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The biggest Taleo World ever opens this morning in San Francisco with news the company has forged a partnership with LinkedIn that will streamline candidate sourcing and help keep candidate resumes up-to-date.

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. keep reading…

Just a bit of what I’m hearing here in Florida, at the annual fall gathering of hundreds of recruiters and companies in the recruiting, staffing, and human resources field: keep reading…

While running the executive recruiting department for a Fortune 50 company, I once overheard a conversation between two people at a well-known coffee bar. Based on their dialog, they were executives from my company’s main competitor and were discussing a candidate they had just interviewed. Said candidate was a high-potential executive at my Fortune 50, and like many executive candidates, this person was a valued employee and not an active job seeker. The indiscretion of the two leaders from the competing company could have put their candidate’s career at risk, or at the very least, jeopardized his interest in continuing conversations with them.

The experience reminded me how much responsibility hiring entities have to maintain the confidentially of the executives they interview. There are at least five areas where exerting caution is imperative. keep reading…

A number of the big-name innovators in talent acquisition — the Sodexos, the PepsiCos, and others — are all trying to find a smooth way to get candidates using smart phones excited about a job at their companies, to apply for jobs without having to navigate a corporate careers site on the phone, all the while staying compliant with government rules, and not wreaking too much havoc on the employer’s applicant tracking system.

Matt Jeffery, who wrote that article on ERE that went quite viral, says his employer, Autodesk, is among the leaders in the mobile race. More on Jeffery and what his company is unveiling in a minute; first a look at how we got to this point.

A page from the Autodesk iPad version

What the amorphous term “mobile recruiting” has meant to many people so far is encouraging candidates to send a text message companies about jobs, like UPS has done, or the tinkering around with a careers website to make it show up better on smart phones, like companies such as Hyatt have done. Randy Goldberg and the Hyatt team are looking into having candidates submit some quick information on themselves using a cell phone, so they wouldn’t have to type in a whole resume or application. But right now, Goldberg believes that having candidates actually apply for a job using their cell phone would be quite a hassle for a candidate.

Most everyone tends to agree — including many folks you may have heard of who have an interest in mobile recruiting, people like Geoff Peterson, Craig Fisher, Gordon Lokenberg, and Chris Russell.

Lokenberg has helped Deloitte-Netherlands with its mobile recruiting. “There are a lot of apps out there that are mostly shortcuts to an Internet career site of the company,” he says. “That makes it hard to navigate.”

“The technology’s not 100% there,” says Peterson. “You’d have to have your resume already loaded up online and have a link to share, or something else like that. In theory (applying straight from a mobile application) can be done for sure, but do I see a lot of being done now? No, I don’t think so.”

“I’ve seen promise from a few different companies,” says Fisher. “But I’ve never seen a working product yet.”

Many of the applications out there are for certain groupings of people, like Lokenberg’s application created in 2009, which works only for companies that are a part of his database, and is called “Shake Your Job.” Or, Monster’s mobile application, for candidates to apply with the Monster accounts. LinkedIn says it does not yet have an “apply now with LinkedIn” mobile-phone application; Russell believes that in general, as LinkedIn makes its moves, it “should speed up the innovation around mobile applying.”

Anyhow, multiple recruiting departments I’ve talked to over the last few months are working on this, with help from various technology vendors. Among those many vendors is a small husband-wife Ohio consultancy working on an “apply now” mobile application, whose work is so private that it doesn’t want its name to be mentioned.

Pepsi, one of the innovators in the mobile arena, was aggressively working on an apply-with-a-cell-phone project, the company told me in the spring, though a spokeswoman tells me it’s not there yet. A little-known UK firm called AllTheTopBananas is its vendor of choice, a company that raves about the success of Pepsi’s mobile efforts to date. AllTheTopBananas has only about 13 employees, mostly developers. It started off in April 2007 as a job aggregator, sort of like a British version of Indeed or SimplyHired in the U.S.

AllTheTopBananas notes that “from the first 60 days from the apps going live, a soft launch only in the U.S., with the apps only being featured in only two places, on their careers website and in the app stores, PepsiCo had received over 3,500 downloads. Out of the 3,500 downloads, 85% of the candidates had job alerts set up on their device for targeted jobs they are interested in. When tracking the candidates who came from their apps, they have hired two new employees and have 10 in the recruitment process. Again, this was within the first 60 days of launch.”

Sodexo, not yet naming the vendor it’s working with, expects to launch its mobile application in about a month, allowing candidates to search and apply for jobs on their phones. keep reading…

There’s probably not a week (or maybe even a day) that goes by in which we don’t read about how technology will help you in your business, whether it be a smartphone, tablet, computer, social media, applications, etc. I think many of us have the need to use every type of technology out there without really knowing why or even having a real need for it. I believe it has gotten to the point that if you don’t adopt every new technology and use it in business, people think there’s something wrong with you.

Yes, technology is wonderful — when used effectively. That’s the caveat. Too many people have just jumped on this bandwagon without evaluating how, when, and why they should be using various technologies in business. It has become so pervasive that some of the tried and true methods of doing business have fallen by the wayside. Let’s look at a partial list of some of the technologies used in recruiting: keep reading…

Cytiva, the Canadian talent acquisition technology company, is being acquired by Taleo.

The $11 million (Canadian; $11.1 million U.S.) deal is expected to close early next quarter. When complete, the purchase will bring Taleo some 250 mid- and small-market employers, strengthening that sector of the company’s business.

Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Cytiva started in 1995 as a tech-sector job board, introducing its SonicRecruit ATS several years later. Over the years, Cytiva has added modules for onboarding, performance management, and others, retaining its focus on talent acquisition. All Cytiva software is true SaaS.

Michael Boese, Taleo’s SVP of its small- and mid-sized business group, said Cytiva is a good fit for Taleo, in part because both companies are focused on SaaS technology provisioning. And because Cytiva’s focus in the SMB market is where growth opportunities are strongest. keep reading…

Define “Best of Breed.” That’s rhetorical, but think about it because it illustrates a point about the direction of HR software that was part of the “Great Technology Debate” at HR Tech this morning.

It wasn’t among the questions posed to debaters Jason Averbrook, CEO at Knowledge Infusion, and Gartner’s Managing VP Jim Holincheck, though it lurked behind their generally affable agreement on most of the talent management issues that arose during their time on stage.

For instance, when show co-chair and debate moderator Bill Kutik asked about the meaning of strategic human capital management, and, later, about just what workforce planning is, there wasn’t much debate.

The former is the linkage of employees, their skills, training, performance, management, compensation, and deployment directly to the business goals and needs of the enterprise. As Holincheck said, it is “more than talent management,” and as both agreed, it is well more than the mere automation of HR functions.

Workforce planning was a little more complicated. keep reading…

Lucky that the recession ended last year. Otherwise it might be hard to explain all the shoppers here at the HR Tech show in Chicago.

I met a guy this morning at breakfast who runs the HR analytics department for a major financial institution. We talked data and he told me about the challenges of getting usable data out of multiple systems — not to mention the various ways systems allow information to be entered. He’s here shopping for tools to help solve the problem and improve analysis.

To my left at the table was an HRIS manager for a specialty retailer with more than 12,000 employees looking at new talent management systems.

At the opening reception Tuesday night I met a team of two HR professionals who came to look at comp management systems. And on the shuttle ride to McCormick Place an HR generalist with tech savvy said he’s at the show to scope out a new recruiting system. He won’t be looking at anything from the current vendor because, he confided, of its poor customer support.

The 13th annual HR Technology Conference & Exposition opened in Chicago this morning with a rousing welcome from show co-chair Bill Kutik. The HR Executive columnist exuberantly declared it the “largest HR Tech show in history.” keep reading…

Foodservice giant Sodexo has gone live with what its talent acquisition VP Arie Ball calls an “absolutely huge” implementation of a recruiting system to manage candidates, resumes, and interviews, including internal employees, external employees, and alumni.

Though Ball admits any company would say this, Sodexo, she says, is highly focused on talent. Indeed, that’s what increases curiosity about Sodexo’s ATS selection process and all else the company does with human resources: the outfit has won multiple awards for human resources and recruiting, including the ERE Recruiting Excellence Award for the recruiting department of the year in 2010.

“This is a big deal for us,” Ball says. “We’re in a growth mode. We need to have the right tools. Our ATS is kind of like the plumbing in the house.”

The plumbing wasn’t broken, but it was aging. Sodexo had tinkered so much with its Kenexa system, which as of this year was nearly 10 years old, that it didn’t have easy access to Kenexa’s system upgrades. “Because of the tremendous degree of customization as technology evolved,” Ball says, “we were still working with old technology. We knew we wanted to do something different. We wanted to start from scratch.”

keep reading…

One of Jobvite’s strengths has always been its ability to track an “invited” candidate back from the application to see how they came to learn of an opening. Now, Jobvite is adding more depth and breadth to its tracking, giving recruiters data about their job postings and the effectiveness of their own career site.

Announced today, the real-time recruiting intelligence can tell you how many people saw an an ad or visited your career site, what they did and, if you have Jobvite Hire, which includes an ATS, what you did.

For instance, if you distributed a job through social sites, sent a Jobvite to your employees, and posted it to traditional job boards, the recruiter intelligence part of the Jobvite dashboard can give you the number of visitors to each page where the ad appeared; how many then opened it; how many of them applied, and how many were interviewed, and, finally, if a hire was made, from where. keep reading…

Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan

HR software maker Kenexa will have a lot to talk about at its annual Kenexa World Conference later this month in Philadelphia.

That’s because Kenexa announced today that it has agreed to acquire compensation specialist Salary.com in an all cash offer for $80 million, or $4.07 per share.

According to a press release from Kenexa, “The agreement has been unanimously approved by the board of directors of both companies, and Salary.com’s board intends to recommend that the Salary.com stockholders tender their shares in the offer.”

Salary.com, based in Massachusetts, makes software that helps businesses and individuals manage pay and performance, and, is very well-known in the HR space. Kenexa says that it expects to close the transaction for Salary.com in the fourth quarter of 2010. keep reading…

HR software vendor Taleo grew its revenue and customer count during the second quarter of this year and though it also grew its net loss, the company beat Wall Street’s earnings estimates.

The company reported this afternoon that it lost $1.4 million, up from just $113,000 in the same quarter last year. Stock options and costs relating to previous acquisitions totaling $6.9 million were responsible for the loss. Not including these expenses (which analysts don’t include in their estimates) and some minor other one-time expenses, Taleo earned 14 cents a share. That was 2 cents better than the analyst consensus.

Revenue from applications (software)– $47.9 million —  was almost 12 percent than the same quarter a year ago. That boosted the quarterly revenue to $56.3 million, for an overall increase over the year before of 14.6 percent.

Of the 226 new customers signed in the quarter, eight of the deals exceeded $250,000 annually.

Taleo also reported that CFO Katy Murray would leave by Oct. 1. She earns $315,000 and received a 2009 bonus of $126,000, according to the San Francisco Business Times.

In the world of recruiting technology, there’s not much difference in the core functions of one ATS from another. All of them need to receive, parse, store, track, and retrieve candidate information. If they can’t do that much, use Excel and a filing cabinet.

So where these systems differ is in how well, how fast they perform these functions and how easy they make it on recruiters and hiring managers to use them. Then come the features everyone uses like job req approvals, posting, redistribution, candidate ranking, EEO tracking, and the features some people use like calendaring and CRM for relationship building, talent pool creation, third-party vendor integration for background checking and assessments and so on.

In 2010, even the free ATS’s (think MrTed’s SmartRecruiters or Zoho Recruit) offer many or most of those features. So why would anyone pay for a recruiting management system? keep reading…

There’s a new, free, ATS in town. Launched today, Zoho Recruit is a nicely featured candidate management system that’s suitable for smaller employers and staffing agencies.

It’s built by the same people who launched Zoho People, a low-cost talent management system we wrote about a while back. keep reading…

Remember Jobster? Of course you do. How could any recruiter forget the soap opera story of this company founded by a former White House staffer who, as CEO, burned through $46 million before he departed at the end of 2007?

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. keep reading…

Did somebody forget to tell Taleo we’re in a recession?

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. keep reading…

I’ve got an in-depth, 2,800-word article about implementing talent acquisition systems coming up in the November Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

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

Recruiter of the year Dan Hilbert must have found the smartest 4th graders on the planet for his OrcaEyes focus group. He says that it took them no time at all to navigate through the OrcaEyes console, generating reports on the cost of vacancies in an Exult Energy division and on the financial impact of an 80 percent improvement in time to hire for that group.

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. keep reading…

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? keep reading…

Bucking an industry trend caused by the recession, Cytiva Software, maker of the SonicRecruit line of talent management software, has posted a first-quarter increase in revenue while reporting its smallest loss in at least five quarters.

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.