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New LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner

LinkedIn named a new CEO today, as expected tapping its president former Yahooer Jeff Weiner for the job. Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn founder and its first CEO, moved out of the CEO job he re-assumed in December after a company shakeup. Hoffman will become a full-time executive chairman.

Weiner’s chief focus, according to a report on TechCrunch, will be to create “an independent public company, with three key revenue sources: premium subscriptions, corporate solutions, and advertising.” All three revenue streams are already in place, generating enough cash to bring the company to relative profitability. All that’s necessary to catapult the company into solid margins is an upturn in hiring.

Weiner is former EVP of Yahoo’s Network Division, the unit responsible for the company’s search, mail, and other key operations. He left in June 2008, during the company’s brain drain. Weiner joined LinkedIn in January after a stay as executive in residence with two VC firms.

His appointment as president came after Dan Nye, LinkedIn’s second CEO, left in December. Hoffman retook the CEO reins he had relinquished to Nye not even two years before.

In a press release, Weiner says, “Working closely with Reid and the team over the past six months exceeded all of my expectations coming into the company. I couldn’t be more excited about our progress to date, and the opportunity ahead of us.”

Hoffman, meanwhile, says in a blog post he will concentrate on “some big picture strategic issues for Linkedin — how Linkedin evolves to become more and more essential to professionals seeking to stay informed and find the right resources to accomplish their tasks fast and effectively.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Canadian company, which trades on the Venture Board of the Toronto Stock Exchange, reported today that it lost $148,000 (CAD) on revenues of $1.88 million (CAD). Revenue for the same period in 2008 was $1.52 million (CAD), with a loss of $299,000 (CAD).

Cytiva first reported its financials in May. The current release is of audited financials, which are nearly unchanged from the initial numbers.

“Despite a highly challenging selling environment, Cytiva’s first-quarter results show strong growth in our key success indicators: Revenue, deferred revenue, and positive cash flow from operations,” said Jason Moreau, CEO of Cytiva Software.

The press release announcing the first quarter results doesn’t include any financial numbers. The numbers used here come from InvestorPoint.

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

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

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

A class action suit has been filed against Kenexa alleging the HR technology provider and RPO firm mislead investors in 2007 by not disclosing problems it was having with international sales and with its RPO business.

The action, brought in federal court in Pennsylvania by Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP, claims that between May 8, 2007, when Kenexa issued its first quarter report and Nov. 7th of that year, when the third quarter financial report was released, it “failed to disclose material adverse facts about the Company’s true financial condition, business and prospects.”

As a result, the law firm claims that shareholders who bought stock between those dates lost value when on Nov 8th, the day after the third quarter results were announced, the stock plummeted 40 percent, dropping from $27.84 per share to $16.61 per share. That day, 8.4 million shares of the company traded hands. The average volume in the weeks before was around 300,000 shares.

A Kenexa spokesperson could not be reached for comment.

Coughlin Stoia is a 190-lawyer firm with offices across the country that specializes in class action litigation on behalf of investors and consumers.  The firm was lead counsel on behalf of Enron investors, suing banks and others that backed the energy firm. Coughlin Stoia has also played a key role in cases as diverse as an antitrust action against the NASDAQ exchange, settling it for more than $1 billion, and in litigation against tobacco companies.

In the Kenexa case, Coughlin Stoia says in a press release that the company:

“… failed to disclose the following adverse facts, among others: (i) that sales cycles for the Company’s Employment Process Outsourcing (“EPO”) and assessments lines of business were lengthening, causing sales to be pushed out and revenue growth to slow; (ii) that the Company was experiencing problems with its international sales and would need to revamp that sales force; (iii) that the Company was experiencing problems with a significant EPO client such that the client was requesting to be released from its contract with the Company; and (iv) based on the foregoing, defendants lacked a reasonable basis for their positive statements about the Company, its earnings, operations and prospects.”

No specific amount of damages is detailed in the complaint.

Kenexa’s stock was trading at $13.47 at midday today, down 38 cents from Thursday’s close. For 2008 Kenexa reported losing $120.9 million, mostly due to a writedown of company goodwill, which many HR tech and services vendors have been doing. For the first quarter of this year, Kenexa posted a $33.6 million loss, after another goodwill hit of $33.3 million. Not counting the writedown and certain other minor one-time expenses, Kenexa would have had a $3.9 million profit from operations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New logo

Kenexa

Here’s a math teaser for you: i X e = s. Solve for “s.” The answer is success, which is what Kenexa promises from its solutions that multiply the individual by the environment.

Like math or not, you’ll be seeing that formula wherever you see Kenexa since it’s a key ingredient of the HR software company’s rebranding.

In a press release today, the company says, “The formula will be rolled out in the company’s website, collateral, and other materials. Kenexa has also unveiled a modern corporate logo that reinforces its new look and feel, and emphasizes the “X” in the formula. The new logo is reinforced by the tag line: ‘HR Success Multiplied.’”

The old and new Kenexa logos are shown here. And if you want even more, check out the company’s new print ads. You can ignore the pop-up box unless you want to provide your info.

TweetMyJobs

Barely five months old, this Twitter-based job service is hitting on all cylinders. Besides thousands of job channels that tweet and retweet jobs fitting an industry and an geography, TweetMyJobs actually has a modest business model charging as little as 99 cents to send a job posting to specific job channel followers. Recruiters can also get resume tweets if they choose, and anyone can follow the general message group.

Now comes TweetMark, a cool service that lets an employer incorporate a brand with their tweet. For $99 a year — free until the end of June — a company gets a custom Twitter page that incorporates its logo or whatever branding message it chooses. When a job is tweeted to the appropriate job channel, the branding element gets incorporated with the 140-character text and appears on the recipient’s device.

Thought you couldn’t get images with Twitter? So did we. But TweetMyJobs founder Gary Zukowski is clever enough to have figured out a work-around. Here’s his explanation: “The logo is not in the tweet, but since it’ll be tweeted on the custom Job Channel, it will be associated to the tweet by default.”

OneWire

Startups, especially job board and candidate matching startups, don’t usually launch ad campaigns that involve TV and radio. A little SEO, some keyword buys, and maybe a press release or two. But OneWire is making a bigger splash with a commercial that’s supposed to be launching today in New York City and a few other major, east coast financial centers.

OneWire, you may recall from our earlier post, is a job matching service for the finance sector. It works on brute force, getting as granular in its data collection as asking for GPA scores, and details about the specific size and reach of the deals an experienced financier handled or an analyst covered.

OneWire is the product of F.S. von Stade & Associates and its founder and president F. Skiddy von Stade. FSvS is one of the leading search firms for the finance industry.

HighFlyer

Speaking of job boards, this one’s a bona fide job board and the latest of the ever-expanding number of ever-so-hopeful challengers to the Monster and CareerBuilders of the world. Now a new job board launch is hardly big news. In fact, it barely qualifies as news at all. But with a seven-day Bermuda vacation as a come-on to job seekers to register, what’s to lose? Especially since the site practically swears that registration will take under a minute. (The press release announcing the launch actually says it will take less than 30 seconds.)

The bad news for job seekers is that we only found nine jobs on the site.

Buy a Domain

That may be a clue as to the decision behind the UK’s Employ Holdings Ltd. to abandon its plan for a network of U.S. job boards under the “Employ” banner. How do we know the UK job board operator has given up its U.S. hopes? Because it wants us to help it auction off its stock of employ-related domain names. These are such exciting names as EmployCaterers.com, Employlabor.com, and EmployConstruction.com. (Don’t bother clicking into them, they’re all parked addresses.)

Scott Taylor, director of Employ Holdings, emailed us saying, “My company was planning to tackle the USA online Digital Recruitment Marketplace in 2010 to capitalize on the economic recovery and establish ourselves throughout the USA, however as we have various projects underway it has been decided that we are best served concentrating on the UK and European markets at this point in time.”

You can contact him if you’re interested in buying the package — which is the way they’d rather dispose of the 40-odd domain group. If you bid, keep in mind that dot-com addresses for job boards may not be worth a whole lot. Especially once Employ Media starts selling dot-jobs addresses.

Rick Fletcher, of HRchitect, talks about:

• Which recruiting-technology vendor is the “red-hot category killer”
• How the economy’s doing, when it comes to the recruiting field
• What ever happened to Vurv customers
• How to tell if your potential vendor is in bad shape
• Vendors such as SAP, Workday, Deploy, Taleo, Kenexa, iCIMS, nowHIRE, SilkRoad, HRsmart, and others
• What Kronos is doing right
• Buying a niche product vs. a talent-management suite of products keep reading…

Kenexa, a leading talent acquisition software provider, reported first quarter revenues today that were close to what analysts had expected, even if they were $9.4 million less than the same period last year.

The company reported revenues of $38.8 million and non-GAAP earnings per share of 14 cents. The per share earnings were in line with analyst estimates, though the Street had been expecting revenue of $39.05 million. keep reading…

Even for a product that’s free, MrTed’s entry-level ATS has had a meteoric rise. Since being introduced in October, 1,000 clients have become users of SmartRecruiters, an accomplishment the European-headquartered company celebrates today in an announcement that declares it “the fastest-growing ATS in the recruiting software industry.”

“We are blown away by the response of small businesses to the launch of SmartRecruiters,” says Jerome Ternynck, CEO at MrTed.

Undaunted by the recession, the small businesses and organizations that are the target market for the SaaS-provisioned ATS are currently using it to fill 10,000 jobs. Posts to a commercial job board earn MrTed a commission, which is one of the ways the company earns money from the program.

“We pay nothing,” says Jerry Winans, associate vice president of HR at Taylor University in Indiana. The 1,900-student Christian school was looking to move away from its decentralized, paper-based recruitment process when it decided to give SmartRecruiters a try. keep reading…

The lawsuit between two Eagan, Minn. staffing software and services vendors has been dismissed.

Neither TempWorks nor its upstart competitor Avionte would discuss the terms of the settlement, though John Long, Avionte founder and president, said in an email, “Can’t disclose any terms, though I’d like to. The result was as expected and we are pleased with it.”

TempWorks CEO Gregg Dourgarian said about the same thing: “We’re delighted with the outcome.”

The two companies sued each other last year, with Avionte claiming in a state court lawsuit that TempWorks was badmouthing it to clients and was sending them letters demanding they stop using Avionte software. TempWorks countersued in federal court, charging Avionte had pirated parts of its staffing software.

All the players know each other, and though Eagan is a Minneapolis suburb, it’s small enough that the principals might run into each other. Long was previously president of TempWorks, and one of the company’s original employees. His partner and Avionte Chief Technology Officer Phi Ngo had been a senior analyst at TempWorks. Sandeep Acharya, chief operations officer, had been TempWorks director of consulting services. And Samar Basnet, chief software architect at Avionte, had been a senior software analyst for TempWorks.

Whatever the agreement, neither company apparently had to give up products or clients. Both companies told us they are continuing to sell their front- and back-office software and other services. “Avionte is definitely continuing to sell our products and business,” says Long.

TempWorks, which broadened its offerings a few years ago, has been moving strongly into payroll services, according to Dourgarian.

“We got a ton of business taking customers away from ADP,” he says, attributing it to the economy which has forced companies to cut expenses. TempWorks, he explains, provides equivalent payroll servicing, but at much less than what ADP charges. And, he points out, it integrates with the TempWorks staffing software.

Avionte’s CEO, meanwhile, says the company’s software business “has been great” (tripled year over year last year, doubled so far this year).

Avionte was founded in 2006; TempWorks in 1994.

Workstream made it official last night, filing a third quarter report that showed it earned the first profit since it went public in 1999.

The $570,000 net profit wasn’t quite as good as the $780,000 it projected in preliminary numbers last month, but it clearly shows how far the company has come since the bleak months of 2008.

For the same quarter last fiscal year, Workstream reported a loss of $19.7 million. You read that right and we’re reporting the numbers correctly: For the quarter ending Feb. 28, 2008 Workstream lost $19.7 million primarily because of interest liabilities. Even so, its EBITDA, considered by analysts a better comparison of company performance across an industry, was $4.5 million in the red. For the third quarter of 2009, its EBITDA was a positive $1.3 million. (Workstream has an odd fiscal year. It begins June 1 and ends May 31.) keep reading…

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

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

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

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

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

Today we have news of new launches, a new ATS, and a couple of gossipy items that crossed our desk.

PERSONAVITA

Whoever first said job seeking was a full-time job probably had no idea just how much overtime 21st-century job seekers would have to put in. You have to brush up your resume — once you decide what kind of resume it is you want, and how many different ones you need.

Then, no sooner does the conscientious job seeker post it to Monster, CareerBuilder, and wherever else they think is right and just, they get told how no one ever gets hired that way. Instead, you have to network. So off goes conscientious job seeker to LinkedIn, Spoke, and to their personal contact list to announce they are in transition, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Meanwhile, they discover that networking is good, but you need to build a personal brand, too. And that means a Facebook page, a personal profile to supplement the resume, maybe their own web page, and, of course, the now-de-rigueur blog to market themselves.

No wonder the number of discouraged workers climbs every month.

Now comes PersonaVita, if not to solve the problem, at least to salve it. Launched today, the site is pitched as a way to “capture your experiences, validate your contributions, and draw from your social, professional, and academic achievements to create a personal brand online.” keep reading…

Go ahead and cheer. Do a happy dance. Stocks were up today as Wall Street reacted to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s plan to breath life back into the U.S. banking system. keep reading…

Workstream is reporting that it made money last quarter, bucking the recession tide to give the HCM technology and services company its first profit since going public in 1999.

In a statement today, Workstream says it earned $780,000 on revenues of about $5.6 million for the 3rd quarter ending Feb. 28. Its EBITDA of $1.5 million for the quarter is three times what it was for the 4th quarter of 2008. EBITDA, often used to compare the performance of companies in the same industry, is debated as a metric of genuine profitability. But there’s no debating a bottom line operating profit of three-quarters of a million dollars, a stunning reversal considering Workstream’s historic financial performance.

keep reading…

Something strange is happening in Maitland, Florida. Workstream’s stock has jumped 1000% since the end of the year when it closed at a barely perceptible 2 cents a share. And that was before the current market run-up, so the increase is more than just a coattail phenomenon.

A provider of SaaS HCM software and owner of 6FigureJobs and personal career consultant Allen and Associates, Workstream was bleeding red ink last year. Its obituary was all but written after its deal to be acquired by payroll processor Empagio fell apart.

But in July the company reported ekeing out a small quarterly profit, earning an EBITDA of $.5 million. For the fiscal year (which ended May 31) the company lost $52 million, with more than half of that coming from a downward valuation of goodwill.

Now, as of the last report filed with the SEC covering the 2nd quarter which ended Nov. 30th, the company had shaved $5 million from its operating expenses and cut its quarterly loss by 77 percent compared to the same quarter in 2007. Revenue, though down, was off by about 25 percent compared to the same quarter the year before. The half-year numbers were equally impressive. The company is losing money, but CEO Steve Purello has managed to cut the losses by close to two-thirds from the previous year. keep reading…

A year ago, Baylor Health Care System launched a keyword marketing campaign, buying ads on a variety of search engines. After 11 months of what began as an experiment, Baylor has generated 12,455 applicants at an average cost per applicant of $3.35.

“It’s worked very well for us,” says Baylor’s HR Communications Director, Eileen Bouthillet

Baylor’s story was told Monday in the Wall Street Journal, which also detailed last fall’s seasonal hiring push by United Parcel Service. Both companies told the Journal that search engine marketing produced more applicants at a lower cost than did print.

“We’re cutting newsprint wherever we can and trying to move more to online media,” Matthew Lavery, corporate workforce planning manager, told the Journal. “Google is outperforming other online media.”

Bouthillet, who provided us with updated cost per applicant figures, says Baylor worked with TMP Worldwide’s Dallas office to develop a campaign and track the source of the applicants. By far, keyword buys on Google, Yahoo, Indeed, and SimplyHired yielded the largest number of candidates at the lowest cost. But the job boards also performed well, even if they were 7.5 times more costly per candidate.

CareerBuilder job postings were responsible for 52 percent of all the candidates coming from the job boards, which, cumulatively, had a cost per applicant of $25.43.

Compare that to the $403.14 Baylor spent per candidate on print.

Bouthillet also improved Baylor’s career center to make listings and the specific specialties more friendly to search engines, which also made them easier for candidates to find. Working with her staff web specialist, Bouthillet crafted custom landing pages for the keywords. So instead of a generic nursing page, she and her communications staff created pages for all the key nursing specialties being sought.

Optimizing the career site and job listings, she told us, was “kind of a no-brainer. We got better placement on the search engines and that helped drive candidates.” The Baylor name was also a draw.

The next step in the program is to track the hires. “It’s horribly inaccurate when candidates self-select,” Bouthillet acknowledges, which is why the TMP-crafted campaign embedded source tags into each component. Now, she and TMP have been pushing Taleo, Baylor’s ATS vendor, to incorporate TMP’s tracking tags to track both source and cost of hire right down to specific keywords, sites and whatever campaign media are used.

Almost daily we get news of another online recruitment service launch or job board startup. Some of the more useful we write about.  By far though, the majority of these are me-toos; one more entrant into a field so crowded you can’t cross cyberspace without tripping on one of them.

Occasionally, though, we come across a site worth sharing. Here for instance are three of the more browse-worthy.

Labor Insight

This is a cool site even if you have no interest in employment analytics. If nothing else, you’ll be wowed by the site’s interactive, graphical displays and ease of use.

Starting with a map of the United States, a simple mouseover of the states gives you such basic employment information as household income, and size of the labor force. Click on a state and you see what cities have the most online job posting activity, an indicator of how robust the local economy is. Drill down, and Labor Insight will list every posted job in the time period you pick.

There’s also a search by company, which will tell you what company has posted the most jobs online during a given period. Or what company has posted the most jobs in Alabama, or check trends in occupations by ONET code (Occupational Information Network) or … well, you get the idea.

The site is a product of EmployOn, LLC, a jobs technology company, that provides jobs searching and matching, data structuring, and other services to education, government, and others. Laborinsight.com is a natural offshoot from the job scraping, and data structuring EmployOn does.

Even if you don’t think you have any use for such business intelligence (if you think that, we suggest you think again), try out the site. The three-day free trial tells us that this is not going to be a free service.

keep reading…