ERE.net

Recruitment technology provider Jobvite has garnered a second round of financing, giving it $8.25 million to use for product development and to meet customer growth.

The company announced the Series B funding tonight. The round was led by ATA Ventures, whose co-founder and managing director, Hatch Graham, will join Jobvite’s board of directors. In December 2007 Jobvite received $7.2 million in Series A funding from a group led by CMEA Capital.

Jobvite says it grew its client count by 300 percent in the last year and now counts Accuweather, Mozilla, TiVo, Yelp, and Zappos among its customers.

One reason for Jobvite’s success is its versatility. Not only has the company built a nicely featured ATS, but it took care in the development to include the kind of networking capabilities that recruiters want. The recruiting platform allows for internal collaboration, encouraging employees to make referrals and, to the extent company culture and hiring managers allow, they can participate in the hiring process.

Making this a more active exercise is Jobvite’s behind-the-scenes job matching capability. Employees can choose to connect Jobvite to their Facebook friends,  LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers. Jobvite analyzes the profiles of those connections and suggests good matches with company openingx to the employee, who can choose to send a “jobvite” invitation to their friend, follower, or 1st degree connection.

Jobvite is an on-demand system with a yearly subscription fee priced for the SMB market and designed to be less demanding of recruiter time.

“This recession is fundamentally changing recruitment, pushing companies to become more cost-effective, innovative, and strategic. Companies are looking to the technology industry to make this possible,” says Dan Finnigan, president and CEO. “Our growth this year proves we’re serving a big need and delivering immediate ROI to our customers. With this new investment, the strong additions made to our team this year, and the on-going advancements in our technology, I’m looking forward to what Jobvite will do for our customers.”

I have not always been a cell phone technology enthusiast. Until my last phone — the world’s smallest brick — refused to charge. This sent me sauntering into the AT&T store, determined to keep my existing pre-historic calling plan. When it comes to cell phones, I am pretty cheap. I root for the vigilant “Rollover Minutes Mom.”

“I never use data services,” I haughtily told the salesperson.

And then it happened. I palmed (pardon the expression) an iPhone. Sheepishly, I upgraded my plan. I am a convert — to unlimited everything! The iPhone makes handheld technology fun and accessible. (I still get a kick out of the level application. I fire it up to randomly to test the lopsidedness of tables. I also play mobile Scrabble. Hours of geeky fun!)

In addition to entertainment value, the iPhone also provides opportunities for recruiters to improve productivity. Joel Cheesman and Michael Marlatt have written extensively about the coming mobile revolution. Joel, who has launched a mobile recruiting marketing agency, outlines why recruiters should be paying attention to mobile technology in an excellent whitepaper.

Most of the recruiting/job-related iPhone applications were developed for jobseekers. Here are a few apps that will help recruiters save time, allow greater mobility, or improve communication with networks and contacts. You may very well have some favorites to add; please include them in the comments. 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…

The interviewee queried the Microsoft Hardware Interviewer: “What is Microsoft’s commitment to hardware?” The applicant continued: “While, Microsoft is known for software, what is your vision for the hardware business?“

This scene played out over and over. Sometimes the candidate would even be looking over the interviewer’s shoulder without noticing the poster proudly displayed behind the Microsoft hiring manager. Yes, after 25 years, we were still getting those questions.

That was two years ago. Since then, we have changed the perception of Microsoft Hardware. We have changed the brand Hardware@Microsoft. Hardware@Microsoft has become a profession. The average “person on the street” may not know anything about Hardware@Microsoft. But a target audience of engineers who work in hardware will know about the importance of hardware in terms of Microsoft’s business vision.

ERE acknowledged our work with a “Most Strategic Use of Technology Award” and industry thought leaders like Dr. John Sullivan called our work “pioneering.” (In fairness, this award was shared by a talented group of colleagues who created View My World and incidentally just launched a new careers site.) While being recognized by one’s industry is flattering, the real success of our work was in solving a business need in our division.

The story of making Hardware@Microsoft a profession was an answer to a critical business issue.

keep reading…

Twitter’s confidential corporate information, stolen by a hacker a few weeks ago and partially released Wednesday by TechCrunch, is embarrassing the company, and causing a major stir about journalistic responsibilities, but the worst damage could be to candidates who have interviewed with the fast-growing startup.

According to a blog post by TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington, the tech-focused website was emailed 310 Twitter documents “ranging from executive meeting notes, partner agreements, and financial projections to the meal preferences, calendars, and phone logs of various Twitter employees.” Most of them, Arrington writes, “are somewhat embarrassing to various individuals, but not otherwise interesting.”

Those, including documents showing who interviewed for senior positions at Twitter, will not be released by TechCrunch, he says. Those dealing with the company’s business plans and products, will be published, he said.

keep reading…

What did you do the last time you invested in a new HR system?

If you’re at all similar to the thousands of other HR leaders that have gone through the process, you probably assembled an inter-departmental group from across the company and began creating lists of all the features anybody suggested.

Like other companies, that list probably didn’t include such vendor questions as:

• What is the turnaround time on resolving system problems?
• What is the turnover in your customer support staff?
• Can we request a change in our primary customer representative?
• When do we have to pay for system upgrades? Can we refuse an update and still receive support?

An article in the September issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership addresses the issue of post-sale service and support for HR technology systems. The article (available only by subscription) talks about the advice experts like Leighanne Levensaler of Bersin and Associates and HRchitect’s Rick Fletcher and Matt Lafata have for companies planning an investment in HR technology. (Incidentally, they all agree that mere lists of features is the WRONG way to go.)

They, and, surprisingly, the vendors I spoke with for the article, all agree that the most overlooked area in systems acquisition is customer service.

After the system is up and running, the most important feature becomes service and support. That the systems have user-defined fields and configurable screens matters hardly at all if you can’t get the vendor to help you batch post job listings to multiple sites.

That’s why Andrew Curtis, director of customer support at iCIMS, suggests that once you’ve got a short list of vendors, and are making a decision, the post-sale support and service “should carry a 100 percent weight.”

OK. So that might be overkill, but SilkRoad technology’s COO, Brian Platz, says, “How much weight would I give to post-sale issues? I would give it 50 percent of my criteria.”

Now that you’ve got some sense of just how important the post-sale service is, how do you go about checking out the vendor? The Journal article offers more detail, but here are some tips from the consultants and vendors. keep reading…

Here’s a question I bet didn’t come up at the Social Recruiting Summit on Monday: Should I add my boss as a Facebook friend?

What prompted this question (which I encourage you to comment on at the end of this article) is Hunch. That’s right, Hunch, a dot-com that launched out of beta on Monday. It’s not exactly a search engine. Nor is it an oracle. It’s, well, here’s how co-founder Caterina Fake explained it to CNN.com: “It’s something new.”

We’ll call it a decision engine, since that’s what others are doing and it’s as good a descriptor as any. The first time you use Hunch, you’re confronted with 20 questions. More will come later, but Hunch starts easy. You can skip these profiling questions, but like talking with a shrink, any question you ask will be answered with several from Hunch.

When I asked Hunch about where to look for a job, it presented me a with a list of topics and question options including, “Should I look for a job or wait?” Not exactly what I was looking for, but interesting enough. The first question Hunch asked when I agreed to that topic was “Do you need the money?” After working my way through the decision tree, Hunch advised me to “wait a bit.” But the split between that answer and start looking was 55-45.

Besides being fun, Hunch has a serious side. Though it isn’t going to replace a search engine for sourcing candidates, it can help cut through the clutter to help you answer questions like “Do I need an in-house person for my U.S. business?” Or “Is it OK to ask my co-worker on a date?” keep reading…

Joshua Kahn (who goes by twitter.com/joshuakahn on Twitter), spoke this afternoon at the social recruiting summit, talking up some of his favorite ways to geek out. Kahn works for Accenture, mainly on the Best Buy account. keep reading…

We interrupt today’s wall-to-wall social media coverage to bring you this bit about something old school in the way of promotion: The human billboard.

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

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

One of the largest employers in the world has embraced cloud computing for HR in a way so big that Siemens AG will have one of the largest, if not the largest, enterprise cloud computing deployments in the world.

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

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

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

Experienced companies with HR and IT professionals who have been through a system acquisition process before probably won’t find much help at CompareHRIS. But for the thousands of companies whose employee management system consists of file folders and outsourced payroll, the site is as good a place as any to start when the time comes to upgrade.

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

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

How long have we been talking about mobile recruiting? Finally, someone has done something more about it than simply enable job posting and “received your application” messaging.

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

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

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

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

The March 2009 issue of Fast Company lists its take on the 50 most innovative companies in the world.

As I read their analysis, it seemed evident that the lessons learned about what makes a company innovative could be directly applied to the recruiting industry. With this perspective in mind, here’s how I’d translate business and product innovation into recruiting ideas.

Some of them are wild and crazy, but then again, they might just work.

keep reading…

Do you use LinkedIn for sourcing? Everybody does these days, right? Would you like to be more efficient, reach more relevant people, and do this all for free? Perhaps you are aware of some of the points below, but I hope you will find something new here too.

keep reading…

If you work at a company that has recently cut back on its recruiting budget, but not on its high expectations, attempting to deliver can be frustrating.

Fortunately, if you have the courage to shift your approach you can still produce significant results using recruiting approaches that require little or no money. I am sure you are probably thinking that the old adage “you get what you pay for” holds true, but I am sure you also realize that there are exceptions to every rule (after all, ERE.net is free!).

Over the course of my career, I have compiled hundreds of innovative steps that recruiters and line managers have taken to reach top talent when other solutions simply were not working or they didn’t have the money to fund them.

I recently put pen to paper and completed a new book entitled 1,000 Ways to Recruit Top Talent, which as the name implies, offers numerous recruiting ideas, all of which have been used successfully.

The following is a checklist of some of those ideas that require little or no budget to implement. These approaches also work during strong economic times but they are especially appropriate during a major business downturn.

keep reading…

Can’t get enough of HR shows and technology? Then you’re in luck. HRchitect (profile; site) is organizing what the consulting firm is calling the “largest regional HR technology event.”

To be held outside Dallas on June 10 and 11, 2009, the show used to be sponsored by the area chapter of the International Association for Human Resource Information Management. HRchitect helped organize it in years past, but is now sponsoring the conference itself.

Matt Lafata, show chair and VP of sales and marketing at HRchitect, promises theHRshow as it’s being called, will be the “largest HRM show in the Southwest and one of the biggest tech shows besides HR Tech.” He and Rick Fletcher, HRchitect CEO, insist they aren’t trying to compete with the HR Technology Conference and Exposition put on every year by the magazine HR Executive.

“Our show is regional,” Lafata told us, estimating that about 90 percent of the attendees will come from Texas and adjacent states. Added Fletcher: “We’re not trying to take away from HR Tech or any other show.” keep reading…

Let’s face it: YouTube, Break, Hulu, and Veoh have changed the way we view movies and videos and, more important, they have changed the way we use the Internet.

We rely more and more on pictures, graphics, and videos to display data, deliver the news, give us instructions, and keep us up-to-date with our families. The facts are amazing. Using Quantcast as my source, here is a rough idea of what’s going on. The online version of the New York Times, for example, has a monthly readership that averages about 14 million people in the United States. And that’s the largest readership of any print media I could find. The online Wall Street Journal does a paltry 4 million and even the prestigious Economist does only 3 million globally and most are seeing declining readership.

On the other hand, YouTube averages about 71 million viewers monthly — just in the U.S. And its rivals are also doing well and growing. Veoh does about 23 million, Hulu about 19 million, and Break about 15 million globally.

This indicates a decisive trend: more and more of us are getting information and education from video, rather than from words – whether in print or online.

We have already seen video slowly gaining in popularity and importance in recruiting. All top-tier career sites incorporate both pictures and video. Usually the videos are of employees talking about their jobs, but some include campus tours or chats with the CEO or a hiring manager. Many recruiters have received a video resume, and chat rooms have buzzed with concerns over the legality of such resumes and whether they should be accepted.

I don’t believe there is any serious legal issue in using video resumes, as long as your organization has a policy about how they are used. They are no more discriminatory than a face-to-face interview and may actually help to showcase communication skills and other positive traits. They can speed up the pre-screening process and may even eliminate the need for the number of interviews we subject candidates to.

Younger candidates, who are just entering the job market, may prefer to create a video resume as it reflects the media with which they are most comfortable. I can also easily imagine a time when the face-to-face interview is replaced with a live, virtual interview, perhaps with the hiring manger and several others also present virtually. The use of video lowers costs, expands the number of people who can participate in an interview, allows asynchronous viewing, and makes it more convenient for a candidate.

Here are just four of the ways organizations are using video.

keep reading…

There is no doubt that technology has had a significant impact on the way we identify and recruit candidates in this age of social networking and blogging, but have we gone too far?

I recently had the opportunity to speak at a recruiting conference whose major theme focused on technology and its application in the recruiting lifecycle. As I stood in the back of the room waiting for the speaker in front of me to finish her presentation, I was shocked at what she had to say. She stated that “there is no reason to actually talk to a candidate today.” She continued by saying that “email and text messages should be the only means we use to contact and recruit candidates today because that is the medium they use.”

As this well-known speaker’s comments began to sink in, I realized the cause of many of the problems we face today — it’s people like this speaker who teach us to rely almost exclusively on technology! I may not be a doctor, but the last time I checked, every candidate is a living, breathing, human being with the innate craving to have a relationship with other living, breathing, humans.

Within the recruitment profession today, technology has moved from a tool to identify candidates and create efficiencies to a mechanism that replaces real relationships. If we all rely on the same technologies to identify, engage, and recruit candidates, what will be the differentiator from company to company? Are candidates to be treated as a commodity?

Have we forgotten that recruiting is sales? That sales is what builds real relationships? That technology should enable us to be more efficient but cannot engage a candidate in the way a recruiter can? Obviously these are all rhetorical questions aimed at pointing out how our near-reliance on technology is only exacerbating the problems we face today.

As I surveyed the room after I heard these ridiculous statements, I realized the impact this speaker had on the audience of seemingly young, inexperienced recruiters who were attempting to learn at least one nugget of information they could apply when returning to their respective companies.

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Progressive companies are now implementing Just-in-Time (JIT) sourcing programs to ensure they have a ready pipeline of top talent once the economy recovers. This will provide early adopters a significant competitive advantage and an increased share of the best talent.

In fact, these are the same companies that everyone else will be benchmarking in 2010 and beyond. So if you’d rather be the presenter at ERE Expo instead of sitting in the audience hearing about what you should have done, here are some things to consider as you begin implementing a JIT sourcing program.

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, supply chains became very sophisticated with concepts like material requirements planning, demand-pull procurement, Kanban, and just-in-time sourcing becoming commonplace. Recruiting is now starting to apply these same supply-chain ideas to improve the quality and timing of hiring efforts. This parallels the increased application of advanced consumer marketing and advertising concepts to recruitment advertising. It is the adoption of techniques from these two fields that makes JIT sourcing possible.

The basic concept behind JIT sourcing is the development of a dynamic candidate database of resumes and prospects. On top of this is a drip marketing program nurturing and engaging with this database on an ongoing basis.

When jobs become available, appropriate candidates in the database are notified and invited to evaluate them. As long as the database is filled with enough high-quality candidates and if primed properly, enough people should raise their hands for consideration. This means that jobs could be available for interviews within hours after a req is formally opened.

Even better, a recruiter could query the database ahead of time to determine whether there are enough candidates available to meet upcoming hiring needs. If not, sourcing programs can be accelerated to meet future supply needs.

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I just returned from the Future of Talent conference put on by Kevin Wheeler. This is a truly exceptional experience for those lucky enough to attend. The quality of content and discussions would be hard to duplicate. Having heard and talked about where talent management might be in the foreseeable future, it was logical to look at what technologies might be there to support it. As luck would have it, the Fall brings opportunities by the truckload to review the future of HR technology.

Judging by what’s on display and what’s being discussed at some other HR tech conferences I’ve been to, HR technology appears to be geared more to the past than the future.

keep reading…