Sources tell us that Sam Zales, president and CEO of BuyerZone, a B2B supplier network and business lead generator, is reportedly about to be named president of ZoomInfo. He will replace Bryan Burdick, whose new role is unclear. The move has not been announced and neither Zales nor Burdick returned calls.

Burdick has been president at the company since April 2006, joining from Monster Worldwide where he was chief marketing officer - TMP. Zales has been with BuyerZone since 1999. He became president and CEO in July 2000. In 2006 BuyerZone was acquired by Reed Business Information.

Both BuyerZone and ZoomInfo are based in Waltham, Massachusetts, not far from Monster’s home in Maynard.

In the past few months three senior executives have left ZoomInfo. Most recent, in fact so recent that his name is still on the company website, is Michael Souza. He was sales VP for the company, joining in 2003 from Lycos.

Prior to Souza’s departure, Tad Goltra and Sam Tharp both left. Alums of Monster Worldwide where both were vice presidents, Goltra headed ZoomInfo’s recruiting business unit as VP and general manager and Tharp was VP and general manager of the search business unit.

It is not known why the men left ZoomInfo, though Tharp founded Otrib.com, a funeral and memorial site, before he joined ZoomInfo in 2007.

The sources we spoke with tell us the company has financial difficulties that have been worsened by the contracting U.S. economy. One source said the company, which as recently as the second quarter of this year had plans to expand its workforce, now has what amounts to a hiring halt.

“Right now, there’s no hiring and there’s no growth,” says a source close to the company. However, job search site Indeed (profile; site) lists a number of openings at the company, mostly in technical positions.

Zoom Information was founded in 2000 by CEO Jonathan Stern and Michel Decary, senior scientist. It raised $7 million in 2004 from Ascent Venture Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Venrock Associates, and Vulcan Capital. In 2007, when ZoomInfo participated at Demo, a conference showcasing emerging technology companies, it reported 2006 revenue of $10 million and said it was profitable. Hoover’s lists its 2007 revenue as $8.4 million.

Earlier this year it spun off its its advertising business, launching a new company, Bizo Inc.

That bit of bad news was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirming fears that the economy is in a recession that is only deepening.

Yet for the recruiting industry, Jeremy Eskenazi, founding principal of Riviera Advisors (profile; site), says, “I think this whole recession is different than in the past.”

During tough times in the past, when companies started laying off, among the first to go were the recruiters. “Companies thought recruiters were nice to have, but they axed them right away,” Eskenazi told us. Now, he says, “I have not seen a recruiter get fired first.”

What’s different is that employers have more of a challenge hiring workers. Even while some workers are laid off, there are always some positions that have to be filled. These are the jobs that generate revenue or are otherwise critical to keeping the company operating.

“It’s a much harder thing to do today to get people to quit their job and move,” says Eskenazi. “Recruiters are professionals at doing that, and employers know they need them.”

He cites the case of one large bank whose recruiting leader told him at a recent STARoundtable meeting that the bank needs good recruiters more than ever now because of the negative publicity affecting the industry and her bank in particular.

Terry Terhark, CEO of The RightThing (profile; site), echoed those comments. “I’d caution all companies not to wholesale reduce their recruiting,” he warns, even though recruiter layoffs will mean more more work for The RightThing, one of the leading RPO firms in the U.S. In fact, he says, that is already happening.

“We have more RFPs in house than ever,” he told us, referring to the volume of inquiries from companies that want The RightThing to take over part or all of their recruiting operation. Terhark said the company had its best third quarter ever and is on track to have an even better fourth quarter. This is coming despite a slowdown in the hiring by the company’s clients.

“Our clients are like all the other companies out there,” Terkark explains. “We’ve seen a flatness to a decline (in hiring). Some are down 10, 20 percent in their hiring.”

On the other hand, pharmaceuticals and technology firms are hiring, he says, but convincing talent to change jobs is getting harder. “We’ve seen an increase in the reject rates,” Terhark says, adding, “In a tough economy, people tend to hunker down and stay in their jobs if they are stable.”

Although Terhark says AIRS, which The RightThing acquired earlier this year, “has performed exceptionally,” and demand for the AIRS software hasn’t slowed, other vendors haven’t been so lucky. Taleo (profile; site), which beat Wall Street’s quarterly earnings expectations this week said it expected lower revenue for the 4th quarter.

Kenexa (profile; site), which competes with Taleo in the human capital technology area, reported that its  third-quarter profit dropped by 23 percent over the third-quarter in 2007 this week then saw its stock price plummet to 52 week lows. It reduced its earnings expectations for the fourth-quarter.

Rick Fletcher, founder and president of consulting firm HRchitect (profile; site), speaking with us two weeks ago, predicted that the technology vendors were in for some tough times in the coming months. “We’re going through a contraction,” Fletcher told us, pointing to the acquisition of Vurv by Taleo and other deals.

“The smaller vendors, those that aren’t as well capitalized, are going to have the most trouble,” he says, “But there’s enough pain to go around.”

His counsel for recruiters and HR professionals is to talk regularly with their vendors and look at the financials of the publicly held companies. The private companies, he says, should provide numbers as well, since most clients sign a non-disclosure agreement. “Ask for them,” he suggests. If the company drags its heels or doesn’t provide complete numbers, consider it a warning sign.

He also recommends that every HR department document how it uses the technology products it has, especially noting customization and configuration. And that HR participate in the company’s IT strategy committee, or push to start one. The purpose, he says, is to share vendor concerns with IT, develop a backup plan in case the worst happens and also help other departments and IT understand that HRIS is part of the overall business strategy of the company.

HRchitect is offering a series of webinars to help HR departments assess vendors generally and a series specifically for Vurv customers who have to make decisions about replacing their systems. To register for the Vurv customer series go here. Here’s where you’ll find more information on the entire webinar series. ERE also has an archived webinar on talent acquisition systems.

HR technology providers Taleo (profile; site), Kenexa (profile; site) and SuccessFactors (profile; site), all of whom reported this week, mostly beat or matched Wall Street’s expectations for the quarter. Only Kenexa took a hit when it reported earnings that were lower than the same quarter in 2007.

Both Kenexa and Taleo said they expected the fourth quarter to be tougher and issued financial projections showing a reduction in earnings per share from the third quarter, which ended Sept. 30.

Taleo lost $8.2 million for the third quarter, compared to net income of $2.2 million for the same period last year. The company said this was “primarily from restructuring charges and amortization expense related to the acquisition of Vurv.” Kenexa meanwhile earned $5.4 million and expects to earn between $6.3 million and $7 million for the fourth quarter. That doesn’t take into account a hit of $2 million to $2.5 million. That’s what the company expects it will cost to reduce its workforce by a planned 12 percent.

Those numbers are below what Wall Street was expecting, sinking Kenexa’s stock price to a 52-week low.

SuccessFactors, which has been losing ever-increasing amounts since 2004, was the only one of the three companies to say it expected improvement in the fourth quarter. The company expects revenue for the quarter to be in the $31.0 million to $31.5 million range. For the year, it raised its earlier projection and now says the company will bring in between $109.9 million to $110.4 million. Even with the improving numbers SuccessFactors will show a loss for the year op $1.32 to $1.34 per share.

On the job board side, both Monster (profile; site) and privately-held CareerBuilder (profile; site) (which voluntarily reports some numbers) showed a drop in North American revenue. Monster, which released its numbers last week, had total revenue of $332.2 million with the U.S. and Canada contributing $155.2 million of the total. The balance came from its international sales ($142.4 million) and from advertising and fees ($34.5 million). CareerBuilder, which only reports its North American revenue numbers, had $189.9 million.

Both companies’ North American job posting income was down from the same quarter in 2007. Careerbuilder was off $10 million. Monster was down $20 million. Monster’s profit rose, however, to $42.8 million, or 35 cents per share, compared with $33.3 million, or 26 cents on more shares, ifor the same period last year. Despite the news, some analysts downgraded Monster’s stock rating, fearing that a continuing recession will dampen the company’s overall earnings prospects for at least the next quarter.

Taking to heart the message CEO Sal Iannuzzi has been touting that users are as important as recruiters, the company is set to roll out a new look and new features on January 10th. Monster was previewing some of what’s coming at its well-trafficked booth, and what we saw suggested the kind of career and succession planning tools found in higher-end talent management systems.

“It’s a seeker-centric appoach,” Monster’s VP of Client Adoption, Eric Winegardner, told us during a tour of the features.  There were no live demos because Monster’s development teams are still making tweaks.

But the slides showed tools that should appeal to passive candidates, as well as the traditional active seeker.

In three steps, a worker could learn what rungs others in the occupation have taken up as they worked their way up the ladder. Using the benchmarking tool, a candidate can learn how they stack up against others. Using the Career Snapshot, a worker could research related occupations by title, skills, and the like.

Just like a quality talent management system, Monster’s tools will help career-minded workers do a gap analysis and see what they need to do to ready themselves. The advantage Monster has over any single company is that it taps a database of millions of resumes to create aggregate pictures of career movement for nearly any occupation and industry that exists.

Where it doesn’t have the data, it reaches out to get it, pulling in things like average salary for a searched occupation in the specific geography. Every job, Winegardner tells us, will have salary data — if not from the employer, then salary ranges Monster will provide.

We asked Winegardner about the integration of the job-matching technology it bought when Monster acquired Trovix. Winegardner laughed. Almost everyone who he talked to asked the same question. “It’s coming,” he said. Some parts are there now, others will begin to appear in December, but the complete integration won’t happen for the Jan. 10th launch.

There are also some changes coming on the recruiter side. One of the more useful is the matching of candidates to job postings based on keyword. It won’t replace resume searching, but it will prove useful to smaller companies since they’ll be able to see resumes and then decide if they want to buy access to the candidate.

Winegardner said that 90 percent of the user experience — seeker, especially, but recruiter as well — will be changed. And Monster will get a new look. No previews there, since the design is still being developed. But he did give us a hint: What users get might very well be a personalized homepage.

“We want to let everyone know about us,” explains JuJu’s Euan Hayward. Around since 2006 (with the JuJu brand) and with respectable visitor numbers, Hayward says it was time for the company to reach out to recruiters. “This is our first booth experience.”

A job search engine with roots in the late 90’s, JuJu is nearly identical in concept to the better known Indeed and SimplyHired, both of whom are also at the Expo here in Hollywood Beach, Florida. Like them, it “scrapes” job postings from commercial and corporate job boards making a jobseeker’s search a one-stop effort.

Does the world need another vertical — or meta — job search site? Hayward thinks so. “There are some additional opportunities,” he says. “Innovation is not dead in this market.”

There was other evidence of innovation on the show floor.

Take CareerAthletes for instance. Much to my disappointment, it’s not a job board for athletes at least not in the way I was hoping (”Quarterback wanted for NFL team”). It is, however, a means for companies to hire college athletes for more typical jobs, such as in sales, marketing, engineering, and the like. It is the product of a merger between Career Athletes and Athletes4hire.com.

Working through college athletic departments, CareerAthletes provides a branded networking-oriented site for the athletes and former athletes. The focus is on community, and a site might include alums of a particular sport mentoring current athletes and sports news and similar types of content. There’s also a job board, which is supplemented by a resume-like database of the college’s athletes, which, over time, can grow to be quite extensive.

What sets CareerAthletes apart is the company’s campus-based orientation for the athletes. “We’ve done over 800 on-campus presentations,” company CEO Chris Smith says. “We are hands-on with the athletic department.” These presentations, made to the athletes, include on-the-spot sign-ups for the site, ensuring their participation and availability to recruiters.

At the other end of the showroom, AllianceQ was making a first appearance. A consortium of several large employers, AllianceQ enables these firms to share resumes of employees they don’t hire. Besides cutting the cost of sourcing candidates, the resume-sharing opportunity can salve the sting of rejection. Before sharing a resume, the candidate has to agree. And not every candidate is shared. Participating companies get to decide whether they want to share a particular resume — a precaution against losing a hot prospect for whom there may not be a position just now.

There are also at least three companies exhibiting here that focus on helping employers market their jobs through search engine optimization, a term which means tweaking a Web page in such way as to improve its placement on the results a search engine returns.

We’ve seen Jobs2Web (profile; site) before. It helps employers manage their websites and job listings to increase visibility and traffic. Also showing at the Expo are SEO4Jobs and OptiJob. Both create microsites for job listings, with OptiJob focusing exclusively on the individual job posts and SEO4Jobs also providing some additional careersite optimization.

I asked OptiJob’s VP of Business Development Chad Hensler what he has been hearing from recruiters. “It’s a mix,” he says. Most recruiters understand the value of a high Google ranking, but many are uncertain how those search results (typically called organic search) differ from search engine marketing (which, in this context, means paying for a position on the search results page).

“We do a lot of explaining,” Hensler adds. “This is a critical part of recruiting.” Not to mention having some fun. OptiJob is giving away toy rockets that fire a good 20 feet straight up.

Jonathan Duarte of SEO4Jobs was even more of an evangelist. He says search engine optimization and search engine marketing are things recruiters absolutely need to know about to be competitive. “We’re getting a lot of (recruiters) stopping to ask us all sorts of questions.”

And then he pitched a workshop on the topic at the next ERE Expo, which comes up the end of March 2009.

At ERE’s Fall Expo in Hollywood Beach, Florida, recruiters will meet the newest businesses to launch. Two of the founders will talk about how their respective companies are harnessing the power of video to help recruiters make better hiring choices and save the environment while also saving the hiring company a few dollars.

Greg Rokos, founder of FutureResume.com and its affiliate, GreenJobInterview.com, and Darryn Severyn, founder and CEO of Interactive Applicant, will try to convince recruiters that video resumes and video interviews are effective ways to screen candidates without the cost or carbon expenditure of bringing them onsite.

FutureResume.com is where candidates post a video and standard resume, the latter searchable by the usual means. Then, instead of bringing in a candidate for a first meeting, they can be interviewed online.

Interactive Applicant takes a little different tack, pre-screening applicants via an automated series of questions that candidates can be required to answer via video, audio, text, or any combination. Then the recruiter can review the candidate’s presentation skills before bringing them in.

SnapTalent’s CEO and founder Sumon Sadhu will describe how his company’s online advertising service helps recruiters and hiring managers source better candidates. It’s similar to a keyword marketing campaign but places targeted ads on content sites, rather than on search results pages.

Jeff Stewart, Urgent Career’s serial entrepreneur founder, will show how linguistic technology can be used to match sales candidates to jobs. That’s different than voice analysis, though there are some similarities. Just how it works and how effective it really is are questions that Stewart will be answering next week.

If the Spring show is any guide, these founders will get questions as tough — maybe tougher, since the audience knows recruiting — as any venture capitalist will ask. Hardly a shy bunch, the Spring ERE audience point-blank asked that crop of company founders and executives how they intended to make money and why an employer should do business with them.

Ben Yoskovitz, founder of Standout Jobs and one of the presenters at the first Startup Forum, told us that since the show he’s learned more about the HR industry than he thought possible. “The panel was a good place for us to start getting feedback, ” he told us recently.

His company provides easy-to-use software for smaller companies to build their own career sites.

Since the spring, Standout Jobs has grown to over 200 customers. While still a free service, that will soon change. An upgrade to the service is also planned. And, Yoskovitz says, now that the intensive testing and learning period is mostly behind the company, promotion of Standout Jobs is the next major effort.

Path 101, a content-intensive community networking site, is still in alpha, which, though growing in depth, is about where it was last Spring. But then, it’s an ambitious effort, which founder Charlie O’Donnell, at the forum, described as a site for job-seekers to research their career options before they apply for jobs. The site itself says it is a place where “Job candidates can figure out what “people like me” are doing with their careers and the site aims to be the first stop for career research.”

At Jobscore, CEO and founder Dan Arkind told us that the last six months have been a learning and testing period. “Not much to report,” he said at first. After a little prodding he said the resume-sharing site has been making inroads into the smaller employers the company is targeting. Especially those in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Jobscore is headquartered.

The company was developed to help smaller businesses source better candidates by sharing resumes and easily post jobs to one or multiple sites. Companies can choose to pay to gain access to the resumes or earn free access by sharing resumes. So far, Arkind said, 96 percent of the customers share.

He has intentionally kept Jobscore low-key. Soon, he said, it will be making a bigger splash. When? “When it’s ready,” Arkind said.

Finally, there’s VisualCV, a site where jobseekers build an online presentation of their experience, background, skills, and more using text, multimedia, and even work samples. It’s an adjunct to the standard resume, not a replacement, at least not yet. Though COO Doug Meadows told us, “What we want to do everyday is wake up and replace the resume.”

We didn’t get to talk to our presenter co-founder Clint Heiden, but Meadows said the company has been “going gangbusters.” VisualCV has been the most visible of all our startups. Cheezhead, alone, has featured the company no less than four times since the Startup Forum in early April. It has a new CEO.  It’s also added new features, most recently a VisualCV Marketplace.

There are now 800 companies signed up with VisualCV, meaning they accepting the VisualCV and have their own posted on the site. Participation in the program is still free; the company is generating revenue from private labelling VisualCV to business groups, associations, alumni organizations and others. The China Business Network uses it to help its thousands of members better connect. Search firm Heidrick and Struggles uses it for its elite group of candidates. A few firms are also using the site to search for candidates, Meadows said, paying a findersfee when a VisualCV member is hired.

What will the next six months bring for these startups and for the four new companies presenting next week? That’s an even tougher question today than it was last Spring because of the economic conditions in the U.S. and around the world. We don’t know how they will adjust, but you can be sure that’s a question our latest crop of presenters will be asked.

• Talent management technology will be to the next five years what the ATS was to the last;
• Recruiters need to engage with line supervisors on a regular basis, and not just when a req comes through, because you will be measured on how well your hires do;
• For the same reason, recruiters need to play as big a role in the selection of HRMS tools as every other HR division;
• All HR professionals must become more proactive in identifying and implementing tools to help workers better engage with each other and the company and, for that matter, with their peers in the wide world.

The need for HR to take a more aggressive role was made so very clear in a conversation I had with a bank personnel officer on the last day of the conference.

We were chatting casually after Gerry Crispin’s presentation on “The Growing Power of Private Social Networks” when our talk turned to how her various branch managers network.

Her bank, one of the biggest in her small (by population) state, didn’t offer a formal social networking tool of the kind Crispin had been demonstrating. Nor did it have so much as a discussion list, which, back in the old days, we called a Listserv.

How do branch managers share ideas, get help with sticky problems, or offer guidance to each other? The phone still seemed to be the tool of choice; emails also fit it there somewhere. But the short answer seemed to be that it was up to them and their division to figure that out.

Despite all the evangelizing for proactive HR by the thought leaders who blog and write here on ERE.net and elsewhere, despite all the conference workshops that teach how to make a business case and how HR can earn a seat at the grownups table, there’s still the need to declare “You are expected to lead,” as Crispin exhorted during his presentation.

If there was any doubt, Prof. Peter Cappelli (pictured), director of the Center for Human Resources at The Wharton School, made a compelling case for HR professionals to take the lead in developing new approaches to talent management.

The predictability of demand is so uncertain in today’s world market that it is nearly impossible to estimate talent needs on anything approaching a long-term basis, Dr. Cappelli told the audience, surprisingly large for the final speaker of the 2 1/2 day conference. Instead of even trying, HR needs to take a different approach.

He offered a variety of suggestions, but the heart of it is that HR can lead by inventorying the skills and capabilities of existing staff, implementing development programs that have shorter payback periods — tuition assistance programs are a favorite because the employee shoulders some of the costs and they tend to attract only the most motivated and hardworking — recruiting strategically to develop talent pools that are internal, and using a mix of worker types.

If some of this sounds elementary, pat yourself on the back. But judging from the rapt attention Cappelli got, there are plenty of acolytes left for whom analyzing the economics of layoff versus the cost of future hiring is a mystery. Measuring the costs of the salaries and benefits is easy enough. That’s what HR does.  Calculating the lost opportunity from not having critical workers in place is far more challenging and not something many HR people would even attempt.

Talent management systems can help with that, which is why Cappelli’s closing keynote was entitled “What You Should Know About Talent Management Before Buying Software.” As you’ve probably figured out, his comments weren’t about features, but about what the expectations should be for talent management and the role HR can play in helping their company perform more efficiently.

Talent management, as he described it, is “Getting the right person in the right job at the right time.” If that sounds so much like recruiting, it is. Instead, though, of the outward focus most recruiters have, talent management looks inward at least as often as a recruiter looks out.

To make better use of their human capital, companies are looking at talent management and complete HR management systems. For the first time since the HR Tech conference has been asking the question, the straw poll showed a majority of those voting were not shopping for a new ATS system. What was the top priority to buy or implement?; 21 percent said it was an HRMS. That was followed by 18 percent who said a performance management system was their priority with 16 percent declaring a recruiting system to be theirs. Interestingly, for 10 percent a learning system was their priority.

While accurate forecasting of talent needs beyond the near-term may not be possible for any system, no matter how well designed, efficiently managing the human capital inventory is possible, and these systems can help do that. But in shopping for them, HR needs to take a leader’s role in pressing the business case for its involvement in managing the workforce.

Already, the more progressive companies measure recruiters on the quality of their hired candidates as well as on the traditional metrics of time and cost to hire. And every recruiter of worth should be looking at the sourcing metrics that tell them the most effective spends. Good talent management systems, those that integrate performance management, will expand the usage of the quality-of-hire yardstick. Thus recruiters have a selfish interest in the systems their companies acquire and in promoting the adoption of tools that will help the candidates that get hired perform as well as they can.

Which brings us back to the bank’s personnel officer. I don’t know her involvement in hiring branch managers, but helping them network more efficiently can improve their productivity and effectiveness. It’s worth investigating. And that’s just the kind of HR leader Gerry Crispin was talking about.

“Recruiting is not going away,” said Zach Thomas, senior analyst with Forrester Research. But it is shifting focus to retention and internal recruiting.

He joined other industry analysts at a panel at HR Tech Thursday to discuss “Today’s Technology Trends and Predictions.” None of the four went so far as to declare the war over, but each in their own way suggested that the mass exodus of Baby Boomers from the workplace may not be quite so mass as we’ve been hearing.

With 401(k)s tanking and housing prices dropping, boomers who had been counting on both for their retirement may well delay their departure. That likelihood prompted Naomi Lee Bloom, managing partner of Bloom & Wallace, to predict multi-generational workforces that will require companies to make accommodation for different work styles, habits, and especially individual interests.

Lisa Rowan, a program director at IDC, said recession or no recession, certain jobs and jobs in some industries, healthcare, and IT for instance, will continue to be difficult to fill. “In a downturn, there is always opportunity (for workers).”

Still on the subject of the economy, there will be an impact on companies, but just what it will be, no one could or would say. Instead, they counseled HR to prepare for the worst by identifying high performers a company would want to retain under any condition, focus on cost savings, and show business value.

What was curious about the financial discussion was that just before the panel got underway, a straw poll of the audience found 66 percent of the HR professionals said the economy had no effect on their buying plans, while 69 percent said it no impact on consulting and systems integration agreements or system upgrades.

In other areas, panelists said:

• Web 2.0 and social components are over-hyped (in the words of Jim Holincheck, a managing VP at Gartner);
• Buyers and vendors are moving toward suite solutions and away from component buying, though some vendors are achieving that by partnering;
• SaaS is here to stay, at least for the forseeable future, and that is true for complete systems and not just recruiting.

On The Show Floor

Seems there’s a little discrepancy over just how the financial climate affected attendance at HR Tech. Wednesday, show manager Fred Kurst estimated attendance at around 2,000, not including exhibitors. Now we hear that number may have been more of a guesstimate and that registrations fell off as rapidly as the Dow did a few weeks ago. Even so, vendors, who almost always grumble about the cost and the conference attendance, told us they were at least happy about the latter.

eQuest (profile; site) was rightly displaying its award as a top HR product for its eQuest Prophesy. The just released tool can now track source of hires with a high degree of accuracy by extracting hiring data from the ATS. eQuest, you may know, negotiates job posting contracts for its clients, distributes the listing, tracks the source of candidates, and makes recommendations for future buys based on the metrics it generates. Now, Prophesy can track those inbound applicants through to the hiring process and report back not only what job board produces the most applicants, but the most hires. It also can connect the dots back to individual recruiters.

Zapoint, making its first appearance at HR Tech, attracted a fair amount of notice and not just because of the Smart Car it had parked on the show floor. The new company is a talent platform that takes inputs from multiple sources to generate a picture of individual readiness for promotion or internal movement. It removes from the equation such things as a supervisor’s rating of a subordinate’s readiness, relying instead on objective criteria such as performance scores, experience, and resume. The starting point and key data is the resume, CEO Chris Twyman told us.

Coming from the opposite point of view is HRMC (profile; site) whose CEO and founder, Ron Selewach, said resumes are just so much marketing material. His Acclaim system analyzes and rates job applicants based on their responses by voice, Web, or a combination to competency and behavioral questions. It’s all done by computer, which can politely reject a job-seeker or rapidly elevate them to hot prospect category.

The JobApp Network does the same thing for hourly workers, except it goes a step further and can actually hire the candidate without recruiter or hiring manager intervention. It’s designed for high volume hiring, such as in fast food, where turnover is constant and the skills needed to do the job are fairly easy to quantify.

Pegged Software does something similar, but not so far as to make the hire without a human touch. It starts by measuring the attributes of your top performers, quantifies the results, then measures candidates against them. Applicants answer a series of screening questions, provide background about themselves, and get a Yes or No recommendation from the computer whether they should be interviewed. CEO Michael Rosenbaum told us it’s as simple as that and, what’s more, there’s a 91 percent certainty that the ‘Yes’ candidates will succeed.

No one was even close in the voting by some 800 or so recruiters, HR professionals, and others who cast electronic ballots at the end of three separate presentations by each company. The presentations addressed three typical corporate scenarios scripted by shootout organizer and HR Executive magazine writer Bill Kutik and Leighanne Levensaler, director of talent management research, at Bersin and Associates. It was the third win for Authoria in four years.

In each of the three rounds of voting, Authoria garnered over half the votes leaving Cornerstone OnDemand (profile; site), Salary.com (profile; site) and Softscape (profile; site) to divide the balance. The voting was even more lopsided, since none of the runners-up came in 2nd, 3rd, or 4th more than once (which under the unique rules of the shootout meant they all tied for 2nd place).

Although the anonymous voting doesn’t explain why the balloting went the way it did, audience chatter suggested the engaging presentation style of Authoria’s CEO Tod Loofbourrow had as much to do with the result as the features and the system’s ease of use and clarity of data.

The shootouts are a popular feature of HR Tech conferences. In the past, these competitions have featured ATS vendors and performance and learning. Today’s was the first to feature talent management systems.

Kutik said the process is rigorous, beginning months ago with calls to 18 talent management vendors. Thirteen agreed to participate in fashioning the terms of the challenge, with nine falling out along the way. The remaining four were given a scenario with three acts and 15 minutes total time to present their solution in a demo-like environment. The shootout rules require the company CEO to handle the presentation personally.

ACME Company was the fictitious multinational firm and the scenarios were built around succession issues, performance management, gap analysis, and personnel development. The scenarios were crafted to explore how well each vendor was able to identify high performers, assist them in their career track planning, offer development assistance to fill gaps in their competencies, and drill down into problem areas, while also solving a typical corporate succession-planning challenge.

Each of the participants played through the scenarios, demonstrating how their systems provided the critical information and assisted in addressing and filling talent gaps. Softscape demonstrated its multi-platform delivery system by showing how the system can be used via a PDA. Branded as Talent Phone, Softscape CEO Dave Watkins showed that the entire analysis can be done on a handheld.

Salary.com CEO Kent Plunkett quipped at the beginning of his presentation that his talent management system is “an overnight success five years in the making.” It was a reference, of course, to it being less well-known to the industry. On the other hand, Cornerstone OnDemand CEO Adam Miller observed that his company was one of the largest HR software providers by virtue of its user base and worldwide distribution.

“We’re not seeing cutbacks,” Christopher Faust, executive vice president / global strategy for Softscape, told us this morning. “But we are hearing (from prospects) ‘How can I leverage what I’ve got?’” Softscape customers have always been heavily invested in succession planning. Now, says Faust, they are also asking about performance management so they can better manage their existing workforce.

Same story at StepStone, the European talent management company that is making a push into the U.S. market. Interest in the performance management and succession modules is especially keen, we were told. Less so for the recruitment. “The companies want to inventory their assets and better plan in case there has to be layoffs,” a StepStone staffer said.

Even so, some of the smaller recruitment-focused vendors seemed to be doing well. At the Bond StarSearcher booth, business for the ATS software was steady. Interest in the smaller market product is as good as it was last year, said Tim Schram, director of marketing and sales. Actual hiring may be slowing, he speculated, “But that doesn’t stop the resumes. People still want to make good hires when they hire.”

Fred Kurst, trade show manager for HR Executive, which hosts the show, said his sense from conversations with the exhibitors is that there is greater interest in the tools that will help a company better manage its existing staff. And the economy appears not to have slowed down anyone, least of all the major exhibitors all of whom, he added, have signed up for the same amount of space at next year’s show.

By that measure, Taleo will again have the largest exhibit. The company has three huge areas, one of them dedicated to a performing troupe of aerial artists who climb fabric “ropes” that dangle from the ceiling. Not even the Workscape car giveaway garners more interest.

The car may be the biggest prize, but up and down every aisle are iPod drawings, baskets full of stress balls, pens by the crateful and a variety of the usual — and unusual — trade show tsotchkes. Among the latter was a booth where you could take your picture with either a cardboard John McCain or Barack Obama.

Yet even with all the activity on the trade show floor, the workshops still played to mostly full houses, though here, too, the recruiting track seemed to have the lightest attendance. The morning sessions focused on case studies of specific companies including Aetna, Hewlett-Packard, and Whirlpool. The afternoon sessions took a broader view, with sessions on workforce analytics and trends in HR outsourcing.

While conference keynoter Michael Beschloss, historian, author, and NBC News historian, spoke about leadership and the presidency to rousing applause, luncheon speaker Richard Pimentel talked about inspiring greatness by believing in people.

The subject of the 2007 motion picture, “Music Within,” and a national expert on employment and disabilities, Pimentel told his life story in vignettes from his time in an orphanage to his years growing up with his grandmother (the first of many to believe in him when he was diagnosed as “retarded”) to teachers who believed he could succeed to his success as a spokesman for people with disabilities. He left the applauding audience with the challenge to “believe in someone for a year… Not as a matter of evidence, but of faith.”

Thursday’s conference highlight is the first talent management Shootout. A regular conference feature, four companies — Authoria, Cornerstone OnDemand, Salary.com, and Softscape — will compete for to be declared the best of the talent management products.

Wednesday, the editors and staff of HR Executive, honored the previously announced winners of the magazine’s top HR and training products.

He has, however, been bullish on Taleo. Swanson — who like Randy Mehl is one of the few stock analysts really focused on HR companies — is now taking a job there, as VP of investor and analyst relations.

Taleo’s CFO Katy Murray says that in addition to the investor/analyst duties, Swanson will “work closely with the corporate development team in developing and executing on our market and strategic opportunities.”

Carolyn Bass and Market Street Partners have been working with Taleo on investor relations; they’ll be handing it over to Swanson.

In a press release announcing the filing of the suit in federal court, TempWorks claimed Avionte “pirated significant elements of TempWorks source code and database design and made use of proprietary TempWorks marketing materials.”

Avionte founder and CEO John Long dismissed the lawsuit as a publicity stunt by the company where he was once president. “We vehemently deny this. Not only didn’t we steal a single line of code, it’s physically impossible for us to have.”

He said the controversy between the two companies has been going on for months, but it wasn’t until Avionte sued TempWorks in state court late last month alleging interference with its customers that the federal suit was filed.

“We told them we’d submit both sets (of programming code) to a third party evaluator and stand by the results. We even said we’d pay for it,” but they never responded to us, Long told us.

TempWorks executives couldn’t be reached. But in the press release Founder and CEO Gregg Dourgarian said of the decision to sue, “It’s only fair to those who have invested in a career or a business relationship with TempWorks that we confront in a court of law those who might attempt to plagiarize years of our hard work.”

The press release pointedly noted that that the four founding partners of Avionte are all former TempWorks employees. 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.

A few other of the 17 Avionte employees are TempWorks expatriates, a situation which can’t help relations between the two Eagen, Minn. companies. Avionte, like TempWorks, is a staffing software vendor offering a front and back office solution that integrates with Outlook and back office financial programs. The company was founded in 2006.

The 60-employee TempWorks, founded in 1994, also offers payroll funding and processing for staffing firms and a disaster recovery service.

A spotcheck of several publicly traded HR vendors showed most of them were off by at least as much as the overall markets, all of which closed down. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 370 points, a 3.58 percent drop that was actually considerably improved from the 800 points the Dow was down at one point Monday. The NASDAQ was off 84 points for a 4.34 percent drop.

In the last 90 minutes of trading the New York Stock Exchange saw a sharp upturn that recouped some 400 points. The rising tide lifted most boats, including the shares of publicly traded HR recruitment, staffing, and tech stocks. Even so, among the companies we checked, only Monster (profile; site) was up on the day, closing at $14.81, up 6 percent. Dice Holdings (profile; site), like Monster a job board, was down 7 percent to close at $6.05 a share. Workstream (profile; site), which owns 6FigureJobs.com, closed at 7 cents a share, a 12.51 percent plunge for the troubled company.

Among the HR tech vendors, Taleo (profile; site) was down 9.77 percent to $16.07, while competitor Kenexa (profile; site) closed at $12.94 for a 5.75 percent drop.

Some of the staffing companies performed better, a relative term considering the size of the market drop. Manpower, for instance, was down $1 to close at $36.92, a drop of 2.64 percent. Kelly was off 3.38 percent, down 60 cents to $17.13 a share.

There may yet be more bad news. In after hours trading prices began declining again.

Version two of the popular Perpetual Sourcing web-based sourcing and CRM system was released last month. That might not ordinarily be news, but the enhancements and improvements are the result of a collaboration of Todd Davis, who developed the program, sourcing guru Shally Steckerl, and vendor Intelestream.

“This product is especially unique due to the level of industry expertise found at its core. As a senior recruiter with companies such as Microsoft, Google, Starbucks, and Yahoo, Todd Davis offered his knowledge to help us create his ‘dream solution.’ Shally Steckerl, founder of JobMachine consulting has also played an intricate role in collaborating on this project,” reports Intelestream’s Director of Marketing Stafford McKay. “It’s great to be right in line with the best practices taught by the experts.”

Davis has described Perpetual Sourcing as a pre-ATS applicant tracking system. An apt description for a system designed for the passive candidates found through LinkedIn, Spoke, Hoovers, Jigsaw, and ZoomInfo, all of which the system can automatically assess. It also can help source candidates via the search engines, managing your search strings for you. It also helps with OFCCP and EEOC compliance, by saving search histories, including locations searched, search strings used, and candidates sourced .

Because it is a CRM tool, it also manages contacts with the candidates. It synchronizes with Outlook and has direct email campaign capabilities.

Perpetual Staffing is based on SugarCRM, the commercial open source customer relationship management software that is in use worldwide by customers as varied as GoDaddy and North Carolina State University.

Davis developed Perpetual Sourcing in 2007 and offered it through PerpetualSourcing.com before transitioning the operations earlier this year to Chicago-based CRM consultant Intelestream.

The deal leaves intact Authoria’s management team including founder and CEO Tod Loofbourrow, who said that the acquisition “brings us an investor well matched to the size of the market opportunity before us.” Bedford will inject an additional $8 million in working capital to accelerate Authoria’s expansion.

The price is half the $128 million that Taleo (profile; site)  paid for Vurv (profile; site) just six months ago. Both companies had similar staffing levels, but Vurv’s 2007 revenues were around $40 million, while Hoover’s, the business reporting service, estimated Authoria saw about $17 million that year.

Vurv was probably also in better financial shape. Since being founded in 1997 Authoria raised some $100 million in venture capital, including $58 million raised by Hire.com, a company Authoria acquired in 2005. It evidently also had some debt, since Loofbourrow pointedly notes in the announcement that “Bedford Funding will provide us with a debt-free capital structure.”

Jason Corsello, writing in his blog, The Human Capitalist, called the deal a recapitalization observing that existing investors shareholders, which include senior management, as well as the VC firms, would probably only receive “only a fraction of the investment and value.”

Even so, he is encouraged about the company’s prospects for the long term saying it “creates a much cleaner structure for the company to really attack the market as the first vendor that can truly bring together talent acquisition/recruiting with the rest of the talent management suite.”

With the increasing awareness of CEOs and HR executives that quality of hire is part of the evaluation equation for recruiting programs, how those hires are performing is a metric no recruiter can afford to ignore.

“When recruiters can be measured on quality, some recruiters will simply be better than others at bringing in high impact, more productive, and longer tenured employees,” said Dave Lefkow, CEO of consultant talentspark and a veteran recruiter, in an article more than three years ago.

Comprehensive talent management systems do more, of course, than assess and track employee performance. Coupled with succession planning modules, they can make identifying promising internal talent a snap and in doing so encourage internal recruitment. The more sophisticated of these systems can also flag employees who are at risk of leaving, spot talent shortages and replacement gaps, suggest and track training, and lots more.

If your company doesn’t have a talent management system now, it could very soon. The market for these is growing strongly as if in inverse proportion to the U.S. economy. Authoria (profile; site) had a 93 percent growth in bookings for the first half of this year over last. Pleateau, whose recent release of its Plateau Talent Management 5.8 Service Pack 5 prompted this article, reported 2007 revenues that were 58 percent higher than the previous year. The 450 attendees at its user conference last week was the largest turnout in the company’s history.

During a demo of the new release Frank Leff, Plateau’s Pre-Sales Product Consultant, observed that companies can easily assign fields to individual employee profiles, identifying such things as source of hire, recruiter who had the req, and whatever else might be useful. He, and Dennis Gullotti, Director of Product Marketing, showed how easily a recruiter could find in-house talent before having to go outside the company.

But as we watched the demo unfold, we saw how easy it would be to identify the recruiters whose hires were making the biggest impact. Plateau’s competency comparison, intended to identify potential successors and assist with skills gap analysis, could also be used as a quality-of-hire metric.

Is that happening? Absolutely, Gullotti told us. People are “coming out of the talent management silo,” he said. As systems like Plateau’s are increasingly linked to other enterprise software, “We,” he said, meaning HR as a whole, “are connecting the recruiting silo to the performance silo to the other systems.”

That’s closing the feedback loop that will inevitably make quality of hire as important and common a metric to be weighed as time and cost to hire are now.

Workstream issued a press release today saying it had appealed the latest delisting order. That gives the company some breathing room while NASDAQ reviews the matter. Workstream could avoid delisting by filing its annual report, Form 10-K, as required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Workstream is required to file 90 days after the end of its fiscal year on May 31.

Why the report has not been filed was not explained in the press release and company CFO Jay Markell could not be reached.

Company officials reported in July that Workstream’s fourth quarter ended in the black, the first time that has happened in the company’s history as a publicly held corporation. It reported an EBITDA of $516,000 for the fourth quarter ended May 3 compared to an EBITDA of ($4.5 million) for the previous quarter and ($1.3 million) for the fourth quarter last year. Only sketchy numbers were released then, however, with the company explaining there was some sort of analysis underway of its accounting for goodwill.

Nevertheless, delisting is almost inevitable for the company. In November 2007 the company was notified that it would be delisted by the NASDAQ exchange because its stock price had fallen below the $1 a share minimum. The company got an automatic extension to Nov. 17th., but with the stock trading around 16 cents a share for the last few months, Workstream will be dropped by NASDAQ. That will make it difficult for its shareholders to sell their stock. When they do, generally through private transactions, fees will be higher than when the shares are traded through an exchange.

Earlier this year, Workstream was courted by payroll processor Empagio, which made a bid to acquire the company. Though unsolicted, Workstream and its board endorsed the merger, which would have created a new company with Workstream shareholders owning 25 percent. The deal eventually fell through.

Besides its software business, concentrated in on-demand compensation, performance and talent management in its TalentCenter 7.0 released last year, Workstream also owns 6FigureJobs.com and Allen and Associates, a candidate focused career management firm.

Swanson says Kenexa blames, among other things, the strengthening U.S. dollar for its lowered projections, but he says that “we believe Kenexa’s real issue is that it’s trying to do too much. We believe this is creating confusion with customers and field sales reps, negatively impacting customer support, stifling innovation, and in general, making it very difficult to execute consistently in a more difficult competitive environment.”

He adds: “BrassRing will continue to run as a standalone product. We believe this decision will diminish innovation, placing Kenexa further behind best-of-breed vendor Taleo, and ultimately result in a product portfolio that is increasingly expensive to service and support.”

Meanwhile, Swanson issued a positive report on StepStone, saying, “We believe StepStone is uniquely positioned within the emerging human capital management market. In many ways, the company, in our view, has done what Monster should have done several years ago — combine a low-cost customer acquisition tool in its job board properties with a suite of high-value human capital management applications. While cross-selling between the company’s two businesses has only just begun, we believe there is a significant potential opportunity to do so, especially selling high-value, recurring revenue human capital management applications that tend to be stickier.”

The company’s stock was off $5.89 as of 2 p.m. EDT, selling for $16.14 as buyers reacted to the company cutting its earnings estimate by 9 cents a share. Previously, Kenexa said it expected to earn $1.52 to $1.55 per share for the year. Wednesday, it told analysts and investors it would be in the range of $1.43 to $1.46.

“The macroeconomic environment continues to be challenging, and as a result we have seen an increased number of project implementations that have slowed or been delayed,” said Rudy Karsan, Kenexa’s CEO, in a prepared statement, released prior to a conference call with analysts that was held after the market closed Wednesday.

He also attributed part of the reduction to the changing exchange rate. “The strengthening of the U.S. dollar since the end of the second quarter has created an additional headwind considering the fact that international operations are the fastest growing segment of Kenexa’s overall business,” Karsan added. The company opened an office in India this year and has an office in London. It is headquartered in Wayne, Pennsylvania.

For the third quarter of the year, which ends Sept. 30, Kenexa expects revenue of $54 to $56 million, operating income of $10.3 to $10.6 million, and per share income of 35 to 36 cents. This is a reduction from the previous revenue estimate of $57 million to $59 million, operating income of $11.4 million to $11.8 million, and per share earnings of 38 to 39 cents.

Some thoughts in an email from Marcon on the world’s largest executive search company.

Average fee/search increased a very strong 15%.

Growth is clearly decelerating — from +26% in FQ2, +22% in FQ3, +16% in FQ4.

Futurestep also had a solid quarter, and continues to make good progress of improving its operating margin. Revenue increased 22% and operating margin expanded from 8.1% to 9.2%. (Futurestep is the RPO division; it’s about 14% of the company.)

North America and EMEA, two largest segments, were significantly better than expected, while Asia-Pac was disappointing. The only real negative was Asia-Pac.

South America performed well, but is small.

Korn/Ferry’s top executives also talked about the business, the economy in general, and more, during a conference call.