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.

Although the Committee on Foreign Investment could squelch the deal, it’s unlikely. Delays due to investigations such as the one encountered by SAP are typical. No deals, however, have been blocked as a result, says IDG News.

The Taleo acquisition isn’t subject to those procedures, since Oracle is a U.S. firm.

Like other major software providers, Oracle is struggling to gain inroads into the fast-growing SaaS market. With companies turning to cloud services because of their efficiency and significant cost savings over buying and installing software on in-house equipment, tech firms like Oracle have been developing their own SaaS programs. Acquiring companies with SaaS products accelerates the process.

Oracle said as much in this morning’s announcement. “Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organizations,” said Thomas Kurian, EVP, Oracle Development. “Taleo’s industry leading talent management cloud is an important addition to the Oracle Public Cloud.”

Taleo offers both SaaS provisoned HR software, as well as on-premises systems. The company has about 5,000 customers and 2011 revenue of $308.9 million.

Unlike SuccessFactors, which isn’t profitable, Taleo has had two winning years in the last four. The company released its fourth-quarter and full year financials this morning, following the acquisition announcement. The numbers show the company lost 35 cents a share for the year. In 2010, it earned a penny a share. With adjustments for one-time expenses, including the costs of acquisitions Taleo itself has previously made — it bought Cytiva last spring — the company earned $1.06 a share versus 2010′s 78 cents a share.

In both years Taleo posted a fourth-quarter loss of 2 cents a share. After accounting for one time expenses, the company earned 26 cents a share, beating analysts’ 23 cent a share expectations. Its $84.8 million 4th quarter revenue was short of Wall Street’s $86.8 million estimate.

The Oracle offer sent Taleo’s stock up 17.23 percent, to $45.65 a share by early afternoon in New York. Oracle’s $46 a share offer is 18 percent above Taleo’s Wednesday closing price. SAP’s $40 a share offer for SuccessFactors was a 52 percent premium over the stock’s previous price. That differential in just two months lead TheStreet.com to suggest that the premium companies are willing to pay to get into cloud computing is falling.

“Cloud-based deal premiums are falling as investors and analysts correctly anticipate consolidation between technology giants and specialized cloud players,” says TheStreet in an analysis of today’s Taleo deal. TheStreet notes that the acquisition announcement is also lifting the stock of HR software vendors Saba, Kenexa, and Cornerstone OnDemand.

The price difference may have influenced three law firms to announce they are investigating Taleo’s acceptance of the Oracle offer. The firms are soliciting shareholders as clients. Taleo has been sued in the past by shareholders.

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.

Of course, the bright move (watch what we did there) is to keep up with your prospects. BrightMove, the talent acquisition and staffing software vendor, thinks so, too. So just this week the company added a “Social Bar” to its toolkit. With a click of the ‘sync” button, BrightMove will pull in your prospect’s updated info from Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites.

Now you know without waiting for that callback that your prospect has a new job and a better title than what you’ve got to offer.

Sure, this is something you can do on your own. And, you will, the first time you pull up a resume. Once you tag it, the process is automatic. BrightMove’s COO Mike Brandt says everything could have been automated — no human touch required — but then no system is smart enough to know which of the hundreds of Michael Brandts on LinkedIn is the one in question.

It won’t make sense to make the effort for every resume you get. But for your hot, if not immediately placeable prospects, tagging them when you get them and letting BrightMove update them for you, is, well, a bright move.

Jobaline

Matching, as anyone who has ever dated or recruited can attest, is an imprecise art. Yet that doesn’t stop anyone from insisting there’s enough science about it to improve the odds.

For hiring, I won’t argue against it, which is why when I checked out Jobaline last year I admitted not knowing quite what to think. Besides the usual requirements matching and ranking, Jobaline introduced a “seriousness” quotient. On the theory that the more interested and committed a candidate is to a particular job, the more time they will spend filling in all the info the employer demands.

Whether there was any validity to a seriousness ranking, even the founder wasn’t prepared to say.

A year later and Jobaline, as they say, has gone in a different direction. Today’s Jobaline is a sort of job board servicer, where employers post jobs for free, then get to review the basic info about applying candidates. When you see what you like, you pay.

Founder and CEO Miki Mullor calls it “pay-to-pick.”

The Interviewer Who Fell Asleep

There’s nothing like explaining to an interviewer just what it is you can do for the company to make a difference — only to discover they’re sound asleep. That’s a pretty clear hint of what your job prospects are like.

Alas that happened to poor Irwin, who was on his first interview after graduating college. Turns out the interviewer was a narcoleptic who, after snoring away for a few minutes, awoke and resumed where he left off.

I don’t know if Irwin got the job, but he did win $100 from OneWire for telling the most memorable interview story in the firm’s contest. OneWire, as we noted in last week’s Roundup, is a sourcing, tracking and, most significantly, matching system for the financial industry.

Quick Hits

Unrabble, the un-resume, SaaS ATS for the SMB market (we are partial to acronyms here at ERE), has just introduced a free version. It doesn’t do a lot, but it will give you a taste of a world without resumes.

Looking for a way to measure your branding efforts, or the performance of your career sites (besides just counting apps), or your social media significance? Here’s a list of 20 free tools. The list is intended for marketers, but then, isn’t that what we’re all becoming?

SHRM’s latest ANSI standard proposal is available for comment. The draft proposal is on workforce planning.

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. Job candidates can find jobs, record video or audio (Shah says that when given the chance to talk about their strengths on video or audio, they’re anxious to), upload a resume, references, and more. They can see who has viewed their profiles, and can receive interview requests through the system.

For employers, the system can push jobs out to people using social media, a little bit like other systems you’ve heard about, like Jobvite. Employers can look at candidates’ video or audio profiles, set up video pre-screening questions, ask text-based (written) screening questions, and interview people online. It also enables you to schedule interviews.

Thinking of all the other companies launched in recent years, I asked Shah: “Haven’t other people built stuff like this?”

He smiled, and shook his head horizontally in the ‘no’ motion. “That’s why I built it,” he says. He says — quite excitedly — that the biggest job boards are “archaic.” Their price, the number of resumes people are bombarded with, etc. – he feels it’s all designed more for quantity than quality.

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?

Here an ATS, There an ATS

Is there anyone left in the world who wants an ATS and doesn’t have one? There’s no reason for that these days, what with an ATS in every price range.

At the free end, there’s Zoho Recruiter, if all you need are the basics. For our money (actually no one’s money) there’s SmartRecruiters, which is a surprisingly full-featured, sophisticated ATS that’s priced at an even-more-suprising free.

At the other end of the scale, a company can spend upwards of a million on a enterprise, in-house talent acquisiton system that handles reqs, posts jobs, parses, sorts, manages, and stores hundreds of thousands, even millions of resumes you will never look at.

Despite this virtual cornucopia of systems, humanity’s indomitable drive to build a better mousetrap leads to the near monthly launch of just one more ATS. The latest to find its way into our inbox is Zartis. It’s a minimalist SaaS ATS out of Ireland that’s aimed at the SMB market. (Got all those initials?)

Zartis offers more than Zoho, and less than SmartRcruiters. That would be fine except for one thing: Zartis is mostly fee-based. What you get for free is a single open job allowance, which makes it more of a S than an M market tool. If you have more jobs and want more functionality — like posting jobs to aggregators — you have to pay.

Bottom line: Check out Zartis if you’re curious, then choose SmartRecruiters.

Since the ATS door is now open, OneWire got some strokes in an investment report from Feltl and Company, an investment banker and advisor. The report includes long excerpts from a discussion between analyst Scott Berg and OneWire President and COO Brin McCagg.

Berg obviously was impressed. “Overall,” he writes in his report, “We believe OneWire is creating an intriguing and unique approach to talent acquisition software and we are quite excited to track its progress in the coming years.”

We (our royal usage here refers to us — another use of the royal pronoun!), we wrote about OneWire in 2009,  not long after it was launched by founders McCagg and Skiddy von Stade. (Von Stade heads the financial executive search firm FS von Stade and Associates.)

OneWire was then, and still is, both intriguing and unique. It stands between the applicant and a corporate ATS, though an ATS isn’t a required component. It functions as a matching system, with the players completing profiles far more detailed than a mere resume.

It borrows from social sites, networking, and classic job sites to create a rich database of prospects that, as we (there’s that royal pronoun again) said in the 2009 article, if you want a Harvard grad who was on the crew team with international banking experience in pharmaceuticals, OneWire will find everyone who fits and rank them for you.

OneWire is being used by hundreds of financial firms and many Fortune 1000 companies. If you need another reason to take a look, consider that OneWire was named “One of America’s Most Promising Startups” by BusinessWeek. Here’s one more: OneWire has gotten $30 million from individual investors, a fundraising method intriguing and unique enough to warrant Mashable attention.

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.

When he sold MrTed to StepStone (now Lumesse) in August 2010, Ternynck held on to SmartRecruiters.

Today he’s approaching 11,000 customers and, despite doubters who questioned the staying power of a free — not freemium, but really, truly free — business model, SmartRecruiters is still here and growing. The company makes money by taking a cut or commission from sales of third-party recruiting services such as placements to commercial job boards, assessments, and background checks. Buying those services is entirely optional.

Ternynck likens SmartRecruiters to iTunes. “The way we play it is almost a platform play,” Ternynck told blogger and HR marketer Maren Hogan. “Some clients have called us almost an iTunes for recruiting.”

Mayfield Fund partner Rajeev Batra suggested that it was the “free and frictionless business model for hiring” that caught the fund’s attention. “When you combine a serial entrepreneur with deep industry expertise like SmartRecruiters founder/CEO Jerome Ternynck, with a disruptive model, you can transform a market and build an impactful company.”

While the investment may accelerate the build-out of features, and increase the number of marketing partners, Ternynck and SmartRecruiters haven’t been sitting still. Just a few months ago the company introduced mobile career sites for its clients, launching 10,000 of them. For free. They supplement the WWW career sites that are part of the SmartRecruiters feature set.

On the horizon, Ternynck said, are enhanced candidate features and job seekers that, Aberdeen’s Madeline Laurano says, will “provide a more engaging experience between recruiter and job seeker through a social platform.”

Mayfield’s Series A investment follows a $1 million angel investment the company got in fall 2010. Mayfield, one of the oldest Silicon Valley venture capital firms, has a wide-range of investments and over the years has invested in such startups as Gigya, Snapfish, and Affinity Labs. The company was also a heavy investor in the ill-fated Jobster.

“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).

The company has a strong presence in the SMB market, and says it added its 1,000th customer during 2011, though that’s a little fuzzy since the company has been claiming that milestone at least since 2008. Its client list includes Continental Airlines, FedEx, Liz Claiborne, Treasure Island Las Vegas, and eHarmony.

For years, even as equity funds began discovering HR tech, iCIMS eschewed outside investors. The press release announcing the Susquehanna investment makes the point that “iCIMS had been self-funded, highly profitable, and grown solely organically at 43% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) since 2003.”

The announcement doesn’t detail what led to the investment, and a company spokesperson hadn’t called back when this was posted. However, CEO Day did say in the press release, “We could have sustained our current rate of growth without an outside investment — but the timing was ideal to take iCIMS to the next level. This minority growth equity investment from SGE will help us dramatically accelerate our aggressive expansion plans. We look forward to offering deeper and broader services and support to our clients, and further penetrating the SMB marketplace with our high-value solutions and services.”

iCIMS said it expects to grow full-time staff by almost 25 percent this year. These employees will be spread throughout the United States and abroad and will be concentrated in marketing, sales, and technology.

The HR tech sector has been a hotbed of mergers and acquisition in the last few years. Taleo in particular has bought several companies in the HR sector to enhance and strengthen its product lineup. In the last few months, Taleo and Kenexa have seen their stock bid up, especially so since Oracle and SAP bought up vendors with strong SaaS products.

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.

In the old days (that would be just a couple years ago for most of us) you bought a word processing program (probably Microsoft Word or the Office suite) and installed it on your computer. Call that “on-premises.”

Today, more than a few businesses and loads of individuals are using online word processing programs and storing their documents off-site. Google Docs, which is free, may be the most popular.

Google Docs is SaaS. The documents you save to your Google account are in the cloud. Save them to your computer’s hard drive, and they are not in the cloud.

Simple, isn’t it? Ahh. If only it were. Talk to any HR vendor about SaaS and sooner or later they’ll mention “true SaaS.” While purists and plenty of others will argue with this, SaaS is SaaS. But, like Bertie Botts’ jelly beans, it comes in every flavor.

By consensus, for most companies, the right SaaS application for HR is one where multiple subscribers (clients) are on the same platform, using the same program, with everything managed by the vendor. Updates are pushed out regularly and everyone is updated simultaneously. Client data is securely segregated from each other. This is the multi-tenant architecture you hear about during vendor demos.

HR technologist and thought leader Naomi Bloom offers her own checklist of what makes “true SaaS.” Her column also describes its virtues and the benefits SaaS offers. Some, like cost savings, vendor maintenance, and management of the system, are obvious, others — accessibility, security, frequency of updates and improvements — are at least as significant.

Here’s a summary of what SaaS has to offer:

• Price: Usually a monthly fee, quoted on a per seat or per user basis. The initial outlay is dramatically lower for SaaS than for an on-premise license. That has tax benefits since it is treated as an operating expense, and it helps conserve cash.
• Installation: This can take from a few days to a few weeks — longer in some limited instances. Most of the time is in uploading data to the vendor, training, and in (the limited) customization of the user interface and reports.
• System management: The vendor is responsible for keeping the system up and running, fixing bugs, and installing upgrades. The most common update (not upgrade) schedule is monthly.
• Accessibility: Because the cloud is Internet based, SaaS operating in that environment makes it possible to access the data anywhere at any time, and, as vendors add mobile capability, on any platform.
• Security: The vendor is responsible. Because IT security professionals are scarce and expensive, vendors can more easily hire them and spread the cost over the entire customer base.
• Applications: With apps becoming ever more ubiquitous, cloud computing is a more felicitous method for integrating them with a vendor’s software. These integrations, which vendors tout as partnering, make it simple for an HR unit to begin using a third-party provider for such things as background checks, I-9 verifications, payroll, and the like.
• Service: An oft-overlooked advantage to SaaS is the flexibility customers have to change vendors. While switching is always a hassle, cloud computing means a business is not tied to a particular vendor or system.
• Innovation: Because there is one version of the vendor’s software powering all the company’s subscribers, developing new features and implementing them is easy, compared to an on-premises installation. The cost of the development and implementation is spread across the entire base, encouraging innovation. There’s also the vendor’s ability to effectively monitor how the product is being used. In most cases, vendors get little usage data from installed software. But a SaaS operation can provide gigabytes about what users do with the product.
• Scalability: Growth is rarely an issue. One of the hallmarks of cloud computing is that the storage and usage is, at least theoretically, unlimited. You’ll pay for what you use, but when you need it, the capacity is there.

Nothing being perfect, there are issues with the cloud that don’t make it a place for everyone. The biggest, perhaps, is that with SaaS the company gives up a measure of control. Company data — including sensitive HR personnel records — is stored offsite, often in places you don’t know and will never see. You depend entirely on the vendor’s skill to keep it safe and accessible to you.

Customization is limited. Vendors design their programs to be flexible, so customers can tailor its appearance, naming conventions, fields, and workflow. But you may be out of luck if you want something the developers never planned for.

Internet traffic can slow down the flow of data. Latency, as it’s called, is merely annoying when you’re on YouTube. At work, it can cause a loss of productivity.

There may also be unexpected legal implications. Privacy rules outside the U.S., particularly in Europe, are far more stringent and may be applied to your data should it be stored in an overseas data center. Also of concern is the issue of liability for breaches. A CA Technologies and Ponemon Institute study issued this year summarized the findings about data security this way:

The majority of cloud computing providers surveyed do not believe their organization views the security of their cloud services as a competitive advantage. Further, they do not consider cloud computing security as one of their most important responsibilities and do not believe their products or services substantially protect and secure the confidential or sensitive information of their customers.

Tanya Forsheit, a partner with the Info Law Group, commenting in news reports last year, warned, “Many providers of cloud services tends to offer one-size-fits-all contracts. You shouldn’t just sign up for them. You need to negotiate.”

Weighing up the pros and cons, SaaS and cloud computing come out far ahead — for most companies — of buying, installing and maintaining an on-premises system, which is why the tide is turning away from software ownership.

When Siemens AG in 2009 turned toward SuccessFactors and its SaaS HR systems, it was a demonstration to the world that the cloud had come of age.

Speaking last year at a SuccessFactors users conference, Siemens CIO Norbert Kleinjohann said the system, which took less than six months to get launched, has 400,000 employee records and gets 40,000 daily logins. “I believe that cloud computing will be adopted by IT sooner than we expect.”

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.

Your Staff Is Job Hunting

If you think the headline is wrong, you may be in for a surprise. Right Management (a Manpower division) says 84 percent workers are looking or will be looking for a new job next year. That’s the same percentage as last year, according to the firm, which surveyed almost 1,100 workers for this year’s survey via an online poll.

So now you’re thinking, “Some poll. More than 84 percent of the staff is still here.” But the survey doesn’t mean everyone is headed out the door. The findings are a barometer of worker distrust in management as well as job commitment.

Says Right Management Executive Vice President Bram Lowsky, “It’s a workplace equivalent to whether or not ‘the country is moving in the right direction.’ Sometimes called ‘flight cognition’ by behavioral psychologists, intent to leave is far from an unusual phenomenon, but when it applies to four-out-of-five employees for two years running it has to be of top concern to senior management.”

Creative Forecasting

The first-quarter 2012 outlook for marketing and advertising professionals is pretty decent, according to a new survey.

Here — at right — is what marketing and advertising executives said when asked, “In which of the following areas do you expect to hire in the first quarter of 2012?” (with multiple responses allowed).

Military Recruiting, Swedish Style

The Pentagon recruits American youth with a high-tech appeal that makes military life look like more fun than the best video game. If you’ve seen that space command commercial from the Air Force, then you know what that means. The Swedish military takes, ahem, a somewhat more down-to-earth approach.

Get Paid to Tear Things Down

Who wouldn’t want a job in demolition? Some of us would even do the work for free, especially if it involved stuff blowing up. (Yes, this might just be a guy thing.)

If this interests you, click on over to the National Demolition Association’s new job board, which it calls Demolition Career Connection. It’s a JobTarget site that backfills with construction jobs from construction job boards. Alas, it turns out even laborers have to have certain skills and training to work in demolition.

Applicant Tracking and Referral Systems Partnering

Taleo, a system for managing job candidates, has a little partnership going with SelectMinds. SelectMinds (written up here) has a tool to manage employee referrals, allowing employees or alumni to match open jobs with their contacts, and recruiters to keep track of referral activities, applications received, and so on. This referral product will now be integrated (though not free) for users of Taleo’s applicant tracking system.

Speaking of Taleo partners: TALX also is integrating with Taleo, offering larger employers WOTC help.

Home Health Report

A new report’s out on the home health and personal care industry. The 121-page PDF includes sections on training, wages, hours worked, and labor shortages in the field.

Deloitte Tops Vault’s Tech Consulting List

1,500 consultants ranked Deloitte’s IT consulting group as a best place to work, moving it from third last year to first for 2012. Vault compiled the rankings based on weighting a number of qualities including prestige, firm culture, pay, and work/life balance. Deloitte Consulting LLP earned a weighted average of 7.964. Just behind it was last year’s first place winner, Booz Allen Hamilton with a 7.866 score.

Besides the rankings and scores, Vault also compiles an abstract of what the survey respondents had to say — good and otherwise — about each of the top 25 companies on the list. See it all here.

Manufacturing Optimism

Many manufacturing execs envision certain operations coming back to the U.S. Why? Higher wages in China and elsewhere; a smaller supply of skilled people overseas; and patriotism.

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.

Jobs2Web has grown quickly since its founding in 2003. It has been named to the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies for the last three years. It ranked 419 on the 2011 list, reporting 2010 revenue of $9.9 million and a three-year growth of 824 percent.

When the deal closes, which is expected to occur before the end of the month, SuccessFactors said customers will have the option of buying Jobs2Web services as they have, or buying an integrated solution with SuccessFactors Recruiting Management. The integrated solution is being branded as a Recruiting Execution Platform. Pricing for the products will remain the same, SuccessFactors said.

In an interview this morning, Doug Berg, founder of Jobs2Web, and Susan Van Klink, VP product sales and strategy with SuccessFactors, said the integrated product will leverage the data collected by the recruitment management platform to refine the job marketing piece to more perfectly target high performers.

SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors may have been all about the cloud. But the Jobs2Web acquisition seems more centered on improving candidate attraction. Berg said that with the SuccessFactors data, Jobs2Web will “have the ability to identify what the highest-performing candidate looks like.” That will allow Jobs2Web to refine the positioning and even the language of listings to attract those high-performing candidates.

Besides pushing out ads and optimizing them, Jobs2Web also simplifies building talent communities, which, Berg added, will also benefit from the SuccessFactors data by providing better job matches. He wouldn’t go into detail, but Berg said Jobs2Web has a LinkedIn toolset coming that will automate much of the candidate identification and targeting.

That customers will be able to continue using Jobs2Web without having to move onto the SuccessFactors platform isn’t unheard of, though it is relatively rare. Typically, in an acquisition, the acquiring company will integrate the new product line and compel customers to switch.

Van Klink said “forcing (customers to switch) is not in the SuccessFactors’ DNA.” So Jobs2Web will continue to support customers regardless of what ATS they use.

Down the road, if SAP can make the SuccessFactors integration work, its experience with big data gathered via its enterprise solutions may well make targeting of candidates so effective that messaging can be sent to just high-potentials and a high percentage of them can be expected to respond. It’s an interesting, if elusive, goal that’s been pursued by many companies, including Yahoo when it owned HotJobs.

In an FAQ-style discussion on the SuccessFactors site, the company said that most of the Jobs2Web team will make the transition, with the company  operating as a separate unit. When the SAP deal closes, SuccessFactors will become an independent unit of the German firm.

There was no mention of the Jobs2Web acquisition Saturday when SAP and SuccessFactors held a conference call to discuss that $3.4 billion purchase. According to Bloomberg, that was because the deal wasn’t completed then. Berg said he was unaware of those acquisition discussions, but fully embraced the deal.

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.

Except for a bizarre TechCrunch post characterizing the deal as a yawner, the rest of the business press, and especially the HR analysts, saw the deal as both a validation of the cloud computing model and the likely start of an M&A war among the biggest names in business software.

Over at ZDNet, Michael Krigsman, CEO of tech consultancy Asuret, Inc., said the deal is a declaration that “CLOUD HAS ARRIVED.” (Caps are his).

MarketWatch today quoted JMP Securities analyst Patrick Walraven telling investors: “We expect this M&A trend to continue as it reflects the competitive pressure traditional software vendors are feeling from software-as-a-service companies and the margin pressures software-as-a-service companies face as they attempt to rapidly scale their distribution.”

The MarketWatch report cited an investment note from Citigroup analyst Walter Pritchard saying: “There is potential for Taleo to benefit here. Long term, we expect that Taleo will face a more competitive landscape and thus we’d expect will ultimately end up as part of a larger company. Oracle looks like the most likely candidate here.”

Several weeks ago Oracle, which, like competitor SAP, is heavily invested in the on-premises enterprise market, announced a deal to buy RightNow Technologies. The company is an SaaS provider of CRM and customer service solutions.

Thomas Kurian, EVP with Oracle Development, said of the acquisition, “Oracle is moving aggressively to offer customers a full range of Cloud Solutions including sales force automation, human resources, talent management, social networking, databases and Java as part of the Oracle Public Cloud.”

What does this mean for HR leaders?

First, as Krigsman says, the SAP acquisition of SuccessFactors is a validation of the cloud computing model. While there are different varieties of SaaS, all are cloud and all have the virtue from a financial standpoint of being less expensive to buy and manage. SuccessFactors has made a strong case for SaaS, building its business entirely in the cloud when that was considered a limiting business model. When Siemens AG embraced SuccessFactors in 2009 for talent and performance management, the company’s pioneering strategy was vindicated.

However, as Josh Bersin observes in his analysis of the deal, “The HR software market is highly fragmented, and for this acquisition to pay off over time the companies must build a strong integration roadmap.” While he is not at all certain that the integration will be either swift or easy, he points out that the trend for the ERP providers is talent management integration.

“If SuccessFactors gets bogged down with lots of integration, will they be able to keep pace with the billions of dollars of investment going into the ‘next generation’ of talent management?” he writes. “History says no, but time will tell.”

Analyst Ray Wang and Forrester’s Paul Hamerman both make similar observations about on-premises HRMS and cloud human capital management service. The former are the transactional systems that aren’t so nimble or innovative, thus enterprises with these systems tend to run best-of-breed HCMs in tandem, rather than use those solutions from their on-premises vendor.

As Wang writes, “While the core offerings provided a solid approach, these applications remained in the systems of transaction world and lacked many of the newer requirements for systems of engagement.”

Hamerman makes the same observation, writing, “The co-existence of best-of-breed talent management solutions (typically SaaS) alongside core HRMS (typically on-premises) is quite common.”

In other words, expect to see more consolidation as the largest vendors look to acquire the cloud expertise and market presence of HCM vendors with a hearty SaaS business.

Bersin says it directly:

This move is likely to set up a chain reaction. Oracle could decide to acquire Taleo. ADP could decide to acquire Cornerstone. Mercer could acquire Peoplefluent. IBM could decide to acquire another series of vendors. While I think this acquisition still has many questions to answer, large vendors will now see this as “the beginning of the end” of the era of independent talent management vendors — setting off a chain reaction of other acquisitions. I believe this market is still very young and has a long way to go — but the bigger vendors may just feel it’s ready for consolidation.

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.

Intel’s still refining it, and still piloting it, but basically recruiters, instead of getting paper resumes and writing notes on them, are equipped with iPads. The iPad application (see graphic at left) is used at a career fair or other conference to collect information from a candidate, such as their name, email address, grades, and interests. The recruiter can mark it up with notes, such as whether the person wants a job or an internship.

The information makes it way into the Taleo applicant tracking system, and candidates can hopefully get an email back from Intel as soon as that day, the day they interacted with Intel at a career fair, and not weeks later.

Stephens says “the app allows Intel to reduce our candidate response time by 25 times, and save over 500 hours per year in manual processing.”

Development started in August, and as I mentioned, is ongoing. The biggest challenge right now, with the application having been tested at three different events, is getting a soft copy of a resume entered into the system; in other words, finding the best way way to get additional information from the job candidate added to their profile.

New Mobile App for Candidates

The college recruiting application mentioned above is generally an internal technology — to make life easier for recruiters and in the end, better for candidates. Intel’s also rolling out an application for job candidates who look for jobs with a smart phone, along the lines of ones Autodesk, Pepsi, and others have had built. It’s first being rolled out for Androids, and then to iPhones and iPads.

It took about six months from the first meeting about it to completion, and is still being tweaked as we speak, particularly with respect to the branding, images, and the security features. “We take our brand very seriously,” says Intel staffing channels manager Keith Molesworth. “Especially in the recruiting space.”

Facebook and Other Social Media

When we last off, a year ago, Intel was trying to make its social media recruiting more social, more consistent, and make sure it didn’t fall behind Silicon Valley competitors. Sejal Patel and others are continuing that work, with new wrinkles.

One of those is Google+. Patel partnered with the Social Media Center of Excellence (within the Sales and Marketing Group) to create the Intel brand page, which has multiple circles such as “technology enthusiasts,” “Newsroom,” “Trends,” and a recruiting-focused one, “Life at Intel.”

Meanwhile, as far as search engine optimization of jobs is concerned, earlier this year, Intel started using a tool from an association called DirectEmployers. The tool costs nothing additional for members of the association. Intel is now trying out Jobs2Web on some of Intel’s critical software jobs.

Intel continues to use Twitter, LinkedIn (where it has enjoyed success with a student lounge), and Facebook. When it comes to Facebook — well, that all had gotten a bit unwieldy for Intel, with multiple pages around the world, some even inactive. What it’s doing now is putting jobs tabs on different pages for different countries – UK, Germany, Poland, Malaysia, Vietnam, Israel, Germany, Russia. Those pages will have feeds from Intel’s careers blog, as well as local career-related events. A company called Vitrue helped create the tabs, modules, and feeds.

The Facebook site is pulling from the Taleo system, so people can search for jobs on Facebook, read the job description, and in the end go to the Intel careers site to apply. Work4Labs helps power the job search. “It’s a cleaner, prettier, branded way to search for jobs on Facebook,” says Patel.

It’s not yet using BeKnown or BranchOut, but was recently approached by the latter and is considering testing it, and others in that field.

Intel is also stepping up its use of virtual events in recruiting. Using a company called ON24, some of Intel’s events are mainly chats, where candidates submit resumes and talk to hiring managers and recruiters about working at Intel. Others are more of the webinar variety, on topics like CV writing — with a question-and-answer period.

Allen Stephens provided stats on a recent event: “Over 650 resumes received during two-hour event; 385 students attended; 10 hiring managers plus multiple recruiters in the chat event.”

Still Cracking the Code

Even with all this going on, even with this being Intel and all, if you talk to the Intel team, you find that it’s sourcing and social media challenges aren’t so different from everyone else’s.

You have your Tiffany Peerys (among the Intel team on video here talking about their recruiting in the spring of 2011) who are adept at the social-media recruiting thing, and you have others who aren’t as enthused. To that end, Intel recruiting leaders in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere are brainstorming some ways to better train people on social media, with that training likely to increase toward the beginning of 2012. It’d also eventually like to have a community manager for each region of the world, rather than so much of it being either run out of the U.S, or ad hoc.

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.

This list is presented in no particular order.

Employee Referrals: Traditional employee referral programs tend to fail because they don’t excite employees. Too often referrals are advertised on the intranet, posters in the break room, or distributed via internal mass emails, so this communication just becomes background noise. These programs don’t engage the vast majority of your employee base.

If recruiters, however, only had a referral program as their sole launching pad for filling positions, they could have solid success. Instead of advertising the program, recruiters would pick up the phone and proactively ask for referrals from employees on a regular basis. From that starting point, recruiters could have rich and thorough conversations with referrals from their current employees who may be the right fit for a position or point them to the right candidate. This high-touch methodology would certainly turn up passive candidates that none of your competitors are actively pursuing. The sheer size of your employees’ first and second level connections could fill a talent pipeline for a long while.

Existing ATS: In general, most companies underuse their current database of candidates. Compounding this reality is the fact they’ve paid a lot of money to attract candidates to their application process in the first place. For large, well-established organizations, an ATS could mean access to millions of candidates. The biggest challenge then becomes effectively mining the database, but left with only one recruiting approach, relying on an ATS could very well be the best option. If used wisely, by creating talent communities and folders, an ATS can be a great stand-alone recruiting tool. Positions not filled directly by candidates housed in the database, could lead to referrals and hires down the road.

LinkedIn: Having a dedicated recruiter for LinkedIn searches, introductions, and resulting conversations can result in attractive talent. Since LinkedIn allows recruiters to quickly locate candidates who appear to be a close match to their needs, this tool has a great advantage over several options listed here. However, recruiters tend to start these conversations cold, and this barrier can create resistance to success. For an organization with a low volume of high-niche positions, LinkedIn could be the best go-to tool.

Search Engine Sourcing: Starting a search with the empty box of a search engine can be a daunting first step, but top-notch sourcers can unearth contact information and initiate conversations with talent that no one else is engaging. The weakness of this approach is the energy and time it takes to find candidates. Although much of the search engine process can be automated across several sites, the process still has flaws since connectivity to these candidates is usually pretty weak (as opposed to a referral) so you may have to turn over a lot of rocks to find an interested candidate.

The Phone: Not to be overly simplistic, the old-school recruiters might think it’s best to just start making cold calls to competitors as their starting point. Since fewer recruiters are pounding the phone these days this could be a fairly effective, if not time-consuming, activity. For companies with a high volume of openings this might not be the most practical approach.

Job Boards: This is an obvious choice to discount as a main/only source to find talent. Not only does post and pray not produce the best candidate pool, it also is the only expensive option listed here. However, I would say it has one advantage over all the others above: ease of use. For small companies without robust ATS’s that are mainly filling low-level positions, this may actually be the best option, especially if they don’t have dedicated recruiting support. Most companies are much more complex and require more assertive tactics to fill their positions.

I would love to hear other recruiters’ thoughts on what tools/methods they would use if they were left with only one way to fill positions. Additionally, the common thread in most of these techniques is the ability to engage a candidate and then ask for referrals — this is the relationship nature of recruiting. Those recruiters that are strong on the relational side of the business will always find ways to be successful, regardless of the tools or techniques they are using.

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.

We’re going to be talking more about this at the Spring Expo (March 28-30 in San Diego), but first things first. I think we’ve all heard of the so called “career site black hole,” and I have talked to many a candidate who has a story about moving through a company’s interview process, moving all the way to a final stage, only to never hear from the company again one step short of the finish line. Less anecdotally, CareerXroads publishes a survey every year about how a “mystery candidate” is treated by the top 100 Companies to work for as listed by Fortune. The results are eye opening. It reports that 79% of candidates who apply to a position expect that there will be some sort of feedback, but only 19% of the top 100 companies to work for let the mystery candidate know they were not going to get the job. The apply-process itself has become a barrier between job seekers and organizations, with only 48% of the organizations in the study having a process that takes less than five minutes to complete.

Anyhow, we came out of a two-day recruiting meeting last spring with a long list of to-dos, and at the top of the list was to improve the candidate experience. The key for us was developing a “Candidate Commitment,” and then develop processes to support the commitment. Our commitment is quite simple actually, and focuses on four main areas that are part of the candidate experience: Education, Application, Screening, and Interviewing.

Education: we have used social media channels, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Tumblr (blogging tool) to provide candidates with a closer look into our organization. We make a point not to use these channels as another way to just promote our job postings, but rather to provide content that a candidate may not find on our corporate career site, such as recruiting team activities, corporate events, relevant business news, candidate tips, and so forth. We’ve used video to provide a more in-depth look at some of the functional areas we do a lot of hiring for, as well as to provide a look at the lighter side of our culture.

Application: we worked with our ATS partner to reconfigure our “apply now” process. Now, we only require three fields to complete our process — first name, last name, email address — the minimum it takes to create a profile. Amazingly, almost every candidate includes a resume as well, but you get the point: we went back to the bare basics, and the result is a process that takes less than two minutes to complete for a first-time candidate, less for returning candidates.

In addition to improving the candidate experience, it also improved the ROI for our job board investments. I know it is not a very hip thing to admit these days, but the boards are actually still quite useful for us and an important part of our overall recruitment strategy, resulting in about 19% of our hires. Have you compared the data you get from your job board partners regarding traffic sent to your site with what actually lands in your ATS lately? I was shocked by the drop-off rates, and when I talked to two major boards recently about things, they informed me that our numbers were actually pretty good. Both stated that anywhere from a 50%-80% drop-off rate was typical! No wonder the job boards are talked about so negatively. Our industry may only be realizing 20%-50% of their potential because of the hurdles we create to completing our process.

Screening: we committed to following up with all of our candidates in a timely manner. For us that is 1-20 days. This may be a phone conversation or a “thanks but no thanks” email template, but we do not want anyone to experience the black hole. You may be able to commit to something quicker than 20 days, or longer than 20 days, but the point is to set an expectation and then meet it. It is fairly easy to develop strong communication templates. Every commercial ATS out there has functionality that allows you to send mass messages to your candidates that feel at least semi-personalized.

Interviewing: we work closely with our hiring managers to ensure there is a solid interview plan in place, and that the interview will be conducted in a balanced manner, allowing the candidate to interview us in addition to the information we seek from them.

Three weeks ago I had the privilege to accept one of the first annual “Candidate Experience Awards” on behalf of the Sage NA Recruiting Team. In talking with many of the other winning participants, clearly everyone recognized that we all have a long way to go. I am hopeful that the industry as a whole embraces the challenge to improve, and I am particularly excited to compete for the award again next year.

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?

An ideal profile is 4-6 easily observable characteristics (items) that top performers in a given job share. You should be able to observe them from a candidate’s resume, application, or screening interview. They need to be logically (not just statistically) connected to success on the job.

Each characteristic is written in a format similar to SMART objectives.

Here’s an example of an ideal profile characteristic for an outside sales job:

“Active in 3 community groups for over 1 year.”

It’s specific, measurable, and time-related, but how do we know it’s achievable and realistic?

These last two factors are determined by an analysis of the top-performing incumbents in the job. This analysis can be very formal: thorough job analysis, or statistical analysis of bio data information. Or, less formal: reviewing top performers’ resumes and applications, and interviewing top performers. One quick note: if you are interviewing a top performer, he/she has to frame their answers to reflect their situation before they were hired, not 5 or 10 years into the job.

Another important consideration is the availability of the characteristic in the job market vs. your needs. Remember we are serving two masters here: sourcing and assessment.

Why Build an Ideal Profile

The ideal profile can:

• target your sourcing initiatives to where you are most likely to find candidates who possess the ideal profile characteristics
• better predict job success than pet theories, or gut hunches, because it is based on proven top-performer characteristics or behaviors
• increase acceptability among hiring managers who can relate candidates’ backgrounds to proven job success factors
• set a common standard for all candidates making candidate reviews more effective and efficient while treating all candidates fairly
• increase your recruitment process’ defensibility because it rests on job related behaviors of top-performing incumbents
• enhance your overall recruitment process without adding to recruitment costs

Building Your Ideal Profile

Best practices require compliance. Find a champion early on who can and will motivate hiring managers to use the ideal profile.

Conduct preliminary research into possible items for the Ideal Profile, as described above.

Your next step is to assemble a team of hiring managers, SMEs, and your champion. Based on my experience facilitating these meetings, you should be able to create a working ideal profile for one job in a single 2-hour meeting:

• Kick off the meeting with the champion, discussing: a statement of the business/staffing challenge; what an ideal profile is; and how it will address the staffing challenge. Set the meeting objective: to create an ideal profile for such and such a job.
• Come prepared to present your findings from preliminary research into likely items to include in the ideal profile. This will be your conversation-starter.
• Once the individual ideal profile items are established, the formula for rating/ranking candidates needs to be established. For example, will you require all ideal profile items to be met? Or, four of five?

How to Maximize the Impact of the Ideal Profile

As a recruiter, I have always believed in an all-hands-on-deck, everybody-recruits approach. Given this, here are some ways to use the ideal profile:

• Post the Ideal Profile in your office for co-workers to see
• Hold meetings with management to explain the process
• Incorporate the ideal profile into your referral program initiatives
• Hand out wallet-sized, laminated copies of the ideal profile of target jobs to all employees
• Discuss the ideal profile with your Centers of Influence in the community and with external recruiters
• Place a copy of the ideal profile in new-hire-orientation packets next to the description of your referral program
• Establish networks with community and business groups that are aligned with your ideal profile characteristics
• Build your resume/application review around the ideal profile and structure your initial interview to determine if the candidate meets the profile items

Important Considerations

The ideal profile’s primary use is to focus recruiters’ and hiring managers’ attention on high-potential candidates. It is a starting point. The ideal profile can help you target your candidate search and more quickly and objectively review a mountain of resumes. It is not a replacement for a multi-hurdle assessment process; it is the beginning of one.

As with any assessment tool, fairness is key to avoiding adverse impact and third party interventions. Keep your metrics up to date and be prepared to make adjustments as needed to be in compliance.

Even if you’ve done an in-depth analysis to create your ideal profile, things change: organization culture and goals, products, consumer markets, the job market. Track your results. See which ideal profile items or grouping of items work best in finding high-potential candidates and predicting success on the job. Plan on refining your profiles annually or sooner in a high-volume recruiting situation.

Avoid the use of personality attributes in building your ideal profile. Focus on observable behaviors. With the exception of “extroversion,” research tells us that most of us aren’t very good at correctly identifying personality characteristics from an interview, much less by reviewing a resume or application. Remember the old saw from Psych 101, “People do the same thing for different reasons and different things for the same reason.” Stick with proven top-performer behavior on your ideal profiles.

Many applicant tracking systems give you the ability to ask candidates questions and “pass” or “reject “ them based on how the questions are answered. Your ideal profile items may be used in your ATS. However, at least initially, I’d avoid rejecting candidates based on their answers to the ideal profile questions. Where your ATS allows, a better strategy is to score the answers and start your applicant reviews with the highest-scoring candidates and then work your way down the list.

The ideal profile is a productive sourcing and assessment tool for our times. It is a cost effective way to target high-potential candidates in a fair, defensible manner. Give it a try. It may just be a far better tactic than you have ever done before.

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.

With the introduction of Talent Pipeline in the coming weeks, recruiters will see an “Add” button on their dashboard. That’s how the CRM gets started. If it’s a prospect sourced from outside LinkedIn, say a job board, the Add feature uploads the resume and the record is created. It is, pretty much, that easy, from what Hahn demonstrated.

LinkedIn’s product team obviously did its homework in designing the features. One example: Prospects can be tagged to make searching more precise. Keywords may still be a recruiter’s instinctive search tool, but the tags make it possible to organize candidates in ways that best suit the user. So while Hahn tagged his demo example of a software developer as “android” and “mobile,” there’s no reason a recruiter couldn’t decide to tag a prospect more granularly or use tags to create special groups of candidates, say “hot” for a candidate ready to make a change.

There’s a lot to like about Talent Pipeline, and if anyone missed its potential as a management tool, Hahn began his presentation by noting that despite all the sophistication of modern ATS platforms, they can all be a little clunky when it comes to managing prospect pipelines sourced from social networks, and elsewhere.  He’s certainly right that an ATS isn’t going to pull in network connections, build portfolios, and offer referral opportunities. On the other hand Talent Pipeline isn’t going to replace the more sophisticated systems, those that can handle reqs and authorizations, distribute job postings, manage the corporate career  site, and similar, higher -level functions. But then, LinkedIn’s primary focus was on a tool to manage prospects and pipelines, and that it seems quite capable of doing, especially since the price is right.

This first iteration has only limited messaging capability; that capability comes via LinkedIn Recruiter, so companies that opt to buy just the standalone version will have to find a way to communicate with their prospects. Exporting some of the data is possible, but not all of it, Hahn said.

That it can replace basic ATS platforms is an added benefit, though, Hahn said, it’s not a likely outcome. True enough in most cases, but Talent Pipeline as part of Talent Recruiter can easily rival the simplest systems. A few more bells and whistles, and LinkedIn could have an ATS product to offer.

Talent Pipeline begins to roll out in November as a beta product to select customers. It’s expected to become generally available in the first quarter of 2012. No price has yet been set for Talent Pipeline alone.

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

You may be saying, “Techno-who?”

Indeed, notes Josh Bersin, Technomedia isn’t well-known, at least in the U.S. It has its roots in Canada, particularly as a sophisticated system for companies like Bell Canada to manage their learning/training. Bersin says that Technomedia is “highly respected” north of the border, and has gained traction not just in Canada, but due to the Montreal-French connection, in France. He says it has “struggled” a bit in getting exposure in the U.S. without a significant sales organization.

Bersin says it’s an interesting marriage, in that rather than one large firm buying another to dominate a market, it’s one company strong in one area (learning) buying one strong in another (recruiting). Similar, he says, to the Taleo/Learn.com deal.

Joe Fortunato, the Hodes COO/CFO, and Andy Katz, the digital VP, tell me that the acquisition was a good fit because Technomedia is customer-service oriented, and the product would end up, they felt, in the good hands of a buyer that wanted to keep the product, service customers well, and make it part of a larger software offering. “It’s not going to morph into something else,” says Fortunato.

The two emphasize that Hodes is selling technology — not getting rid of key developers and creative talent needed to work on and create various Hodes social media tools, job distribution tools, and many other offerings. “We sold our ATS,” says Katz, “simply that.”

The collaboration, one of several developments Taleo Chairman and CEO Michael Gregoire will outline during his keynote to some 1,600 conference-goers this morning, uses LinkedIn’s “Apply Now” capabilities to let candidates apply for Taleo-client positions using their LinkedIn profile.

Beyond that, recruiters will be able to source LinkedIn directly from their Taleo dashboard and be able to know whether candidates there are already in the company database. If they are, recruiters will be able to instantly update the on-file resume with new information the candidate may have on their LinkedIn profile page.

Besides just the ease of use, says Jason Blessing, Taleo’s EVP of Products and Technology, the integration will instantly alert the recruiter if other recruiters have sourced or contacted the same candidate. It will also allow the recruiter to use the company’s Taleo tools for communication, as opposed to initiating contacted through InMail, LinkedIn’s proprietary mail system.

Integrating LinkedIn sourcing with Taleo’s talent management system, Blessing told me last week when we discussed today’s announcement, “is huge from a recruiter productivity” perspective.

He’s certainly right about that. Switching back and forth from one system to another is, frankly, a pain. It’s probably not a big deal for small firms, but for employers in Taleo’s sweet spot — those with thousands of workers, or even hundreds of workers and many reqs  — removing the friction in sourcing saves time.

Michael Gregoire

The other product developments Gregoire is expected to mention include an overhaul of Taleo’s visualization tools, that takes into account the kind of information managers and supervisors want and use. Talent Browser, said Blessing, organizes things as an org chart would, making it easier for leaders to see talent gaps and workforce capabilities.

These elements are part of the new edition of Taleo Enterprise Gregoire will officially unveil during his keynote. Later, conference-goers can see demos and hear more about the LinkedIn collaboration during a special afternoon workshop.

The three-day conference includes addresses by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and author and speaker Daniel Pink, whose book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us has been on nearly every bestseller list in the U.S.

Taleo was thinking that a sold-out user conference next week would mean about 800 attendees. Now it’s expecting more like 1,100, up sharply over last year. It signed up 83 “business edition” customers last month, up roughly 15% over the previous month …

Work4 Labs, which sets up company pages on Facebook, is focusing on its “referral engine” product, where employees see who among their Facebook friends might make good employees at their companies. Work4 Labs did a four-company beta with the referral product. Facebook has been helpful in giving Work4 Labs access to its ads API; Work4 Labs realizes people don’t have the biographical information about their work like they might on LinkedIn, but is trying to draw conclusions about people based on things like what their interests, groups, and associations are …

InterviewStream’s Jake Burke says that the company has signed “more than 100 new clients in 2011 alone. Interest is like through the roof,” he says…

Halogen is moving into the recruiting field with a release of a recruiting module, perhaps next week. It’s also looking at international expansion and has opened a UK office…

BranchOut is launching something called “RecruiterConnect,” which is a take on LinkedIn Recruiter in a sense, in that a company will use it with a license and login. It will interface with a company’s talent acquisition system and allow you to search millions of people on BranchOut. BranchOut has also been listed as a top-50 investment-worthy company by Dow Jones, which a BranchOut rep tells me is “kinda funny” since she says the company has “pretty much all the funding we need”…

Corporate America’s nervousness about adding staff, and rebuilding slimmed-down recruiting departments, is to some extent Qualigence’s gain. Says bizdev VP Grant Hubbard: “We’re just slammed.”