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.

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.

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.”

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.”

Reinforcing the point, SAP said SuccessFactors’ founder and CEO Lars Dalgaard will not only continue to run the company, which will remain independent, but he will also lead SAP’s cloud business.

The Germany-headquartered SAP is especially strong in enterprise application software, offering on-premises ERP software to cover nearly all aspects of business operations, including human resources. However with the trend to cloud computing (SaaS), the market for on-premises installations is static, or even shrinking.

HR vendor SuccessFactors, based in San Mateo, California, however, has always been a cloud provider. Its products cover the full range of human capital management and scale for large enterprises, while also accommodating mid-sized businesses. Acquiring the cloud know-how to serve a range of businesses is obviously what SAP was after in buying SuccessFactors. The company itself hasn’t been profitable in years and is expected to post another losing year when the quarter closes later this month.

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of next year.

In a hearty Twitter discussion during and after the conference call, HR tech industry analysts discussed the integration of SuccessFactors’ HCM applications with SAP’s ERP offerings, as well as the implications for SAP’s own SaaS HR product, CareerOnDemand, which was to begin a rollout in the coming months.

HR Tech consultant and thought leader Naomi Bloom speculated CareerOnDemand won’t be released, tweeting “Can’t imagine they’ll keep investing in Career OnDemand. SFSF Emp Central needs major lift, and SAP could provide.”

Jason Averbrook, CEO of Knowledge Infusion, meanwhile, offered this: “Acquisition of SFSF by SAP truly shows SAP trying to focus on people businesses and not just manufacturing focus.” Her also tweeted, “The leaders in the supply-chain transformation space are now positioned to become leaders in the people-chain biz,” referring to SAP.

Madeline Laurano, research director, Talent Acquisition Solutions, Aberdeen Group, wondered aloud,  “What does this mean for Oracle? Are they next to acquire one of the top TMS providers?”

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.

You can of course provide a printed URL, but if you have ever tried to enter a long URL into a mobile browser, chances are you wouldn’t do it again.

What Is a QR Code?

The QR in QR code stands for quick response, and although you might not know them by name, you have undoubtedly already seen these one-inch square shaped symbols that look a little like a maze in advertisements, on billboards, and in posters. Don’t let their size fool you: QR codes can be powerful communication mechanisms because they can take candidates directly to customized supplemental recruiting information that might include a website, pictures, videos, narrative information, or point directly to Twitter or Facebook. Organizations that have taken lead in using QR codes for recruiting include Google, the U.S. Army, E&Y, AT&T, Siemens, and Pepsi.

The Many Benefits of Using QR Codes in Recruiting

QR codes were designed to support mobile users, something the recruiting-tools community hasn’t invested a great deal of time in despite the widespread adoption of smartphones. Because many smartphone users are never more than a few feet from their almost-always-on device, mobile will become the platform of choice for recruiting activity. The application to decode a QR Code comes pre-installed on most devices and there are many free Apps for users with a device not pre-installed with one. Potential candidates could be on the subway, reading the paper, or walking down the street and with the push of a button be immediately taken to follow-up information or a job application.

If your recruiting effort is attempting to show off your firm’s innovation or its use of technology, the use of these codes might help to reinforce that message. QR codes can dramatically increase the value and usefulness of print ads, billboards, posters, business cards, and brochures. Because college students are particularly mobile phone dependent, QR codes should be embedded into all aspects of college recruiting.

These codes are also powerful because they easily allow for effective tracking analytics that can identify sources and usage rates. In addition, QR codes can be produced for free and because they are so small, will save space and advertising costs. These codes can also be used for non-recruiting purposes including check-ins and to provide employee, vendor, and customer information.

“Like a picture, a QR Code can replace a thousand words.”

Potential Uses of QR Codes in Recruiting

There are literally dozens of ways in which these codes have been or can be used to provide recruiting information to prospects and candidates. Some of them include:

• Newspaper/magazine ads — to provide follow-up information that can’t fit in the ad.
• In job postings, social media and blogs — they can provide detailed reference or follow-up information without taking up space.
• Referral cards — they can instantly take a referral to an application site.
• Wall posters/stickers — that can be placed on bulletin boards and even on poles.
• Billboards/signage/on vehicles — QR can work even when the picture is taken from a distance.
• Career fairs and college events — they allow an interested prospect to instantly access additional information without having to wait in line or ask a question.
• In text messages — they can be attached to text messages as a picture or they can be used to send text messages.
• Job alerts/calendar events — individuals can sign up for specific job alert notifications and calendar items can be easily saved on a phone’s calendar.
• Direct mail — they can move an individual directly from a paper letter to the Internet.
• In slides — they can direct you to more detailed information from presentation slides.
• Invitations — they can be used to invite people to join talent communities, and to participate in contests or events.
• In retail outlets/at trade shows/on product packaging — they can convert customers into applicants.
• Bus cards/name tags — they can provide instant detailed information about you.
• On T-shirts — they help send a message that your firm is “cool” (Google used them)
• On resumes — applicants can place them in resumes to show work samples.

Possible Issues

There are of course a few downsides related to the use of QR codes. The first is that many recruiters will resist them for no other reason than most recruiters resist any kind of change that involves a new technology. Second, you will most likely get a spotty response from potential candidates because while QR codes have existed for a while, not everyone is familiar with them and others don’t yet have a smart phone with QR reading capability.

Final Thoughts

Although QR codes won’t solve every recruiting problem, they certainly are a quick, cheap, and flexible way to re-energize and make your non-Internet recruiting information approaches more effective. These codes are particularly effective because they support mobile audiences and that allows individuals to act when they are most excited. Soon QR Codes will be as common as embedded hyperlinks that are only effective within electronic messages.

You can test the effectiveness of QR codes for providing contact information by using your smartphone camera to take a picture of the example at the top of this article, or you can create your own QR codes for free by going to a site like http://goqr.me/.

• Maybe because it’s still new, but companies seem to have a love/hate (or should that be like/unlike) relationship with social media. A SHRM survey out this week says 68 percent of organizations engage in social media activities to reach external audiences. But 43 percent block access to social media on company equipment. Most frequently used: 1) Facebook (45 percent), 2) LinkedIn (34 percent), 3) Twitter (28 percent) and 4) YouTube (18 percent).  Other popular platforms include company blogs (17 percent) and webinars/webcasts (16 percent). Get the survey here.
• Survale is a new career site analytics tool. Insert a little bit of code (sort of like Google Analytics) on your career site pages and Survale will tell you all about the traffic you get. But, and here’s what makes Survale different, at random, visitors will get short surveys asking about the career site, their experience, and their impressions. Some will also get follow-up surveys asking about their interaction with recruiters. Survale was founded by Ian Alexander, who was previously VP of marketing and PR at Cytiva, which was acquired early this year by Taleo.
• Internships.com is all about student internships and real jobs now that the site has added full and part-time employment listings. It also partnered up with Blackboard, a company that provides e-learning and intranet platform services to the military, government, companies, and thousands of educational institutions. The addition of employment opportunities, and the potential reach of the Blackboard platform that dominates the college market, gives Internships.com a strong entry into a market crowded with such job boards as AfterCollege, CollegeRecruiter, Monster College, and Snag-A-Job. Internships is owned by CareerArc Group whose CEO once headed Blackboard Connect, which is part of Blackboard. CareerArc acquired Tweet My Jobs earlier this year.
• Every day there’s some new partnership between this or that human resources technology company, but here’s one worth mentioning since both firms are pretty hot: Workday and Jobvite. Jobvite (whose Facebook application we recently mentioned) will be integrated with Workday, which Jobvite says will “enable customers of both solutions to plug Jobvite into their Workday infrastructure and seamlessly share current data across platforms.”
• Speaking of Jobvite — well, speaking of employee referrals, which is essentially part of the business of Jobvite — a new vendor in the employee-referral-social-media category is the appropriately named “ReferSocially.” It’s refreshing to see some costs listed online. More info’s listed under “what” and “how.”
• JobOn is a combination job board/video application site for smaller retailers and restaurants. Instead of a candidate going around to different stores to apply, they create a video profile. Quiznos, a California sandwich shop, has tried JobOn. So has a Maryland bike shop called the Bike Doctor, whose owner Paul Lombardo says he’s liking the whole idea of JobOn, and about two weeks ago made an offer (one that was not accepted) to someone he found on the site.
• Work Market, a tool to manage consultants, contractors, freelancers, and others, is, itself, hiring.

• A couple of developments with “Identified,” a site we wrote about in September. The company is 1) making all profiles public and searchable on the Internet, 2) giving all companies access to the Indentified scores for their recruiting (as opposed to the limited beta, prior). See the screen shot, (click to enlarge) at right. Identified says that over the course of six weeks starting in late September, “more than 1.8 million unique profiles have been viewed, and our database has grown 7x to more than 50 million profiles.”

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.

That’s kind of how Lori Fenstermaker came up with the original AutoSearch. A recruiter and sourcer who founded her own boutique RPO six years ago, she got tired of spending more time writing search strings than calling prospects. But instead of shrugging it off or surrendering to pure keywords, she hired a development company to build an automated search tool. It became AutoSearch, which she eventually licensed.

AutoSearch has now become Scavado, a name change that signals the launch of a campaign to move Fenstermaker’s creation into the mainstream of corporate recruiting.

An early user of AutoSearch, Jim D’Amico, strategic staffing manager at Bissell Homecare, Inc., said the tool is one of those things you wonder how you managed before it came along.

“I love sourcing,” D’Amico said, but he prefers spending his time on the phone courting prospects. Scavado, he says, “shortens the sourcing cycle.”

“It’s a big time-saver for in-house recruiters,” he says. With multiple reqs to fill at any one time, they need to source, qualify, and recruit prospects without delay. Scavado, D’Amico says, makes sourcing much more efficient for his recruiting team.

If all it did was to take keywords, integrate choices of things like geography, skills, and such from pulldown menus, and generate a list of prospects, it would still be a valuable addition to any recruiting toolbox. But Scavado (Italian for excavate and suggestive of hunting) does so much more that Fenstermaker and her partner, Daniel Estrada, say it also has business intelligence implications.

One of its many features is the ability to search a site like jobs aggregator Indeed to see who else is looking for the same people you are. Check on your competitors and find out what kinds of jobs they’re offering. Scavado may have started out as purely a sourcing tool, but it’s been used by a private investigator to track people and by some companies for sales leads.

Simplicity of use is perhaps what recruiters like best, Estrada says. Skilled recruiters can enter a full Boolean string if they choose; most simply enter the job keywords. Either way, Estrada says, “There’s not a very steep learning curve with Scavado.”

It’s obvious, even from a quick demo, that Scavado was developed by an experienced recruiter for recruiters. Many vendors claim that, but Scavado delivers. For example, once Scavado develops a list of prospects, you get to review their basics and develop a list of “persons of interest” that, among other things, includes comments, and which can be exported.

It’ versatility, as much as its simplicity and time saving, are among the reasons Bissell’s recruiters find it so useful. One of his favorite features, says D’Amico, is the ability to generate alternative job titles. “That’s actually helped me a lot because we have ridiculous titles that correlate with nothing in the real world,” he says. Scavado will look at the job requirements to generate lists of other titles with the same requirements.

Another of his favorites is the email verification. After seeing a Scavado demo last week, I can see how it would make anybody’s list of favorite features. Once you generate a list of prospects, Scavado helps you figure out how to contact them. Emails, for instance, can be tricky and because no one wants to encourage spammers, contact information for passive prospects isn’t always available. But someone at their company has an address floating around. Scavado’s pattern finder will capture corporate email addresses so you discover the naming taxonomy. Figured it out? Now Scavado will verify that it’s a live address without you having to send an email.

From D’Amico’s point of view, Scavado has few shortcomings. Eliminating duplicate entries is one enhancement he’d like to see. A second, he offered, rather tongue-in-cheekly, is an auto-dialer “so I didn’t have to do anything.”

One feature I can see as a benefit is to enable customization of the sites Scavado searches. Google, LinkedIn, and a few others are searched; Facebook, however, is not. Fenstermaker says that’s because Facebook is constantly changing its security settings. As much of a hassle as it might be, Facebook is becoming such an important part of the recruiting geography that it really shouldn’t be overlooked.

Nor will Scavado search the corporate ATS. Ideally, it would, even if candidates in the ATS are not the passive target group for which Scavado was developed.

Fenstermaker and Estrada said ATS integration “is on the radar,” as is giving users more control over the sites to be searched. Because Scavado is an SaaS product, as features are improved and new ones added, everyone gets them immediately. And implementation can be as quick as logging in.

What’s it cost? At $1,999 a year per user, D’Amico described it as “ridiculously inexpensive. The ROI is so fast.”

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.

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.

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:

• The economy is getting better
• There is a continued search for more value from hiring via quality of hire
• The talent management mindset is driving a competency-based vision of the employee lifecycle that requires continual measurement to determine competency levels
• Technology has made it increasingly easier to integrate assessment into other, related products

But the real reason lies beyond all of these factors (although it actually incorporates all of them). This reason is a newfound ability to clearly demonstrate value for programs of all sorts via rapidly increasing capabilities for data analytics and business intelligence.

In fact, powerful and easy-to-use data analytics have ushered in the dawn of an entirely new age of evolution for testing. The past decade saw the rise of test content being offered online. This created tremendous efficiencies for the use of testing, allowing it go mainstream. We spent a decade working out new and better ways to deliver tests and to use the millions of data points captured from candidates to make tests shorter and more powerful. This information also allowed us to really get to the truth when it comes to understanding how to predict performance at a variety of job types and levels.

We are now emerging from this intense period of growth and new understanding. The combination of clarity around human performance and new technology has led us to the doorstep of an era that I predict will see huge increases in the adoption of pre-employment assessment. What I saw at HR Tech really crystallized this vision for me. Here’s why.

We I/O psychologists have been operating with a business intelligence mindset for more than 60 years. We have continually tried to demonstrate the value of testing programs via validation studies looking at the relationship between test scores and job performance. I wrote an article for ERE on this very issue seven years ago explaining the basics of a business-intelligence-driven mindset and how it can clearly show the value of various HR practices, including assessment.

What I saw at HR tech this year was the prediction I made in my 2004 article come to life! Fast forward to 2011 and the major players in assessment have created a whole new way to demonstrate the value of assessments (as well as other related HR processes). I believe this mindset and the technology to support it and make it accessible will allow them to quickly show their clients the money. Once a firm is able to have this level of insight there will be no looking back for assessment tools.

Here are some of the things I saw that have led me feel so optimistic:

SHL is dedicated to “people intelligence” and supports this mindset with a brand new analytics dashboard tool that will allow its clients to model and understand many aspects of their hiring process all the way to how applicants are sourced and how their hiring processes stack up to a variety of reference points, including industry, geographic location, etc. This tool is essentially a wide-open data mining tool that allows a deep level of insight and analysis about the relationship between data yielded by the hiring process and organizational outcomes.

DDI has created a new platform that allows for the ability to track and evaluate data from individuals across the entire employee lifecycle. Data is capture in pre-employment mode and is managed longitudinally so that growth and potential can be tracked and evaluated.

Taleo has begun to focus on the concept of “talent intelligence” and has data available for its clients across the entire hiring process, allowing for deep levels of insight around the hiring process.

Kenexa has also created an impressive dashboard that allows for analytics across the entire hiring process, providing an easy way to examine talent pipelines all the way back to source of hire. Kenexa’s system also learns and allows for changes in the workflow process to adapt to various situations based on real-time data.

What I saw from the major players servicing the assessment market is a collective drive to help their clients clearly understand the value that any number of services can provide in actual outcomes that either represent, or can easily be paired with, actual dollars. In the past when we I/O psychologists were asked how we know assessments work, we would respond by saying “trust me.” While I know that we are sound in our understanding of value, it is hard to close the deal based simply on trust; thus, the adoption of assessment has been slow. Firms who are selling pre-employment prediction are now equipping themselves with powerful tools to break out of this quicksand and clearly model value propositions for those firms willing to listen.

Within 10 years, the collective value shown via the new breed of business analytics tools just now being offered in the HR space will lead the business of assessment to a whole new level of integration and adoption.

We still have our work cut out for us in convincing companies how important it is to take a business intelligence mindset within HR. It is high time that all companies serious about making their people a profit center should have a dedicated data analytics team within HR. The role of this team will be to work with various analytics tools, syncing them with internal data feeds and monitoring dashboards to answer questions and support business decisions, based on real live data. Prediction in the hiring process will be one core part of this, but it will go well beyond this. Early adoption of this mindset and the infastructure to support it will be a serious competitive advantage and soon those who don’t buy it will see their businesses losing ground rapidly to those who do.

In 2004 I wrote about the things I saw at HR tech this year in the hypothetical realm. In 2011 these fantasies are reality that is here for the taking.

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.

From a candidate’s perspective, the ability to check on the status of an application is a definite plus. The app also allows candidates to apply for a job directly from Facebook, using either an uploaded resume, work, and education they’ve listed on their Facebook profile (but none of that other stuff), or their LinkedIn info.

For now, offering candidates a choice of what they’ll use to apply is wise; fewer than half of Facebook users have completed even some of the education and work sections off their profiles. However with the network’s changes, particularly the coming Timeline feature, Facebook users will find compelling reasons to fill in those details. Which brings us to Silkroad Point.

It’s not a social networking site or tool as we might think. It’s more of a social and professional analytical tool to assess the impact an employee has on the operation of the company. It’s a means of measuring the influence of workers, in a way that managers only sometimes are able to do.

Let me give you an example. One of your direct reports does a good job on the work you assign. But what may not always be obvious is how much of a resource that person is to others in the department, and even to those in other work groups. Point attempts to assess that.

In that sense, Point is somewhat like Klout or other systems and tools that attempt to measure a person’s social media presence. But in this case, Silkroad is looking at their influence and qualitative value to the company. However, scoring this all is a subjective undertaking, agreed Silkroad’s COO Brian Platz, who walked me through a demo last week.

Among the many components Point takes account of are such things as the number of articles a person posts and how many of their co-workers read it and commented on it. Since Point integrates with all the Silkroad modules, it knows when a worker has taken and completed training and how well they did. That raises the score.

But scores can drop, too. Skills needed for a job can change; not having them, or not being as fresh as a peer, can decrease your skill.

What’s unnerving is seeing an actual rating for what we all know intuitively, but don’t generally attempt to quantify. Some people — and not just bosses — do have more influence than others. Platz says that Point’s analysis is an effort to get at that undocumented value. “Is it scientifically valid?” he said, “I don’t make that claim now.

After thinking about it, I’m not sure how critical a strict scientific validity is, or even if it’s all that necessary. Point is certainly no less scientific than most of what managers use for the annual performance review. In some ways, it’s actually a whole lot more valuable, alerting managers to those parts of what a worker does that sometimes go unseen and therefore undervalued.

Platz agrees that as a new, and innovative tool, there’s the possibility of some tinkering down the road. For one, Silkroad currently decides the weighting to be given to the multiple elements Point measures. He says there’s some thinking that eventually companies may want to do their own weighting. Other fine-tuning is also likely.

Point deserves a good look by Silkroad users and the company deserves credit for attempting to find a way to address all those other things an employee does that too often don’t get valued.

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.

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):

• Babelwith.me. As you send a message to someone, it translates it into another language.
• ReferenceUSA. Research information on millions of businesses in the U.S., Canada, and internationally.
• Evernote. Bookmark parts of the Web for yourself with your own little virtual sticky-notes.
• Contact Caputure from Broadlook. Find a contact on the Internet, and quickly and easily save it to your contact list.
• FriendorFollow. Previously in beta, you enter your Twitter name to see who’s following you, who’s not following you, and so on (explained briefly here). By putting in your competitor’s Twitter name, you can see the same about them. You can also export into a CSV file. Other Twitter tools include TwitterGrader, Twiangulate, Twellow, Twingly, Follower Wonk, and InboxQ. InboxQ, for example, helps you decide the best Twitter users to answer a question for you.
• fefoo. Search multiple search engines at once.
• Best Vendor. In beta, by invite only, a place to see how others are rating products and providers.
• Gist. A way to manage your contacts. Another tool in this genre is Xobni.
• Social Text and Mango Spring. Two different places to build better, social-media driven intranets.
• Meebo. A messaging tool that works with AOL, Yahoo, and other services.
• Seesmic, cotweet, MarketMeSuite, and PeopleBrowsr. Like better-known tools such as Hootsuite and TweetDeck, these help you manage your social media life, search social media, schedule posts, see where and when you’re mentioned, and more.
• DownThemAll. A plug-in to your Web browser so that you can download more quickly. OutWit Docs is one of the other browser plug-ins Myers likes.
• TinEye. One of a few sites excellent for searching for images.
• Radian6, Viralheat, Crowdbooster, and other monitoring tools. More analysis and monitoring of your social media.
• Diigo and StumbleUpon. “Social bookmarking” tools to keep track of your favorite sites and see what others like.
• “Forms” from Google Docs. A way to create an online form, such as if you want a job candidate to fill something out online.
• Know em?. See if the username you’d like to use on social media is available on different networks. Also use it to find a job candidate: their Yahoo or Gmail address, for example, may be similar to their social media handles, so if you can find them on a social site, it may help in finding their contact info.
• Focus Booster. A time-management tool to help you break down your work period into 25-minute increments, separated by breaks. Also, for people wanting to focus better, Myers suggests separating your desktop out into two different users. As an example, you’d set up one RSS feed for your celebrity gossip, and another for work. When you need a break, you look at the celeb feed, but by keeping it out of your main work feed, you don’t get distracted.
• Social Mention. Like Google Alerts, but for social social media.
• MeetingBurner. One of the newer tools for hosting online webinars.

When it comes to all these tools, Myers says, “it’s not always how many or how new the tools are, but how well you know and use them.”

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

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.

Live chat via text, voice, or video will allow recruiters and seekers to discuss opportunities and even conduct interviews. A recruiter with a hot prospect can conference in a hiring manager on the spot.

Booths can be set-up with jobs, naturally, and also with videos, company descriptions, FAQs, content from the career site, and links into the social networks.

Each of the eight newspapers from across the country — including Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Central and South Florida — each get a floor of the conference center for the employers they signed up. Each newspaper is also promoting the event online and in print..

The sheer scope of this event sets it apart from others. Kelly O’Brien, director of recruitment strategy at Tribune Digital, says she expects as many as 8,000 job seekers will participate, visiting upward of 50 participating employees.

“This is all happening on one day, with recruiters in their booths all day, so job seekers will be able to interact with them right then,” explains O’Brien.”There’s a lot more interactivity that there used to be.”

Recruiters can pre-screen job seekers, so they don’t have to speak with everyone who comes knocking. But if they find a hot prospect among the resumes (they have access to all of them and get filtering tools to sort through them), they can reach out and invite them in for a conversation.

As companies keep a tight lid on spending, but demand more from their recruiting teams, virtual job fairs are getting a second look as an alternative to in-person events.

Joe Shaker Jr., VP at Shaker Recruitment Advertising and Communications, says he’s seeing more interest in virtual job fairs from the firm’s clients. Two years ago Shaker partnered with InXpo, the technology provider behind next week’s job fair. Shaker’s digital division then began managing virtual job fairs for clients as varied as Allstate and Dice.com.

The recession, he says, has spurred interest in virtual fairs. “Everyone is looking to save money,” he says. “What’s the cost of attending these live events?”

While employers pay to participate in the online fairs — rates for next week’s event range from $800 to $9,000 — there are no travel costs. Having a dozen recruiters participate costs no more than one, and none of them have to leave the office.

Nor do working job seekers, who don’t have to take a day off to attend. That,  says Tribune’s O’Brien, may mean higher-quality candidates will participate. The event is accessible from most portable devices, including Android-powered smartphones.

BrightMove, the recruiting technology company, offered another reason recently for why virtual job fairs “are popping up all over the place.” In a word: Millenials.

Gen Yers now entering or in the job market are entirely comfortable with conducting business online. Considering that they prefer Facebook to TV, and texting to email, this kind of career exploration is more the norm than the exception.

In fact, these job fairs, including next week’s, offer an online metaphor for the social interaction of job seekers at a live event. A “Networking Lounge” serves as the equivalent of the hotel lobby of a job fair, says Shaker. It’s a place where job seekers can interact with each other and make connections that may further their job search.

Are we going to see more virtual job fairs? Is this a trend? Says Shaker, “I think, obviously the answer is yes.”

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. Any of these can be the point at which an email fails to get to the recipient as intended. Some of these are in your control and some are not. It is often difficult to determine where the guilt or innocence lies when it comes to email spam blocking. Typically when you send an email, the route that email takes is as follows:

1. Your email application (Outlook, Exchange, Eudora, etc.) — this is the place you create your email.
2. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) — you use this to connect to the mail server that is going to send your email out.
3. Your email provider’s SMTP server — this is the mail server used for sending emails.
4. Your recipient’s POP server — this is the mail server that receives emails for your recipient of the email.
5. Your recipient’s email application (Outlook, Exchange, etc.) — this is where your email is received and viewed by the recipient.

When you receive email, the process is reversed. At each step of the way, spam blocking is usually enacted in some way. It’s a wonder that any email ever gets to the end user! While some of this is totally out of your hands, there are two distinct ways you can potentially control the receipt or blocking of email messages.

Pointers for Receiving Emails From Clients or Applicants

First of all, think about your attitude toward spam. Recruiters are a different breed when it comes to receiving email. Many recruiters have the attitude of “I never saw an email I didn’t like.” On the receiving side for a recruiter there may not be such a thing as spam. As a recruiter, would you rather have to delete 50-100 emails each day that are spam or potentially miss out on that placement email that puts money in your pocket? Tightening down on your spam control may cause you to miss an email from a client requesting to interview an applicant or you may be missing a rich source for leads.

The more you or your email provider put software in place to stop you from receiving spam, the higher the risk of  important emails either being totally blocked or getting delivered to your Junk Email folder.

If you are using an email program like Outlook to open your email, you can control some of the spam settings in addition to training Outlook on what are good and what bad emails. In Outlook you have the option of controlling the level of spam filtering you have. In addition, when you right-click on any email, you have the option to add the sender to your blocked sender list, which moves the email to your junk folder and puts their name on your blocked list. It also allows you to add safe senders to a list, so all the mail from that individual will always be delivered to your Inbox, regardless of the content. So if you are missing emails, the first thing to do is check how your Outlook is set!

What if the Email Is Getting Blocked Somewhere in the Middle?

ISP and email provider spam blocking is the hardest thing to track down. Spam is much more than a nuisance of having to wade through junk email to find good ones. Many spam emails contain viruses, malware, or links to websites that harbor malicious software, so ISP and email providers usually have robust programs in place to stop this kind of email. You will want to be cautions of these malicious emails, too, especially if you are “letting everything through.” You can always confirm an email is valid if you take the time to look at Internet headers. Most email programs have a way to look at the Internet header, which always shows you the real sender, regardless of what is in the From address. In Outlook you can just right click the email and go to the Message Options. Here is an example of an Internet header:

Return-Path: <support@go4.bz>
Delivered-To: support@846815.867606
Received: (qmail 19740 invoked by uid 78); 13 Jun 2011 14:08:57 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO cloudmark1) (10.49.16.98)
by 0 with SMTP; 13 Jun 2011 14:08:57 -0000
Return-Path: <support@go4.bz>
X-NETSOL-Whitelist: Yes
Received: from [205.178.146.51] ([205.178.146.51:57007] helo=omr1.networksolutionsemail.com)
by cm-mr23 (envelope-from <support@go4.bz>)
(ecelerity 2.2.3.46 r(37554)) with ESMTP
id D5/49-27784-8F916FD4; Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:08:57 -0400
Received: from cm-omr14 (mail.networksolutionsemail.com [205.178.146.50])
by omr1.networksolutionsemail.com (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id p5DE8uQo008126
for <support@go4.bz>; Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:08:56 -0400
Authentication-Results:  cm-omr14 smtp.user=support@go4.bz; auth=pass (LOGIN)
X-Authenticated-UID: support@go4.bz
Received: from [64.208.166.62] ([64.208.166.62:2649] helo=appsrv3)
by cm-omr14 (envelope-from <support@go4.bz>)
(ecelerity 2.2.2.41 r(31179/31189)) with ESMTPA
id 3D/CE-22125-8F916FD4; Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:08:56 -0400
From: “Gopher Support” <support@go4.bz>
To: <support@go4.bz>
Subject: Test message
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2011 08:08:56 -0600
Message-ID: <002801cc29d3$6f109de0$4d31d9a0$@bz>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/related;
boundary=”—-=_NextPart_000_0029_01CC29A1.24762DE0″
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 12.0
Thread-Index: Acwp0223TgIxcz0OSg+9iMfIudDMcQ==
Content-Language: en-us

Look for the “Received From” information which will have the real mail server name and IP address that sent the email. If the domains don’t match with the “From” address on the email, you can be 99% sure it is SPAM and should be deleted — and deleted from your deleted items.

If your ISP is blocking good emails, it will help you get your point across to them if you can have the sender get you the Internet header like above and the email that shows the reason it was blocked  You may find that you get into the realm of reverse DNS lookups or SMTP protocols to determine if an email is valid. Don’t let the technology deter you. These are just other ways that an Internet provider tries to protect you from spam. If you find they are blocking your emails from getting to you, and they are using spam-blocking software, see if you can remove your email address from using the filter so you get your good emails. If also helps to have a backup email address at one of the free email providers like Yahoo that you can have a sender send to if you are not getting their email at your regular address. Each major mail provider uses different ways to determine spam, so you will find that you may not get an email sent to you at your main email but it does come to your Gmail or hotmail account.

Pointers for Sending Emails to Clients or Candidates

The first red flag for most spam filters and for readers of email is something coming from goodguy27@gmail.com. There are two things to be aware of here. First, if you are in business, you loose legitimacy by not having an email address of yourname@yourcompany.com. Ditch the Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail accounts as your main business accounts! These email sources were never meant to be used for business purposes. Setup a domain name and email address for yourself that defines you and your business. Second, emails from these sources are the main source of spam worldwide and the first emails to get blocked. You are doing yourself a disservice by using one of these for your main business account.

Next, if you send out a lot of unsolicited mailings you will always want to include the information required by the CAN-SPAM act. At a minimum, this must include the physical address of your company and a way to opt out if they no longer want to receive unsolicited emails from you. A lot of providers are looking for this information and will add you to their blacklist if you are not in compliance. AOL will put you on its blacklist if one person at AOL reports you as a spammer. You then have to go to AOL’s website and try and get yourself removed. Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail also have list that will block your emails from being delivered if for some reason you get yourself on a Blacklist.

Lastly, drop the fancy signatures with pictures, logos, etc. and opt for a clean, easy-to-read signature for your email messages. Even if your email doesn’t get tagged as spam, sometimes images are blocked and not visible to the recipient. If this is the only way for you to convey your contact information, you may not be giving your recipients a way to get in touch with you.

Below are some links if you want more information about spam.

• AOL’s postmaster page describing the Anti-Spam Technical Alliance Proposal
• Anti-Spam Research Group. ASRG is part of the IRTF, and affiliated with the IETF
• Anti spam info & resource page of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission
• CAUBE.AU – Fight Spam in Australia, The Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email, Australia
• Composing abuse reports — what to send, how to send it, where to send it, and what not to send or do.
• “Computer Incident Advisory Committee’s suggestions: E-Mail Spamming countermeasures: Detection and prevention of E-Mail spamming” (Shawn Hernan, with James R. Cutler and David Harris)
• “Historical Development of Spam Fighting in Relation to Threat of Computer-Aware Criminals, and Public Safety” by Neil Schwartzman
• Mail DDoS Attacks through Mail Non Delivery Messages and Backscatter
• Spam Laws United States, European Union, and other countries’ laws and pending legislation regarding unsolicited commercial email
• Stopping Spam An article about spam in Scientific American
• Yahoo’s Anti-Spam Resource Center
• Spam Filter Comparison
• SpamWise — Tools to check your website for address-harvesting risks

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:

Applicant Tracking Systems: Companies need these systems to help manage their candidate pool. There are so many out there to choose from. Where do you start? Do you need it to integrate with payroll and HR? Why? Why not? Do you know the right questions to ask so you don’t end up with a product that doesn’t suit your needs or is so complex that your employee compliance is low? There is one very well-known company out there today whose product I’ve yet to hear one positive thing about from any recruiter using it. Remember, just because you recognize the company’s name does not mean it’s a product you should buy or that it will suit your requirements. More bells and whistles are not necessarily a good thing.

Corporate Careers Page: How many of you have considered the pros and cons of requiring applicants to register on your careers page? Are you thinking, “We want them to register so we can have their information.” or “We’d like candidates to feel comfortable coming to our careers page”? The first is about you. The second is about the candidate. I’m going to assert you want them to register so you’ll have them in your database for the times you need to search out candidates who have already applied. Probably the most significant concern for applicants is confidentiality. I know if I was confidentially looking around to see what types of jobs were available I wouldn’t want to register for some company’s website. There’s just no guarantee of confidentiality without knowing who may be looking at my personal information. Call me paranoid, but it’s not something that gives me the warm and fuzzies.

I popped onto a few sites today and one F50 company allows you to search everything they have open globally without registering for their site. Bravo for them. I looked at several postings and there wasn’t one that didn’t have at least one typo. Do you think the CEO would be happy about this? This is a reflection not only on the head of their recruiting organization but on the company as a whole. Are they this sloppy when it comes to building and selling software? This also tells me a lot about their recruitment department.

Twitter: Are you spamming out tweets about open reqs or really thinking about the best way to use 140 characters? How can you capture someone’s attention and have them take notice? How many followers do you have? Are your followers really reading your tweets and potentially forwarding them to their friends? Have you really thought out your Twitter strategy and how you should be using it for it to be most effective?

LinkedIn: Are you using LinkedIn in the same way as Twitter? Are you sending the same messages to LinkedIn and Twitter? Do you connect with people in order to have quality connections, or just for quantity? If you’re one of those people who connects to any Tom, Dick and Harry, I’d assert you don’t have a strategy. More is not neccessarily better. I know some of you will think I’m an idiot for saying it, but LinkedIn is NOT about seeing who has the most connections.

How is your profile? Is it professional? Is it complete? Is there a professional picture? If you have a picture of you with your kids, at a bar, at a sports event, etc., put it on Facebook. Does is look like a resume or is it conversational in nature while showing your strengths, accomplishments, responsibilities, etc? Does it have real content for someone to see what you’ve done and what you’re currently doing? If you were a candidate and read your profile, are you someone you’d want to work with or connect to?

How are you using LinkedIn to source candidates? Are you sending emails to people or picking up the phone? Why? Why not? People are busy. Have you really thought about what to put in an email or voicemail so that there’s a higher probability of a response?

Video Interviewing Applications: There are a growing number of these and it feels like I’ve evaluated all of them. What I can tell you is that there’s only one I like, and this is becasuse it can be customized to suit each client’s needs. Most of the apps out there now have limited abilities or a set of questions they give you to ask in an interview. I know that wouldn’t work for any of my clients. Can a third party be on the call and be invisible? Sometimes it benefits my hiring interviewers to have me on the call and invisible and sometimes they want me to be part of the interview.

Make sure you are clear about your requirements before you spend money on this “now” technology.

Facebook: Are you posting to your company page? Your personal page? Is it the same strategy as Twitter and LinkedIn? Do you have “friends” of the page who are going to see what you’ve posted?

Telephone: You may be thinking that the phone isn’t high tech. You’re right in one respect but sorely lacking in another. I could, and probably should, write a post about the art of the telephone. How are your phone skills? Do you say “um, uh, you know” a lot to fill space? Shame on you if you do. Some people may think I’m a dinosaur, but I firmly believe there is no other technology more important than the phone (your oral skills). The phone is where you get to know people, build relationships, and gain trust. No other technology can do this for you. Not even lots of LinkedIn recommendations.

I’d like you to look at the examples I’ve given and put a percentage of use to each. Are you using some more than others? Why? Is the percentage you spend using one or two far outweighing the others? Is that large percent of time you use a particular technology returning that amount in candidates? In other words, if you’re spending half your time in your ATS, is that generating half your candidates and are they qualified? If not, you need to reevaluate your processes and procedures to align with your company’s strategies.

The big takeaway here is that no technology will fix a process that doesn’t work, is ineffective, and/or lacking quality recruiters to implement it. Technology must be looked at as an adjunct to enhance a quality, well-thought-out process. It is really nothing more than a tool to help you do your job.

I really want to hear your thoughts on this. My request is that you answer any or all of these questions in the comments sections (or you can send me an email directly) and ask any other questions you’d like to see addressed. This way I’ll be able to write a follow up to this post. Thanks in advance for your participation.

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.

Remember early on in this series when I delineated old (low) technology from new (high) technology in how we communicate?

BRAVE NEW WORLD (High technology)

Text

Instant messaging

Electronic mail

Social media exchange

Cellphone (mobile)

Real-time video (telepresence)

OLD WORLD (Low technology)

Snail mail

Fax

Land line telephone

Face-to-face communication

Keith Halperin pointed out in the comments section of that first part in this series that I forgot real-time video (broadband/telepresence, Skype, etc.) so I added it above.

There are many in our community who insist that the use of technology (Internet search, e-mail, mobile applications, messaging, etc.) is all one (really) needs to perform the work that must be done in our industry.

In fact, Dr. John Sullivan recently wrote an article here on ERE that detailed how to recognize if you yourself have become a technology dinosaur and recommended doing what Jack Welch (past CEO, GE) did: acquire a technology mentor to upgrade your technology status in the event you are found guilty of more than five transgressions on Dr. Sullivan’s list.

I don’t agree with some of his postulations but then, none of us have to agree. As the many comments brought forth, different things work differently for different people.

And that’s my point.

Use what works for you.

Here’s what works for me on a typical sourcing job and here’s how it happens:

Work comes in through either a phone call (low tech) or an e-mail (high tech). The e-mails that come in are usually from established customers, all of whom were preceded originally by a telephone conversation (low tech).

Occasionally a job order gets faxed in (very low tech).

It warrants mentioning at this point that what once was high tech is now low tech; at one point faxes were very high tech, remember?

I look at the job in e-mail. Many times there are attachments to the order (job description, Excel lists of targets and/or names the customer already has, special instructions, etc.) and I format all that into a working document (using my handy dandy electronic Word skills — still very high tech).

Next I do the lowest tech thing of them all. I think!

I plan, I plot, and I posture the job into how I am going to approach it.

When I first started sourcing — and you’ve heard me confess this before — I would spend inordinate time on the Internet searching for information … scratch that … searching for names — that I could use on a job.

Remember, this was the mid to late 1990s, so Internet search was new and cutting edge (very high tech) and very few people knew how to do it. The results that came in could pretty much be used as long as they had been “checked.”

We all know what that means.

As long as the person was “still there” (meaning still at a company) they were pretty much good to go on the list that got submitted to a customer.

It was so much fun to be a whiz-bang Internet sourcer.

Today, not so much.

That same once-high-tech formula has now become a low-tech approach that is being misused in some sourcing circles and is the main determinant why sourcing fails in many organizations.

In sourcing far more sophistication is required today than way back then.

Remember when we started this final piece in this series, I said, “future generations will design and build their own technologies by blending what works and what doesn’t work in different situations“?

Those in the know in sourcing today have done just that.

Until interactive applications become practical (and this will take years), matching robust common-sense knowledge with computers enables a new class of sourcers to make sense of today’s world with a breadth of knowledge that can be integrated with (some) computer applications.

They’ve recognized that technology morphs over time and what’s new today was old back then and what’s old now was new before.

When Lou Adler said that we must kick the sourcing habit in a recent article here on ERE, he said sourcing is getting easier by the day.

He’s right.

I personally don’t agree with him when he says, “at the current rate, by March 11, 2012, everyone will be connected by one degree of separation with everyone else either via LinkedIn or Facebook.”

I think that ignores the trepidation that is beginning to develop in the population around over-exposure, but that tale remains to be told.

Sourcing (as most people think of it) is on the endangered list because its high tech approach is yielding inadequate and many times stale results.

So how can we make the old new again and the new old again?

We can learn how to communicate with each other, and yes, you can just about guess in what direction we’re going here.

What works for me in the next step in my sourcing process is another low-tech tool.

I get on the phone.

I said before that when I started sourcing (in the mid 1990s) I’d spend lots and lots of time on the Internet forestalling that fateful moment when I had to pick up the phone.

This has become a common low-tech problem that self-medicates itself with the overuse (and misuse) of the Internet.

Nowadays, on most jobs, it’s just way faster (for me) to pick up the phone and start talking to people to obtain the information I need.

It doesn’t much matter anymore how scary the job looks.

I just start calling my target lists, knowing that the more I call, the easier the job is going to become.

The more I talk to people, the more I learn.

I call because I know the majority of the people I need for my job I cannot find on the Internet.

No way.

No how.

This calling — what may seem to you a low-tech technique — may not work so well for you. I’m going to ask you why that is.

You can send e-mails (most of which won’t get read and those that do stand a very high chance of being misunderstood) and you can send text SOS messages out to your network of contacts or you could post your need in some social networking group you’re a member of.

You could even make a video of yourself detailing your urgent need for a medical device sales application engineer and tell them where to send their resume.

You can use all those high-tech channels and then you can sit and wait for results.

Unless you’re some mega-bucked organization that was way ahead of the curve and has been investing in today’s high tech so-called communication channels for the last 10 years, using all the high-tech gadgets of today isn’t going to mean squat if you can’t talk with somebody and make a connection.

I think communication that uses real-time analogy and association is the highest technology we as humans possess.

It’s a brave new world and, oddly enough, it very much resembles the old.

Part IV. Part III. Part II. Part I. Intro.

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.

Almost as soon as the first Jobvite was sent, the company upped the value by connecting with Facebook and LinkedIn. Now, recipients of a Jobvite can tell who among their contacts is a good match for the position.

In the two years since introducing the apps, Jobvite has continued to release features — market-driven features, not simply more bells and whistles. Today, the company has two major product lines: Jobvite Hire, which is an ATS with a strong social media sourcing focus and useful, user-friendly metrics; and Jobvite Source, a social media sourcing and candidate contact tool that automates such routine tasks as job posting and profile matching.

The company also offers a free, stripped-down version of its sourcing service, called Jobvite Share.

Already claiming a growth rate of 600 percent in two years, it’s hard to see how Jobvite can kick it up even another notch. The announcement of the new financing says Jobvite now has about 500 clients, including Whole Foods Market, Starbucks, Zappos.com, Inc., Yelp, and Twitter.

However, social media itself is still growing, and recruiter interest in leveraging connections shows no sign of abating. LinkedIn is a clear case in point. It’s market valuation, when it IPOs Thursday, is anticipated to end up around $3.3 billion, much of it based on the expectation that its recruitment revenue will continue to power the company.

No wonder then, that Jobvite’s funding announcement quotes its president and CEO Dan Finnigan saying, “The widespread adoption of social media is changing how people find jobs.

“We are leading the way to provide the new technologies companies need to find and engage quality employees where they socialize. This investment will allow us to accelerate the reshaping of the multi-billion dollar online recruitment market.”

The series C funding was led by Trident Capital and joined by previous investors CMEA Capital and ATA Ventures. John Moragne, senior managing director and co-founder of Trident Capital, will join the Jobvite board.

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.

If you don’t text, tweet, own a smartphone, or know what OMG means, it might be a good idea to take the self assessment and see where you stand on the dinosaur scale.

The Technology Dinosaur Scale

The following top 10 indicators provide you with some insight into how far you are behind the times. If you are falling behind on more than five of the factors, you need to consider yourself a potential technology dinosaur.

1. You wear a watch – the first and most obvious indicator that someone is “old school” is a watch on the wrist. Most individuals under 25 have become accustomed to using their mobile phone to check the time. A wrist watch is a redundant “single tasker” that is often wrong.
2. You carry a camera -- for anyone other than a photography enthusiast, owning a separate digital camera or — gasp, non-digital camera — is evidence of life in a bygone era. The cameras embedded in smartphones and tablets often shoot general purpose photos/video at quality levels akin to consumer cameras. In addition, embedded cameras are not likely to be forgotten and can share the captured memories with friends and family instantly. Even the national media have begun to use pictures and videos captured by mobile devices because of their quality and the fact that such devices are almost always present at the seen of a newsworthy event. If you need further proof that the stand-alone video camera is becoming obsolete, look no further than the recent announcement by Cisco Systems that it will shutter its Flip business unit which produces standalone high-definition camcorders, even though it just acquired the business two years ago for $590 million.
3. You still use a fax machine – if you use a fax machine on a regular basis and have the fax number listed on your business card, you are sending an instant message that you live in the past. Desktop scanning solutions offer far better options for transmitting hard-copy documents electronically. The fax machine has joined the pager and the VCR in the technology antique shop.
4. You use printers and file cabinets — typewriters, long ago headed toward extinction (there is only one producer left on the planet) should have been an indication that print in general was on its way out, but many missed that. Printed documents are expensive to produce, to duplicate, to store and to distribute. Digital documents are far superior because they can be stored, backed up, updated, and accessed more efficiently. As Internet access grows even more pervasive and digital document creation, collaboration, and sharing services evolve, print will disappear. The technology-savvy have already abandoned file cabinets and printers. Even books will fade away; Amazon now sells more e-books than hard copy books.
5. You make telephone calls – communicating by a telephone is rapidly becoming passé. Today there are so many alternative/asynchronous communication channels including text messages, tweets, social network messaging, video conferencing, etc., each of which offer distinct advantages over the sometimes dreaded phone. You might still hold the notion that phone calls provide the “personal touch,” but the data is in, and fewer and fewer people are answering!
6. You rely solely on e-mail — if you have an e-mail account with an old-school provider like AOL or Hotmail, most already know you are old-school. While e-mail itself is still alive, it has many faults that will soon doom it to the history books. Techno-savvy individuals are shifting to communication channels that restrict access, don’t transmit viruses, and offer 24/7 access.
7. You carry a day planner – worse than wearing a watch, nothing sends a message that you are not techno-savvy more than a paper-based leather bound “Daytimer” or calendar. Few under 25 even know they once existed. The technology alternatives are loaded with capabilities the antiques simply can’t rival including electronic alerts and CRM integration. Losing a paper-based day planner can literally be a disaster; electronic alternatives on the other hand provide numerous safer and even encrypted backups.
8. Your language — those that openly embrace technology realize that it brings with it its own language. For example, you can’t possibly text or tweet without knowing the latest acronyms like OMG, WTF, LOL, etc. But you should also know that this new language is gaining usage in all forms of communications and messaging. Even the length of typical messages is changing and becoming shorter to better fit the size limitations of tweets and the miniscule keyboards of smartphones.
9. You listen to CDs — if you still buy or listen to CDs, the world has already passed you by. Most newer cars have switched to MP3 technology, but even carrying an MP3 player is an indication you are falling behind the times. That insane multi-tasker called the smartphone can not only play MP3 files, but also access audio streamed live over the Internet or by satellite radio stations.
10. Miscellaneous factors – in addition to the previous factors, there are some indicators that are hard to categorize. For example, MySpace and Friendster might have been “cool” a few years ago, but today they are considered the domain of laggards. If you watch 100% of your TV shows on TV as opposed to TV.com, Hulu, Joost, or iTunes, you are lagging. If you play video games on a standalone home console versus on an Internet gaming network or even more recently on your mobile phone (i.e. Farmville and Angry Birds) you are also not “with it.” If you can’t walk fast while texting or if you participate in meetings without your mobile phone or laptop on the table, you may be falling behind the technology trend.

Falling Behind in Talent Management Technology

Technology designed specifically to support talent management or that is relevant to the things talent managers do is evolving just as fast as that for other domains. New software-as-a-service offerings, Internet applications, desktop software extensions, mobile applications and social media platforms, are making more advanced talent management solutions not only possible, but also economically feasible for even firms with the tightest financial controls in place. Some of the technological advances you as a recruiter should be knowledgeable on include:

• Collaboration tools — if your company experimented with collaboration products in their early years, chances are you have grown to hate the category of collaboration software, but the offerings of today are easier to use, much more powerful, and in many cases integrated with the desktop applications you rely on. Basic services like Google Docs and Zoho and more advanced products like Microsoft Sharepoint allow talent managers to build technology-empowered processes that deliver exceptional internal and external customer (candidate) experience.
• Social networks – while most in recruiting still look at social networks as a playground for sourcing, the capabilities of the major platforms themselves and the applications that extend them can be used to empower activities throughout all stages of the recruiting lifecycle. By incorporating document sharing and live chat, your careers fan page on Facebook could very easily become a real-time candidate support application.
• Software-as-a-service offerings — the sheer volume of software-as-a-service solutions available today is overwhelming. While enterprise solutions can still be costly, pricetags often pale in comparison to licensed software.  Advanced CRM solutions, workforce planning tools, collaboration websites, and even full blown applicant tracking options abound. For companies really lagging behind the times, many service providers now offer free/low cost personal accounts that you as an individual could leverage.
• Desktop plug-ins and services – Plug-ins extend the functionality of the desktop applications you use every day. From plug-ins for your browser that let you organize your Internet research or automatically monitor websites for changes, to e-mail application plug-ins that let you send/receive messages to all of the major social networks, this category of technology is immense. If you can imagine it, chances are it exists. One of my favorite tools is Contact Capture from Broadlook Technologies; it parses the text of web pages extracting identifiable contact information and makes it available to a variety of contact databases, no more cutting and pasting.
• Knowledge domains (ideagoras) – first coined by author Don Tapscott in Wikinomics, ideagoras are online places where large numbers of people gather to exchange ideas and solutions. Like it or not, one of the key labor types that will dominate the workforce in the future if the contingent resource engaged through any one of several dozen engagement models. Great examples of ideagoras relevant to recruiters include Slideshare, Wikipedia, and InnoCentive.
• Mobile applications – I have said it before and I will say it again, the smartphone is without a doubt the most powerful tool in the modern recruiter toolbox. Not only can the smartphones of today support unified messaging across all channels of communication, they can also run a bevy of applications aimed at making the modern recruiter more effective an efficient. Online document sharing applications, social networking applications, remote access to enterprise applications, mobile CRM tools, location-aware applications, and productivity tools let recruiters do almost everything that could be done in the office outside the office.

Final Thoughts

This quick assessment is meant merely to be a wake-up call to those that have been too busy to keep up with the latest technology. If you find yourself slipping behind, I recommend that you adopt the approach that Jack Welch used on his technology lagging executives at GE: acquire a technology mentor (probably a recent college grad) to guide you through your upgrading process. Set as a goal to learn one new technology each month until you become the technology leader within your department.