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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAP announced this morning that it is buying SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion. The $40-a-share all cash deal is a 52 percent premium over SuccessFactors’  $26.25 closing price Friday.

The unusual Saturday announcement made much of the part the acquisition will play in “accelerating SAP’s momentum as a provider of cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure.”

During a conference call Saturday with financial and industry analysts, SAP’s Co-CEO Bill McDermott enthusiastically declared that the acquisition of SuccessFactors will “create, yes, create a cloud powerhouse… This market, ladies and gentlemen, is just beginning.” keep reading…

If you are a recruiting leader or recruiter who is constantly on the lookout for new recruiting trends, practices, and tools, you have surely already heard of QR codes.

QR codes are a second-generation barcode that allows potential candidates to quickly and directly access supporting materials and websites using only a camera equipped smartphone. QR codes have many uses, but are most often used to direct target audiences to online content that cannot be easily conveyed in print. keep reading…

News about internships, employee referrals, resumes searches, social media recruiting, and a video-oriented job board — it’s all in our roundup, below. keep reading…

Who doesn’t love writing Boolean search strings?

There’s nothing like crafting a Boolean equation to find a software engineer with every single requirement and a few of the “nice-to-haves” only to discover that somewhere in those 193 characters you’ve got a tilde instead of a minus and now your list includes tons of coffee industry IT professionals, who may also know Java.

Even writing a perfect Boolean string the first time isn’t quite so satisfying when you consider the time it took.

Scavado (nee AutoSearch) shortcuts all that string writing to cut to the chase, which, (need it be pointed out?) is to find prospects who meet your hiring manager’s needs. keep reading…

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

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

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

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

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

Job search company StartWire recently got a $3.25 million investment from Baird Venture Partners. The VC firm, which has invested in other human capital businesses including SnagAJob and Pinstripe, said “Startwire stands out in the human capital sector by addressing a real problem facing job seekers.”

StartWire was founded by Chris Forman, former CEO of AIRS, and Tim McKegney, who was previously EVP at AIRS. It launched this year with the promise of helping job seekers avoid the black hole and connect with a network of trusted friends and business connections for advice and job referrals.

Forman said StarWire would use the funds to grow its development team and speed product enhancements, as well as for marketing.

Bullhorn on a roll

Recruiting software provider Bullhorn reported new bookings and paid user count were both up over 40 percent compared to the same period in 2010. Heavy demand pushed usage to over one billion transactions per month, the company said.

The one billion monthly transactions include about 150,000 new and filled job orders as well more than a million job seeker views. Between the company’s recruitment CRM and social recruiting product lines, over 45,000 users across more than 5,000 companies rely on Bullhorn.

The company also announced this week the release of  Bullhorn Time and Expense. The new module for its ATS and CRM software platform provides online time and expense management and integration with accounting and payroll systems.

iCIMS partners with Payscale

iCIMS, a provider of talent acquisition and management technology, has partnered with PayScale. Now, iCIMS 1,000+ customers will have access to detailed compensation information for 13,000 job titles in all cities in the U.S., Canada, and seven other English-speaking countries. PayScale solutions allow companies to design and implement a compensation strategy tied to business results and ensure competitiveness in what has been a volatile talent market.

New twist on resume search

Urecuitme.com is a new jobs site that skips the posting part of job boarding, instead selling access to its resume database. Recruiters pay a flat fee to search for candidates, then pay up to $300 to contact those on the shortlist.

The business model is pretty much the same as LinkedIn Recruiter or buying only the Monster or CareerBuilder resume database, though all three sites likely have millions more resumes and profiles than does the Atlanta startup. The other differentiator appears to be that candidates also must take an assessment test as part of the registration process.

Google+ stalling?

Could be that Google+ has hit a wall. Or it could just be the plateau effect at work (as in loads of publicity generates lots of traffic, that then drops off, but at a higher level where it was prior to the publicity.)

Whatever the cause, Chitka says that Google+ traffic soared 1,200 percent in the days after its public launch on Sept. 20, then fell by 60 percent. The data analytics company is evidently in the “failure to launch” camp, suggesting in prior posts that the site peaked late in July and has been sliding ever since, public launch and publicity notwithstanding.

After the HR tech show last year I wrote an article bemoaning the absence of pre-employment assessment from the radar screen. Assessment really didn’t seem to be an area of much interest to anyone. I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about the perceived value of assessment as it has been a continual struggle to get folks to buy into the value proposition it provides. Still, I am pretty perceptive, and last year there was almost no buzz about this important area of HR.

What a difference a year makes! After this year’s show I am smiling from ear to ear as I was able to clearly tap into a great vibe of interest in assessment tools. I am still a bit disappointed that the majority of talent management vendors do not include assessment as a core part of their product offering. However, there were many talent management vendors who have begun to take steps down the right path. There were more vendors than ever offering a variety of interesting and unique products that demonstrate a continued deeper integration of assessment products designed to do more than just sling tests at job applicants.

What is the reason for the difference between this year and last? There are several, including: keep reading…

Two big vendor announcements kicked off the 14th annual HR Tech show in Las Vegas this morning. And if these are a sample of what we’re going to be seeing when the show floor opens later, then it’s going to be an exciting three days.

Silkroad technology unveiled something it’s calling Point, a different kind of talent (or is it performance?) management product that’s innovative and even a little unnerving at first. It’s certainly nothing like what we have come to expect from human capital systems.

Meanwhile Jobvite, working at the recruiting end of the talent spectrum, released a Facebook app that neatly complements its Jobvite Source social referral tools. Jobvite’s new social app works entirely within Facebook, connecting users with jobs and telling them who among their friends might be a good match. Apply for a job and the candidate gets to monitor the status of their application, all while still on Facebook.

Jobvite has been leveraging employee social connections for the past few years. The system required a company’s employees to work through Jobvite Source to enable the system to access their connections, search out and suggest matches, and then send referrals to those friends or connections. Now, the new Facebook app allows all the action to occur on the social network, making it simpler and easier for an employee to refer friends for jobs. It wouldn’t be right to call it passive job referral, but it’s undoubtedly going to increase the number of referrals because it’s just quicker and more top of mind.

keep reading…

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…

“Get in the mindset to recognize what you need, and avoid being distracted by shiny new tools,” said Shannon Myers, from Walton Search, talking about technology tips and tools yesterday at the fall ERE Expo.

But she did list some of the sites, applications, and services she finds interesting. Here’s a sampling of those services to manage your time, life, contacts, and information online (and in the comments section, add any you find valuable):

keep reading…

Join Kat Drum, Global Social Networks and Employment Brand Manager at BlackBerry, along with Alex Kinsella, Sr. Product Manager of BlackBerry app world, as they discuss a variety of key issues facing employers today in leveraging mobile platforms.

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

Back in the day, online career events were exciting only for their novelty.

To tell the truth, as recently as a few years ago, online job fairs were barely a step above what employers would get for buying a posting contract on a job board: a place to list open jobs, a corporate profile, access to resumes, maybe live text chat, a bulletin board discussion area, and some off-site advance promotion. These events would typically run for days or weeks.

Once the excitement of the Internet’s bursts of innovation began to wane, so did enthusiasm for the online job fairs. Relegated to the sidelines, they chugged along sponsored by colleges, the occasional job board,  tech companies, and some newspapers.

But now, with interactivity commonplace and budgets tight, new life is being breathed into online recruiting events.

Next week, two ambitious events will take place on successive days. One is a bonafide career fair. The other a Twitter-based jobs conference.

Tuesday, TweetMyJOBS will bring together, virtually, a raft of top-flight job search and recruiting professionals, to participate in panels and workshops on subjects from branding to networking to career changing.

Tweetnoting (as the press release describes it) the American Jobs Conference is presidential candidate and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. This is worth watching if for no other reason than to see how he manages to deliver his address — Getting Americans Back to Work — in 140 characters.

It starts at 9 a.m. PDT and runs until 3:15. The general hashtag is #jobs4US, and it’s already getting a workout. Hashtags will be assigned for each of the sessions once the agenda is completed.

TweetMyJobs was acquired a few months ago by the CareerArc Group, which also owns a few other career and recruiting focused sites.

On Wednesday, some of the largest newspapers in the country will participate in a virtual career fair as far from the old-school events as YouTube is from Hampster Dance.

To anyone who has ever played an online game or wandered around a virtual world, the environment of the Tribune Digital-organized job fair will be entirely familiar. Job seekers navigate by moving through a conference center to visit the various employer recruiting booths. keep reading…

Spam: it’s not just for breakfast any more, but what you may not realize as a recruiter is it could be keeping food off of your table.

Most recruiters are highly dependent on email. A single blocked email can result in the loss of a five-figure fee or the hiring loss of the top candidate. Blocked emails can be disastrous either from the receiving or the sending side. What most recruiters don’t realize is that blocked emails occur mostly as a result of the email recipient trying to stop spam. (And no, we’re not talking about that oh-so-yummy canned ham product!)

What Is Spam?

Here is partial definition from Wikipedia: “Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media … ”

“Spamming remains economically viable for advertisers because they have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. In the year 2011, the estimated figure for spam messages is around seven trillion. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet Service Providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.”

The effects of the spam epidemic can be felt far and wide, but are felt most acutely when important emails get blocked because someone, somewhere thinks it might be spam.

Can I Control What Email Gets Blocked as Spam?

There are multiple distinct chokepoints to consider whether you are sending or receiving email. 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…

In this last and final installment of this series we’re going to talk about how to use low and high technology appropriately to tailor your message to your audience.

One of the ideas behind technology is that it empowers us to work creatively. By blending different technologies we can democratize communication in new and surprising ways.

If you buy into the theory (and I do) that future generations will design and build their own technologies by blending what works and what doesn’t work in different situations, then you’re far on your way to understanding that what works for one person might never work for another.

Once again, I’m going to approach this subject from a phone sourcer’s perspective and demonstrate how I blend the use of high technology with low technology. keep reading…

Jobvite, the company that helps recruiters tap the referral power of employees’ social networks, got a $15 million injection of new capital that it will use to accelerate its already rapid growth.

Announced this morning, the Series C funding round brings to just over $30 million the company has received in investor financing since its founding in 2007.

Jobvite has been on a tear since introducing its first product, the eponymous Jobvite Hire. The first iteration of Hire sent job announcements to a company’s employees, encouraging them to pass on the notice to their qualified friends and associates. No matter how far along a Jobvite was forwarded, a recruiter always knew who the original employee was whose chain of contacts resulted in a successful referral. keep reading…

Technology is evolving at the fastest rate in recorded history, and tools relevant to recruiters are not exempt. Every day a new piece of hardware, software, or service is announced that could be used to better support world-class recruiting. Staying abreast of evolving technology is difficult but essential for any savvy recruiter hoping to stay on top of efficiency and effectiveness expectations.

Technology by itself is never a solution, but it often enables leading-edge solutions and approaches. When someone becomes aware of a new tool or service that makes an activity easier or cheaper or faster, they naturally see how that tool could work in other parts of their life even if that tool wasn’t created with those other purposes in mind. Hiring managers, candidates, and savvy recruiters forge such expectations, so failing to be aware of and address how emerging technologies could impact your recruiting operations is akin to saying “I am happy being a laggard.”

While there are numerous indicators that that you may be on your way to becoming a “technology dinosaur,” some of the more obvious are highlighted below. keep reading…