the small businesses and organizations that are the target market for the SaaS-provisioned ATS are currently using it to fill 10,000 jobs. Posts to a commercial job board earn MrTed a commission, which is one of the ways the company earns money from the program.

“We pay nothing,” says Jerry Winans, associate vice president of HR at Taylor University in Indiana. The 1,900-student Christian school was looking to move away from its decentralized, paper-based recruitment process when it decided to give SmartRecruiters a try.

“We looked at other systems,” Winans says, but the cost — $5,000 setup and up to $7,000 annually — was more than the university wanted to spend. With 600 full and part-time employees and a turnover below 5 percent, spending even that modest amount was “prohibitive.”

So when Winans came across SmartRecruiters, he signed up for a beta test. “We wanted to see what the capabilities of their system are,” Winans adds. Since going online with the system in March, there have only been two staff candidate searches, but the results have been “very encouraging. It’s been a good product.”

Being an academic institution, faculty departments mostly handle their own recruitment and selection. Even for non-teaching positions HR plays a supporting role, receiving and processing applications and resumes before sending them all to the hiring managers who do the culling themselves.

Cutting down on the paper flow and being able to centralize a candidate database are two of the more compelling reasons for moving to an ATS. “Our goal,” says Winans, “is to buy no more filing cabinets.”

Taylor University is typical of the SMBs that have signed on to the SmartRecruiters program, a MrTed spokesman tells us. Cost is a key consideration, he says. But, like Taylor, the users don’t want to skimp on features.

One feature Winans particularly noted was the candidate ranking, a typical ATS keyword match ranking against the requirements in the req. When a feature is lacking, such as an auto-responder so candidates know their application was received, MrTed has been accommodating, Winans adds.

“We’re very impressed with the number of features,” Winans says, adding, “it’s very appealing for the price.”

The $570,000 net profit wasn’t quite as good as the $780,000 it projected in preliminary numbers last month, but it clearly shows how far the company has come since the bleak months of 2008.

For the same quarter last fiscal year, Workstream reported a loss of $19.7 million. You read that right and we’re reporting the numbers correctly: For the quarter ending Feb. 28, 2008 Workstream lost $19.7 million primarily because of interest liabilities. Even so, its EBITDA, considered by analysts a better comparison of company performance across an industry, was $4.5 million in the red. For the third quarter of 2009, its EBITDA was a positive $1.3 million. (Workstream has an odd fiscal year. It begins June 1 and ends May 31.)

The financial report, released after the market closed Tuesday, didn’t have much of an effect on the market, which factored in the numbers when the preliminary report was issued last month. Workstream’s stock was trading down 2 cents at 28 cents a share just minutes before the market closed today. The stock has seen a big runup since the end of 2008, when it was trading at 2 cents a share.

Traders may also be looking at the company’s balance sheet, which is carrying a $19 million note and current liabilities of $7.8 million. However, where analysts and investors focus most — operating income — Workstream’s sale of its SaaS provisioned compensation, performance, and talent management services showed a surprising stability. For the quarter, software sales were actually up slightly over the same quarter of 2008. Workstream reported income of $2.1 million vs. $2.0 million. The category is down about $1 million for the nine months ended Feb. 28th, coming in at $5.7 million.

When he released the preliminary numbers last month, Workstream CEO Steve Purello told us the company has been focused on internal cost-cutting while sales “sought opportunities to assist our F2000 base of customers in managing their rapidly changing workforces. “

Besides the HCM software unit, Workstream also owns 6FigureJobs, and personal career consultant Allen and Associates, While the job board, like others, has taken a big revenue hit from the recession (down about $800,000 in the third quarter alone over the prior year), Purello said resume search revenue is buffering the job board as companies that have laid off workers selectively (and quietly) hire others for mission critical positions.

“In today’s environment we’ve found company HR departments with a focused discipline on cost-cutting, measuring and differentiating performers vs. non-performers, reviewing compensation structures, and even some strategic hiring of high-performers previously unavailable,” Purello told us.

As for his own company, Purello wore us last month that “Workstream is continuing its own discipline of seeking revenue opportunities while watching expenses so we may bolster our balance sheet. We realize that prospects and customers are making commitments for our software and services for many years and want to partner with a company they can count on to serve them well in the future.”

Jobscience unveiled an iPhone app in London today that will let you source a resume database from a park bench, the airport terminal, or anywhere you have connectivity. When you find the right contact you can reach out however you think best — email, text message, social network post, or that other thing iPhones do, voice call.

The mobile application works with the ATS offerings available on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. Jobscience uses the Force.com platform for the applications it offers, including ATS solutions for large and small businesses, staffing agency software, and others. Because of that flexibility, users can add on other applications available through the AppExchange.

Besides searching the company database via an iPhone, recruiters and hiring managers can create and manage job reqs and postings, handle scheduling, and do virtually (no pun intended) anything they can from their desktop.

“Jobscience for iPhone is the first complete applicant tracking system that can run on a mobile device,” says Michael Vicchitto, marketing manager of Jobscience, calling it “the most scalable and flexible solution for human resources and the staffing industry available today.”

PERSONAVITA

Whoever first said job seeking was a full-time job probably had no idea just how much overtime 21st-century job seekers would have to put in. You have to brush up your resume — once you decide what kind of resume it is you want, and how many different ones you need.

Then, no sooner does the conscientious job seeker post it to Monster, CareerBuilder, and wherever else they think is right and just, they get told how no one ever gets hired that way. Instead, you have to network. So off goes conscientious job seeker to LinkedIn, Spoke, and to their personal contact list to announce they are in transition, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Meanwhile, they discover that networking is good, but you need to build a personal brand, too. And that means a Facebook page, a personal profile to supplement the resume, maybe their own web page, and, of course, the now-de-rigueur blog to market themselves.

No wonder the number of discouraged workers climbs every month.

Now comes PersonaVita, if not to solve the problem, at least to salve it. Launched today, the site is pitched as a way to “capture your experiences, validate your contributions, and draw from your social, professional, and academic achievements to create a personal brand online.”

You get started in PersonaVita by creating what the founders call an Experience wiki.This has the flavor of a 360 feedback survey, but without, presumably, any negatives. Instead of simply offering up the usual resume assertion about an achievement, you get to describe a project or an experience. Others add flavor and texture to it in a way that not only enhances your reputation but offers help and insight for the greater world.

The wiki and supplementary material, including, if you insist, a traditional resume, form your portfolio, which you can open up to recruiters, or, should you be filling your time consulting, to clients or anyone, for that matter.

The basic service is free; an upgrade runs $6.95 a month. Coming soon is an enterprise version for corporations to deploy.

NEWTON

This San Francisco-based online software company opened its doors in January and released this month an online ATS. The company founders hail from the tech staffing arena, and say the product (also called Newton) will appeal to smaller companies that need to manage candidates and reqs, not software.

“Our idea was to tackle recruiting software by focusing on the users of software, not features,” the founders say on the website. “This means we have become probably overly obsessed with designing easy to use software.”

What we could see tells us that it probably won’t take much training time to figure out how to use it. However, what the site doesn’t do is talk about the kind of features even smaller recruiters do value. So we can’t say how inbound resumes are handled or whether the system includes a way to publish reqs to the company career site and elsewhere.

However, the press release announcing the introduction says: “Newton also includes other perks such as expert support to help companies set up the system, import existing resumes, and create a custom careers site.”

Cost is under $2,000 annually.

ZAPOINT

Not a traditional recruiting vendor, Zapoint has a foot in the job seeker world and another, bigger foot in corporate human capital management. Its “LifeChart” is a new take on the resume. It develops a candidate profile by integrating standard resume content with additional jobseeker content and measures the results against organizational progression and career ladder information.

If that sounds a little vague, it is, because Zapoint really is best demoed than described.

The company, which has been around since 2007, now unveils SkillsMapper. It does what it sounds like: offers a company-wide map of relevant (and futurely-relevant, a word we just made up) skills required and skills possessed by the staff.

Here’s what the company says about SkillsMapper:

“By leveraging Zapoint’s LifeChart technology, SkillsMapper gives enterprises the ability to benchmark skills by employee, department, and across the company. It offers employees a way to track their own skills in conjunction with others in the organization; for managers, SkillsMapper enables comparison of individual and group skills, measurement of competencies against corporate objectives, and the establishment of a skills inventory that can be drawn upon when needed.”

JOBSTER

This long-troubled viral referral turned job board and sort of social network site is shifting away from the Jobster name to become Recruiting.com. Jobster bought the domain from Jason Davis (now of RecruitingBlogs.com) in 2006 when it had lots of money .

The two sites have different looks. Recruiting.com is focused on reaching businesses and pitching its tools and services. Jobster.com, which the new “About Us” section says is now a division of Recruiting.com, is essentially a consumer job board.

Founded by former White House staffer Jason Goldberg, Jobster raised more than $55 million in venture capital and burned through most of it in less than four years.

FINAL NOTE

That’s not a company name, but our own way of ending this post. Here’s a bit of PR gobblespeak, which comes directly from a pitch letter we received a few weeks ago. The name of the company has been removed, but we can say it came from a software vendor most of you have heard of. We think it’s really a cryptogram, so let us know if you crack the code:

“(Company) has always approached its natively integrated, wholly organic product suite from the strategic perspective that the PERFORMANCE is a key differentiator to understanding and helping business perform better via General Management On Demand, the category we created.”

High-Level Observations

• The rise of talent management. This seems to be the age of  “talent management” when it comes to the use of technology in HR. I saw a ton of companies offering “talent management systems.” These platforms use technology to cover a broad footprint of key HR areas/functions such as branding, recruiting, onboarding, learning, development, and communication. Talent management products are starting to provide HR practitioners with a technology based backbone that will allow them to integrate major HR functions. The integration of more functions into one platform is a trend that can have significant value given the traditional walls that tend to exist between the major areas of HR in larger organizations. There seems to be variation in the functions offered by the various talent management platforms as well as some gray area around what defines a talent management product. These gray areas are nothing new, and are indicative of the nature of an industry-wide trend that is causing vendors to jump on the bandwagon. While my overall thoughts about talent management products are definitely positive, one wonders how many vendors have just dubbed themselves as “talent management” providers to be trendy, and have not significantly changed their products.

• ATS Not Hip Anymore. Is it just me, or does there seem to be a significant decrease in companies selling products referred to by the term “ATS”? I could not help but think that much of the momentum in the use of hiring and technology seems to be in the idea of the broader, strategic, idea of talent management and less in the more tactical area of applicant tracking. The concept behind applicant tracking and its related functionalities are still of great importance; it just seems that the term itself is losing favor as traditional ATS functionalities are being baked into other products such as advanced screening/assessment management platforms and talent management systems.

• Goodbye paper resume. It seems that there is continued movement toward removing the resume from the hiring process. This is definitely true of the paper resume, but there is a broader movement afoot to deconstruct the resume and extract the types of data it usually provides (i.e., skills and experience). Key information about candidates is being collected via other opportunities in the search and application process such as the creation of detailed profiles that have fields that guide the entry of important candidate information in a standardized format. Parsing, another method of deconstructing resumes, seems to be continuing to evolve as a means of extracting important data from resumes. Resume deconstruction methods allow for much more efficient searching, and matching between candidate data and important job requirements. These methods are part of an overall trend that will see the integration of a variety of candidate information into a digital platform that will allow it to be standardized, categorized, and compared to key requirements for a job or career. While we have a long way to go toward the complete death of the resume, technology is helping us to continue the slow march towards the inevitable.

• Web 2.0 is hot. It almost goes without saying that the latest in HR technology is leveraging the benefits of easy access to information, communities, and data that are at the core of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 was everywhere at this show. It seemed to me that the applications of web 2.0 seemed to be concentrated more in the space of performance management products, but there is no doubt that it is having a large impact on the thinking of those creating recruitment-oriented products as well. I saw a heavy focus on the use of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook and on products that provide companies with platforms on which to build communities. The data-driven nature of web 2.0 provides a good deal of promise for the area of recruiting and hiring.

• We’ve come a long way. The products I saw at this show provide a sign of continued progress and evolution that seems significantly more advanced than the products available five years ago in many ways. While the core function of many products may remain the same, we are continuing to develop new ways to connect people and information. The products I looked at seem slicker, cleaner, and more usable than ever before. While it is often hard to cut through the smokescreens when one is looking at products on the tradeshow floor, the overall level of tech-savvy seems higher than ever. I was able to see firsthand the positive impact of technology on a variety of recruiting- and hiring-related products. Of course keeping up and separating faddish technologies from those that truly are game-changers will continue to be a challenge in years to come.

Assessment-related Trends

• Assessment is still an outsider. While there were a decent number of assessment vendors at the show, as an overall area of HR technology, assessment is still a very small piece real estate. This makes sense to me given the problems that organizations seem to have in understanding the value assessment can provide.

• Two directions of evolution for assessment. Technology is helping assessment to slowly evolve in two directions. The first of these involves assessment being integrated into the functions provided by bigger, broader systems and products such as job boards, ATS, and talent management. Embedding assessment into other products makes sense when one understands that the core value of assessment is to provide information that can be used in conjunction with other information to support informed decision-making. Pre-employment assessment actually may have the most value when it is an integrated part of a process-based approach into which its results are integrated. This trend has been very slow to develop, but we will continue to see a trend toward embedded assessments. The second direction in the evolution of assessment is toward the productization of assessments to be sold transactionally. While assessment has been sold transactionally for decades, the present state of evolution leverages millions of data points to help provide a new level of clarity about what content predicts certain traits, behaviors, and outcomes. This evolution allows for off-the-shelf products that are more accurate than ever before, while providing documentation to support the relevance of these products for specific jobs.

• Hello, talent management providers? Assessment seemed to be conspicuously absent from the slate of services provided by most talent management systems. While assessment is part of the deal for some of the big players in talent management, it does not seem to be a core part of the concept at this point. This is upsetting given the value assessment can have, not only during the hiring process, but throughout the entire employee life cycle. Anyone who considers themselves to be a player in the realm of talent management should strongly consider embedding quality assessment tools.

• Platforms evolve nicely. The software platforms that accompany pre-employment assessment products are evolving nicely. I refer to these as “candidate management systems.” Today’s candidate management systems offer many of the functionalities once seen only in ATS products. This evolution should help support the value proposition of assessment as products become easier to use and provide additional decision-making support.

• Simulations still lacking. While there has been some definite positive movement toward the creation of more advanced simulations, we still need to be pushing ahead in this area. While there are some nice simulation products currently available, the future of hiring will continue to move toward the increased use of simulations. Not enough steps are being taken toward the development of truly innovative and unique simulations. This is an artifact of a lack of buyer interest and the absence of “killer apps” that are needed to allow simulations technology to advance.

When it comes to HR technologies that support the recruiting and hiring process, we are moving in the right direction and have come a long way over the past five years. The technology level available for assessment both as a core process and as a supporting cast member is more advanced than ever. However, there is a lot more that we can be doing to integrate assessment into the products that seem to be marking the trends in HR and technology. Assessment still seems to remain the misunderstood stepchild of HR, which is a shame since there is so much evidence for the value it can have. I remain optimistic that assessment will continue to be brought more tightly into the fold in years ahead.

No one was even close in the voting by some 800 or so recruiters, HR professionals, and others who cast electronic ballots at the end of three separate presentations by each company. The presentations addressed three typical corporate scenarios scripted by shootout organizer and HR Executive magazine writer Bill Kutik and Leighanne Levensaler, director of talent management research, at Bersin and Associates. It was the third win for Authoria in four years.

In each of the three rounds of voting, Authoria garnered over half the votes leaving Cornerstone OnDemand (profile; site), Salary.com (profile; site) and Softscape (profile; site) to divide the balance. The voting was even more lopsided, since none of the runners-up came in 2nd, 3rd, or 4th more than once (which under the unique rules of the shootout meant they all tied for 2nd place).

Although the anonymous voting doesn’t explain why the balloting went the way it did, audience chatter suggested the engaging presentation style of Authoria’s CEO Tod Loofbourrow had as much to do with the result as the features and the system’s ease of use and clarity of data.

The shootouts are a popular feature of HR Tech conferences. In the past, these competitions have featured ATS vendors and performance and learning. Today’s was the first to feature talent management systems.

Kutik said the process is rigorous, beginning months ago with calls to 18 talent management vendors. Thirteen agreed to participate in fashioning the terms of the challenge, with nine falling out along the way. The remaining four were given a scenario with three acts and 15 minutes total time to present their solution in a demo-like environment. The shootout rules require the company CEO to handle the presentation personally.

ACME Company was the fictitious multinational firm and the scenarios were built around succession issues, performance management, gap analysis, and personnel development. The scenarios were crafted to explore how well each vendor was able to identify high performers, assist them in their career track planning, offer development assistance to fill gaps in their competencies, and drill down into problem areas, while also solving a typical corporate succession-planning challenge.

Each of the participants played through the scenarios, demonstrating how their systems provided the critical information and assisted in addressing and filling talent gaps. Softscape demonstrated its multi-platform delivery system by showing how the system can be used via a PDA. Branded as Talent Phone, Softscape CEO Dave Watkins showed that the entire analysis can be done on a handheld.

Salary.com CEO Kent Plunkett quipped at the beginning of his presentation that his talent management system is “an overnight success five years in the making.” It was a reference, of course, to it being less well-known to the industry. On the other hand, Cornerstone OnDemand CEO Adam Miller observed that his company was one of the largest HR software providers by virtue of its user base and worldwide distribution.

Twittering for Sourcing
We see it used at conferences. We read about it on our discussion boards. We might even be active “Tweeters” ourselves … but how effective is Twitter for sourcing and recruiting? Erika Hanson Brown recently joined the Twitter community and wants to know how it works in the recruiting world. John Kennedy is skeptical about Twitter. Although it can help save time when learning about a potential candidate, John relies on some advice he received years ago, “there are only three true productive tools in recruiting — the pen, the pad of paper, and the telephone.”

After reading several more responses to Erika, it is clear that John is in the minority. Twitter can be an effective tool if you follow the advice of Kelly Dingee and Mark Tortorici including search strings, and tying together SMS and social networking sites. If anyone is interested, you can check out Dennis Smith’s presentation on the Recruiting Road Show and tune in to ERE’s webinar series on November 5 for some tips and advice from Geoff Peterson.

ATS Wish List
Erica McNally wants to know what are your “must-haves” and your “nice-to-haves” when selecting your ATS. What’s on your “wish list”? Jake Stupak lists the following: scheduling for multi-users, resume parsing, email tracking, and candidate and position matching. Sylvia Dahlby astutely advises to identify your unique business requirements first. “The leading apps all have the basics” — think about what your company needs before creating your list. She recommends CareerXroads and HRchitect for additional information. (HRchitect, by the way, is doing a workshop in San Diego at ERE’s conference on “How to Save Your Current ATS and Get a Return on Your Investment.”)

I have to add The Newman Group (who will also be doing a session on HR systems at the Spring Expo) to that list since it has a wealth of knowledge in this arena. Dorothy Beach, unhappy with Vurv, has been very impressed with Avature’s Recruiting CRM tool as an ATS option. (I also sat on a demo last week with Michael Johnson and agree that it is worth checking out.) This makes me wonder…will CRM tools replace traditional ATS tools? What do you think? Would you take the leap?

Onboarding New Hires and The Buddy System
There are several programs that if implemented correctly can make onboarding strategies successful. Based on research and discussions, many companies would include the “buddy system” on that list. Laura Arnold is very interested in a program that would pair an internal employee with a new hire but wants a new name for “the buddy system.” Apparently, Laura is not alone. Several respondents use a variety of different names, including “Mentor Program.” Bryan Chaney also recommends “Internal Career Counselor” and “Coworker Coach” while Joann Robinson has used “New Hire Partner,” “Orientation Partner” and “Orientation Coach.”

I’m interested in knowing if any companies have been able to measure the success of their onboarding programs, more specifically the concept of a “mentor program.” Todd Raphael has an in-depth look at onboarding in the next Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

JobFox or Net-Temps?

Kathleen Coughlin wants to add a new job board to her list. Can anyone recommend JobFox or Net-Temps? Although Kathleen did not receive feedback on Net-Temps, JobFox (often considered the eHarmony of recruiting) has some work to do. Taryn Pfalzgraf has been satisfied with the customer service but feels that the process is too time-consuming. She recommends a “conditional trial membership” or “waiting a few months to see if they’ve ironed out their problems.” Kimberley Joyce would have to agree. As an Oracle-centric company, she was reassured that JobFox could meet her companies’ needs. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Among other complaints, they are unable to add different tools, languages, and functionality. Given this negative feedback, Eden Shaffer encourages Kathleen to consider Search Engine Marketing instead. What do you think?

Hiring a Virtual Recruiter/Sourcer and Unethical Competitors
These topics continue to dominate the discussion boards. We’d love to hear what you think about these critical and timely recruiting issues…

The deal leaves intact Authoria’s management team including founder and CEO Tod Loofbourrow, who said that the acquisition “brings us an investor well matched to the size of the market opportunity before us.” Bedford will inject an additional $8 million in working capital to accelerate Authoria’s expansion.

The price is half the $128 million that Taleo (profile; site)  paid for Vurv (profile; site) just six months ago. Both companies had similar staffing levels, but Vurv’s 2007 revenues were around $40 million, while Hoover’s, the business reporting service, estimated Authoria saw about $17 million that year.

Vurv was probably also in better financial shape. Since being founded in 1997 Authoria raised some $100 million in venture capital, including $58 million raised by Hire.com, a company Authoria acquired in 2005. It evidently also had some debt, since Loofbourrow pointedly notes in the announcement that “Bedford Funding will provide us with a debt-free capital structure.”

Jason Corsello, writing in his blog, The Human Capitalist, called the deal a recapitalization observing that existing investors shareholders, which include senior management, as well as the VC firms, would probably only receive “only a fraction of the investment and value.”

Even so, he is encouraged about the company’s prospects for the long term saying it “creates a much cleaner structure for the company to really attack the market as the first vendor that can truly bring together talent acquisition/recruiting with the rest of the talent management suite.”

Swanson says Kenexa blames, among other things, the strengthening U.S. dollar for its lowered projections, but he says that “we believe Kenexa’s real issue is that it’s trying to do too much. We believe this is creating confusion with customers and field sales reps, negatively impacting customer support, stifling innovation, and in general, making it very difficult to execute consistently in a more difficult competitive environment.”

He adds: “BrassRing will continue to run as a standalone product. We believe this decision will diminish innovation, placing Kenexa further behind best-of-breed vendor Taleo, and ultimately result in a product portfolio that is increasingly expensive to service and support.”

Meanwhile, Swanson issued a positive report on StepStone, saying, “We believe StepStone is uniquely positioned within the emerging human capital management market. In many ways, the company, in our view, has done what Monster should have done several years ago — combine a low-cost customer acquisition tool in its job board properties with a suite of high-value human capital management applications. While cross-selling between the company’s two businesses has only just begun, we believe there is a significant potential opportunity to do so, especially selling high-value, recurring revenue human capital management applications that tend to be stickier.”

The company’s stock was off $5.89 as of 2 p.m. EDT, selling for $16.14 as buyers reacted to the company cutting its earnings estimate by 9 cents a share. Previously, Kenexa said it expected to earn $1.52 to $1.55 per share for the year. Wednesday, it told analysts and investors it would be in the range of $1.43 to $1.46.

“The macroeconomic environment continues to be challenging, and as a result we have seen an increased number of project implementations that have slowed or been delayed,” said Rudy Karsan, Kenexa’s CEO, in a prepared statement, released prior to a conference call with analysts that was held after the market closed Wednesday.

He also attributed part of the reduction to the changing exchange rate. “The strengthening of the U.S. dollar since the end of the second quarter has created an additional headwind considering the fact that international operations are the fastest growing segment of Kenexa’s overall business,” Karsan added. The company opened an office in India this year and has an office in London. It is headquartered in Wayne, Pennsylvania.

For the third quarter of the year, which ends Sept. 30, Kenexa expects revenue of $54 to $56 million, operating income of $10.3 to $10.6 million, and per share income of 35 to 36 cents. This is a reduction from the previous revenue estimate of $57 million to $59 million, operating income of $11.4 million to $11.8 million, and per share earnings of 38 to 39 cents.

–(You heard it here first): NewmediaHire is going live with a redesign of its site today. If it looks familiar, it’s because it’s based on a platform called “Ning,” popular for building websites. The video-blog-discussion-heavy site is aimed at creating a sense of community — more than just job-hunting — and is aimed at an international audience (the site has a corresponding LinkedIn group and perhaps half of that group is based in the UK, Australia, Canada, Africa, South America, and elsewhere outside of the U.S.) An Indian company helped NewmediaHire build the new site.

–A new site, moneybackjobs.com, is offering employees a “5% to 7.5% bonus for accepting a new job that’s posted on our website.” Employers pay $50 to post, and 10-12% for each candidate they hire. There are incentives for employees to be exclusive, and to take their resumes off of other sites (”trust us, we have ways of finding out,” the company says) as well as big incentives for employers to only post on moneybackjobs. Smart.

–From ThinkPanmure’s Nate Swanson: “We are hearing that several large BrassRing customers are unlikely to renew their contracts when they expire late this year or early next year, but have yet to make a decision as to whether to use their existing ERP vendor or that of a best-of-breed vendor.”

The company’s $56.4 million in revenue was an increase of 25% over the $45.2 million for the same period in 2007. The company provides full life-cycle talent management software and multiple additional products including assessments and RPO services.

Kenexa’s CEO Rudy Karsan did a little crowing in the financial announcement, which was released after the market closed Monday. “The combination of solid sequential growth and integration of Quorum International enabled Kenexa to become the first independent talent management vendor to pass the $200 million in annualized revenue level during the second quarter,” he said in the typical, curbed enthusiasm of the financial announcements of publicly-held companies.

Quorum International was a London-based RPO provider to Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The company was purchased for an undisclosed sum in April.

Kenexa told investors and analysts that it expected its current third quarter to come in at between $57 million and $59 million, which is about $10 to $12 million more than during the third quarter of 2007. After expenses, that translates to 38 to 39 cents in earnings, the company said. Analysts were expecting 40 cents a share earnings on $61.7 million in revenue.