Yes dear reader, just in time for Valentine’s Day CareerBuilder tells us what you’ve been suspecting all along: your office mates are mating up. If the survey is to be believed — and why not?; they surveyed 7,780 people who all can’t be pranking us — then almost 4 in 10 workers have dated someone they met on the job.

Awkward, if one of them thinks it’s going places and the other one … you get the idea. Fortunately, 31 percent of those relationships lead to marriage. (Which is no guarantee things won’t get even more awkward a little down the road. But this is the season for love, so ignore our dose of ugly reality. Or read on to the part where we tell you how Challenger, Gray, & Christmas snuck in a warning about office violence.)

HR people out there, this stat’s for you: CareerBuilder says 18 percent of office dating is between boss and their report. Women were more likely to date up than men, 35 percent to 23 percent respectively.

Of the industries reported, you just had to know that hospitality by far (47 percent) has the most co-dating co-workers. Healthcare also made the top five list, which, considering how many parents hoped their offspring would marry a doctor, is no surprise. But financial services (40 percent)? And transportation and utilities (43 percent)? And IT (40 percent)? These also made the top five? Really?

Now moving on to that warning about workers pulling a Valentine’s Day Massacre  from Challenger, Gray & Christmas (hereinafter CG&C). “Some companies are facing an entirely different problem: their workers have lost that loving feeling and the consequences can be dire,” reads the press release we got from the global outplacement firm.

“Often in situations where managers are aware of a problem between two or more coworkers, they merely look the other way, letting the employees work it out amongst themselves.  This may work in some situations, but in others, this hands-off approach can have disastrous results,” says CGC CEO John Challenger.

The press release offers a whole bunch of ideas to increase civility and reduce animosity. Missing from the list, and very conspicuously considering Valentine’s Day started this whole thing, is the free supply of large amounts of chocolate.

A Vowel Please

From the “Can I buy a vowel?” department comes Goood Job, the latest in a long line of companies entering the employee-referral-social media business we’ve talked a lot about (and includes socialcruiter, socialreferral, and many others). In short, here’s how Goood Job works: Employees can opt-in to have their company’s job postings automatically show up on their Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages. Friends can express an interest, filling in short information about themselves on a landing page, and the employee can add a comment (like “Goood guy, worked with him for three years”).

The system tracks employees’ referrals through the hiring process. The employees build up points, like a loyalty program, however you want to set it up — x number of points for referring someone who sends in a resume, y number if it resulted in a hire, etc. — and earn dinners, movie tickets, trips to Paris, the spa, or perhaps even to a spa in Paris. HP and Microsoft in Israel are using the Tel Aviv company for referrals, and Goood Job says both are considering expanding their use globally. The sweetspot, though — or shall we say sweeet spot — are companies in the few-hundred to a few-thousand-employee range, who pay around $1,000-2,500 a month, depending on company size. One client has tripled its number of referrals since using the system. As we began an early-morning demo of the product, one company rep IM’d us to say “Goood Morning.” Cute.

Short Takes

BeKnown as you with a URL all your own. Just go claim your Beknown.com/your-name-here address. Yeah, yeah, we know there are a ton of places to get a vanity addy, but as our best friend’s mother used to say, “What can it hurt?”

Remember the SHRM Members for Transparency? That’s the group that’s taken issue with some of the goings-on at the top levels of the HR professional association. We were starting to unremember them ourselves until up pops an email from the group the other day saying they’re still trying to get a second meeting going with representatives of the big group’s board of directors. The first meeting took 102 days to schedule. The second took a little longer than that. It’s now scheduled for March 4. (Go here and read all about the last meeting.)

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.

One suggestion: You might want to keep a glossary of acronyms handy. Those of you who can correctly identify ANSI, ATS, SaaS, and SMB — you are excused from the glossary requirement.

Freshening Stale Resumes

When a resume is stale, but the skills and experience are just what the hiring manager ordered, what do you do? You call, you email. You don’t hear back. Or if you do, you find out they’re perfectly happy in the new job they started six months ago.

There goes your time-to-fill right down the drain.

Of course, the bright move (watch what we did there) is to keep up with your prospects. BrightMove, the talent acquisition and staffing software vendor, thinks so, too. So just this week the company added a “Social Bar” to its toolkit. With a click of the ‘sync” button, BrightMove will pull in your prospect’s updated info from Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites.

Now you know without waiting for that callback that your prospect has a new job and a better title than what you’ve got to offer.

Sure, this is something you can do on your own. And, you will, the first time you pull up a resume. Once you tag it, the process is automatic. BrightMove’s COO Mike Brandt says everything could have been automated — no human touch required — but then no system is smart enough to know which of the hundreds of Michael Brandts on LinkedIn is the one in question.

It won’t make sense to make the effort for every resume you get. But for your hot, if not immediately placeable prospects, tagging them when you get them and letting BrightMove update them for you, is, well, a bright move.

Jobaline

Matching, as anyone who has ever dated or recruited can attest, is an imprecise art. Yet that doesn’t stop anyone from insisting there’s enough science about it to improve the odds.

For hiring, I won’t argue against it, which is why when I checked out Jobaline last year I admitted not knowing quite what to think. Besides the usual requirements matching and ranking, Jobaline introduced a “seriousness” quotient. On the theory that the more interested and committed a candidate is to a particular job, the more time they will spend filling in all the info the employer demands.

Whether there was any validity to a seriousness ranking, even the founder wasn’t prepared to say.

A year later and Jobaline, as they say, has gone in a different direction. Today’s Jobaline is a sort of job board servicer, where employers post jobs for free, then get to review the basic info about applying candidates. When you see what you like, you pay.

Founder and CEO Miki Mullor calls it “pay-to-pick.”

The Interviewer Who Fell Asleep

There’s nothing like explaining to an interviewer just what it is you can do for the company to make a difference — only to discover they’re sound asleep. That’s a pretty clear hint of what your job prospects are like.

Alas that happened to poor Irwin, who was on his first interview after graduating college. Turns out the interviewer was a narcoleptic who, after snoring away for a few minutes, awoke and resumed where he left off.

I don’t know if Irwin got the job, but he did win $100 from OneWire for telling the most memorable interview story in the firm’s contest. OneWire, as we noted in last week’s Roundup, is a sourcing, tracking and, most significantly, matching system for the financial industry.

Quick Hits

Unrabble, the un-resume, SaaS ATS for the SMB market (we are partial to acronyms here at ERE), has just introduced a free version. It doesn’t do a lot, but it will give you a taste of a world without resumes.

Looking for a way to measure your branding efforts, or the performance of your career sites (besides just counting apps), or your social media significance? Here’s a list of 20 free tools. The list is intended for marketers, but then, isn’t that what we’re all becoming?

SHRM’s latest ANSI standard proposal is available for comment. The draft proposal is on workforce planning.

So let’s get on with it: Guess who says they want to grow their influence at the top corporate levels?

HR you say? Sorry, not the answer we were looking for. The answer comes from MarketingCharts, which says, ”An overwhelming majority (79%) of global CMOs say they want their influence in business strategy and development to grow.”

Here’s another factoid from the article, which is based on a survey from Forrester Research and Heidrick & Struggles: 89 percent of CMOs identified visioning and strategic thinking as a top competency. There now, don’t you feel better?

Here an ATS, There an ATS

Is there anyone left in the world who wants an ATS and doesn’t have one? There’s no reason for that these days, what with an ATS in every price range.

At the free end, there’s Zoho Recruiter, if all you need are the basics. For our money (actually no one’s money) there’s SmartRecruiters, which is a surprisingly full-featured, sophisticated ATS that’s priced at an even-more-suprising free.

At the other end of the scale, a company can spend upwards of a million on a enterprise, in-house talent acquisiton system that handles reqs, posts jobs, parses, sorts, manages, and stores hundreds of thousands, even millions of resumes you will never look at.

Despite this virtual cornucopia of systems, humanity’s indomitable drive to build a better mousetrap leads to the near monthly launch of just one more ATS. The latest to find its way into our inbox is Zartis. It’s a minimalist SaaS ATS out of Ireland that’s aimed at the SMB market. (Got all those initials?)

Zartis offers more than Zoho, and less than SmartRcruiters. That would be fine except for one thing: Zartis is mostly fee-based. What you get for free is a single open job allowance, which makes it more of a S than an M market tool. If you have more jobs and want more functionality — like posting jobs to aggregators — you have to pay.

Bottom line: Check out Zartis if you’re curious, then choose SmartRecruiters.

Since the ATS door is now open, OneWire got some strokes in an investment report from Feltl and Company, an investment banker and advisor. The report includes long excerpts from a discussion between analyst Scott Berg and OneWire President and COO Brin McCagg.

Berg obviously was impressed. “Overall,” he writes in his report, “We believe OneWire is creating an intriguing and unique approach to talent acquisition software and we are quite excited to track its progress in the coming years.”

We (our royal usage here refers to us — another use of the royal pronoun!), we wrote about OneWire in 2009,  not long after it was launched by founders McCagg and Skiddy von Stade. (Von Stade heads the financial executive search firm FS von Stade and Associates.)

OneWire was then, and still is, both intriguing and unique. It stands between the applicant and a corporate ATS, though an ATS isn’t a required component. It functions as a matching system, with the players completing profiles far more detailed than a mere resume.

It borrows from social sites, networking, and classic job sites to create a rich database of prospects that, as we (there’s that royal pronoun again) said in the 2009 article, if you want a Harvard grad who was on the crew team with international banking experience in pharmaceuticals, OneWire will find everyone who fits and rank them for you.

OneWire is being used by hundreds of financial firms and many Fortune 1000 companies. If you need another reason to take a look, consider that OneWire was named “One of America’s Most Promising Startups” by BusinessWeek. Here’s one more: OneWire has gotten $30 million from individual investors, a fundraising method intriguing and unique enough to warrant Mashable attention.

A quick look at some of the goings-on in recent days from the recruiting/human resources world:

• If you’re looking for a gift for the busy New York professional who has everything, you can now get them a “PA for a day.” The new temp firm, founded by a PR/events director for a New York ad agency, offers personal assistants for a day — actually for as little as two hours, at a rate of $20 an hour. The company says that “personal assistants cannot and will not assist with any tasks that are illegal, illicit, or questionable.” In addition, “PA For A Day currently does not offer babysitting/childcare services.” We’re not sure if they’re referring to the boss’s kids, or the boss himself.
• Hey LinkedIn, better sound general quarters. You’re under attack by a Norwegian startup. JobCruiter sent out an announcement about its launch with the in-your-face headline “JobCruiter.com Challenges LinkedIn.” The site, says the announcement, has “ambitions of being the best global career network.” Now, here’s the fightin’ words: “Many see today’s career networks just as boring overviews of their contacts where nothing is ‘happening.’“

• So many job boards launch in a week that we’re tempted to erect our own population clock. Atlanta, which has no shortage of job sites already, has one more as Twitter jobs broadcaster TweetMyJobs gets into the job board business. The city is partnered up with TMJ, which puts Mayor Kasim Reed right on the front page. The site itself does what all job boards do, provides a search box, a dashboard to manage searches and submit resumes, and a way for job seekers to see who of their Facebook friends works at a hiring company.

• Speaking of new sites, CareerBuilder took the occasion of a survey about relocation to announce its new CareerRelocate site. It’s a cool site with a graphical skills demand indicator, which told us that cowboy country is where there are jobs in the “other” industry category. But will the jobs move us? The survey says about a third of employers will. Forty-four percent of workers say they’re willing to go, but when they do 41 percent leave the family behind.

• Bad news on those relocation prospects for recruiters, though. Wanted says job ads for recruiters increased only 4 percent between December 2010 and December 2011. That’s about 50 percent better than what it was back in 2008 and 2009. But that CareerBuilder jobs demand map says most of the country doesn’t have much need for recruiters.

• Jobvite says it’s making it easier for veterans to find jobs. Jobvite customers can flag job opportunities specifically for veterans. Among other features of the application, jobs specifically of interest to veterans can be tagged, after which they automatically get added to the Veterans Job Bank.

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.

News first broke yesterday when Arbita’s CEO Don Ramer sent emails to customers notifying them of the decision to shut down the OnePost job distribution service. Broadbean, meanwhile, issued its own announcement saying it would take over the balance of uncompleted customer contracts.

“We are excited at the opportunity to work with Arbita’s client base and will, first and foremost, provide a high-quality, stable platform that meets their global posting needs,” Broadbean’s CEO and founder Kelly Robinson said in the company’s announcement.

John Sumser, who wrote about the situation on his HRexaminer site yesterday, quoted Ramer as telling customers that Arbita has been unable to solve the many technical problems with its job posting delivery system. “Accordingly,” Ramer says, “I have decided to close the Arbita posting platform and assist clients in migration to a more robust posting platform.”

Broadbean, a UK company with an office in Newport Beach, California, isn’t acquiring Arbita or any of its assets, according to the post. Robinson says, “The responsibility we take from Arbita is the tech and time they owe to their current clients.”

“Please know that while Arbita’s business has failed and their doors have closed, with their technical operations ceasing, Broadbean is here to assist clients by offering to fulfill the service obligation owed to OnePost clients.”

A company spokesperson said Broadbean did not pay Arbita for the right to service the customers. The number of customers was not disclosed.

In November, after a contentious parting with Shally Steckerl who was Arbita’s executive vice president and leader of its sourcing group, Ramer closed the unit and laid off three employees. At the time, Ramer said Arbita has been “financially stressed and challenged since Q1 2010.”

Steckerl — and other former Arbita employees — say the company delayed paychecks or, in some cases, failed to pay employees at all. Steckerl said he’s owed thousands in company expenses that were charged to his Arbita credit card, but for which he’s personally responsible.

With the closing of its job posting service and the layoff of the two employees who remained there, it’s not clear that anything remains of Arbita. However, in an email, Ramer said, “There has been no announcement of the company closing.”

Regarding the financial issues, Ramer said, “Measures have been taken and processes are in place to assure that all of Arbita’s obligations to employees are responsibly discharged.”

Recruitment MarComm Firm Sold

NAS Recruitment Communications has been bought from Interpublic Group by a private equity firm in partnership with senior management. The new owner, Stone-Goff Partners, called the acquisition an “excellent match” with its “strategy of investing in strong niche businesses with established track records and experienced management teams.”

Key members of the management team, including CEO James Miller, will stay with NAS. In the announcement of the deal, Miller said, “Interpublic has been a great owner and partner over the last decade; however, under this new structure, NAS will be more nimble and better able to adapt to a constantly evolving set of dynamics in our space.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Unrabble Your Candidate Search

Unrabble is the latest “no resume” candidate analysis and job posting service to hit the market. The startup from KMC Software is aimed at the SMB market. Busy hiring managers or recruiters just fill out an online job description form, edit the resulting job posting, and it gets posted to StartUpHire, Indeed, and SimplyHired. It can also be distributed to the leading social networks.

Candidates apply by filling in forms that, among other things, have them list and rank their skills. Unrabble ranks candidates based on how their skills and self-scoring stacks up against what the hiring manager specs out. The service even allows a hiring manager to research a specific company listed in a candidate’s work history. The site is heavy on visualization and graphic representation of work timelines and the like.

Coalition Says No More Addresses For .jobs Operator

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers began selling new domains this week to almost anyone who can pony up the $185,000. For that, you get the right to append a .pepsi or .toys or even a .smith to an Internet address.

While the whole idea has been mired in controversy, the coalition fighting over how the .jobs domain is being used says the one group that shouldn’t be allowed to get one of the new gTLDs is Employ Media or any of its principals. In a letter to ICANN, the .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition says the organization has been lax in its oversight of how the .jobs domain was used and mismanaged the contractual dispute.

“ICANN can still re-gain a measure of regulatory authority by publicly excluding Employ Media, as well as DirectEmployers Association, its alliance partner in this egregious breach, from participating in the new gTLD program,” says the Coalition in a letter.

You can find the history of the dispute here.

“The company,” says today’s announcement, “plans to significantly increase investments in marketing, product development, and additional acquisitions that will further accelerate the organization’s rapid growth and expansion plans.”

Founded in 1999 by its CEO Colin Day, iCIMS offers SaaS-based talent acquisition, onboarding, performance and talent management tools. The company has made the inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies for six consecutive years, finishing 2010 with revenue of $25.6 million (2011 rankings won’t be released until later this year).

The company has a strong presence in the SMB market, and says it added its 1,000th customer during 2011, though that’s a little fuzzy since the company has been claiming that milestone at least since 2008. Its client list includes Continental Airlines, FedEx, Liz Claiborne, Treasure Island Las Vegas, and eHarmony.

For years, even as equity funds began discovering HR tech, iCIMS eschewed outside investors. The press release announcing the Susquehanna investment makes the point that “iCIMS had been self-funded, highly profitable, and grown solely organically at 43% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) since 2003.”

The announcement doesn’t detail what led to the investment, and a company spokesperson hadn’t called back when this was posted. However, CEO Day did say in the press release, “We could have sustained our current rate of growth without an outside investment — but the timing was ideal to take iCIMS to the next level. This minority growth equity investment from SGE will help us dramatically accelerate our aggressive expansion plans. We look forward to offering deeper and broader services and support to our clients, and further penetrating the SMB marketplace with our high-value solutions and services.”

iCIMS said it expects to grow full-time staff by almost 25 percent this year. These employees will be spread throughout the United States and abroad and will be concentrated in marketing, sales, and technology.

The HR tech sector has been a hotbed of mergers and acquisition in the last few years. Taleo in particular has bought several companies in the HR sector to enhance and strengthen its product lineup. In the last few months, Taleo and Kenexa have seen their stock bid up, especially so since Oracle and SAP bought up vendors with strong SaaS products.

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.”

So this morning we discover that Talent Technology did the swooping and scooped up the site for job seeker portfolios. Financial details weren’t in the announcement, but Talent Technology made clear the site would continue. “The service will continue to operate as a standalone offering,” said Talent Technology.

Just in case you don’t recognize the corporate name, Talent Technology is the Canadian firm that sells the HireDesk ATS, and a sourcing system it calls Talementry. A new version of the latter was just released.

Even if you’re not a job seeker, and don’t plan on being one, VisualCV is worth a look. It’s a great place to showcase work for anyone building or managing their personal brand. It supplements your LinkedIn profile.

As Amybeth Hale wrote on our sister site, SourceCon, the site enables professionals “to easily build and manage an online career portfolio that comes alive with informational keyword pop-ups, video, pictures, and professional networking.”

All good for VisualCV, but what’s in it for Talent Technology? The announcement doesn’t really say. There’s only this: “As part of Talent Technology, users can also look forward to new innovations to help them create even more engaging online resumes faster and easier in the future.”

For users of the site, VisualCV says everything will stay as is, except that it will now be free. The premium service is being discontinued. Subscribers should already have gotten a refund.

We start with a job seeker good deed from the Challenger people:

Free Job Hunting Advice By Phone

For two days next week, job seekers will be able to get career advice directly from professional counselors at no charge. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. CST on December 27 and 28, counselors will accept calls from job seekers nationwide, answering questions and offering advice about the job hunting process.

The number is 312-422-5010. Job hunters can get more information about the call-in at firm’s website and blog.

This is the 26th year that the global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray  & Christmas will offer this free call-in service .

Salesforce Acquires Rypple

Rypple, the company that brought a social, collaborative networking approach to performance management, is being acquired by Salesforce.com. The CRM company announced last week that it was buying Toronto-based Rypple for an undisclosed amount.

When the deal closes next year, Rypple will be renamed Successforce and become the foundation of a new Salesforce HCM business unit.

Both companies are entirely cloud-based operations, addressing different parts of the HR landscape. Primarily a CRM service, though it has a significant presence in candidate and applicant tracking, Salesforce has been broadening its product lineup. In the last year it ha acquired a number of companies including Assistly for $50 million, Mobile Metrics (price undisclosed), and social media monitoring company Radian6 for $326 million.

However, the Rypple deal is the first pure-play HR buy. It signals an aggressive push by Salesforce into human capital management.

Said the press release announcing the Rypple acquisition, “The company plans to expand into other areas with a new social model that will revolutionize the way companies recruit talent, build teams, empower employees, and achieve results.”

Salesforce Losing Force?

That’s one way to put it, says an analysis this week from writer Drea Knufken. In her list of the 10 Most Controversial Stocks of 2012 she calls Salesforce “one of the most overvalued stocks on the market.”

Pointing to a P/E ratio of 400 and receivables growing 300 times faster than revenue, the one time Business Pundit blogger declares, “The question seems to be not if Salesforce.com’s stock will drop, but when it will happen — and how the company will handle it.”

Solving the Mystery Applicant

Much like the weather, the “candidate experience” has been talked about for years but fewer folks do anything about it. Companies often not only don’t tell folks why they didn’t get a job — but decline to tell final candidates that they didn’t get the job.

The topic is getting new attention. A recent webinar on the topic drew a large crowd. And, a new award was recently launched just for providing a good candidate experience, with two winners of that award set to talk about their hiring-process improvements in March in San Diego.

Now, a startup out of the UK is also making the candidate experience its niche. Mystery Applicant is launching quietly while it builds up some clients and gathers data.

Director Nick Price says the product is a lot like the consumer surveys you take after calling in with a question about your credit card, satellite TV, or cell phone plan. When a candidate applies for a job, they get an email asking them to answer some short questions about how the process went for them. They’ll get another after being hired or rejected.

Price says that he hasn’t done any big splash, and is quietly working with applicant tracking systems to tell them about the product. But, he says, he has gotten the interest of some large companies, and one of the world’s largest employers is already using the service. They can filter the responses to see if it’s working better in certain geographies, or among young people vs. old.

A Recruitment Campaign or Is That a Wanted Poster?

The Hamburg, Germany police department is more than a little embarrassed after it discovered that one of the four models it used in its 50,000 Euro recruitment marketing campaign is a suspected thief.

Seems that after the we-want-you posters went up all over the city, one of the four models posing in full police uniform was identified as a suspect in a petty robbery. The victim saw the poster and called the (real) police. The suspect denies the charges, but the posters he has in have been taken down.

What’s That Internship Pay?

Students looking for work on Internships.com will now be able to see what the job pays and what the range is should it turn into a full-time opportunity. Glassdoor’s salary data will now be a part of the listings on the site.

New Sourcing Suite Version Released

Talent Technology Corporation released a new version of its  Talemetry talent generation suite. In particular, the company says the release includes a “significant update to Talemetry Match which delivers a redesigned user interface designed to help novice and experienced recruiters search, rank, and contact candidates from virtually any internal job database, job board or social network.”

Sullivan’s name is on the firm, his wife is his partner, and there’s no doubt he’s the sensei. But over the years, Burnett came to be an alter ego, presenting at conferences, consulting with companies in the U.S. and globally, writing and co-authoring articles by the dozens, and, when Sullivan himself was unavailable, Burnett was the public face of the firm.

Now, after a decade with, Burnett is leaving for a global role as director of strategy for UK-based BraveNewTalent. 

“I have never before seen a company with as grand a vision as this,” Burnett said in a conversation Sunday.  “It’s what convinced me (to take the job).”

So enthusiastically did he speak of the company and its plans to “defragment the social landscape and the knowledge landscape and bring it together in a way that will be a complete solution,” that if his excitement could be harnessed it would power a city.

“I’m not really abandoning the work that I have done with John (Sullivan). BraveNewTalent is addressing the emerging issues we’ve identified; things we don’t have solutions for,” says Burnett.

BraveNewTalent was founded almost three years ago, getting its first injection of investor money only this year. Although it counts McAfee and IBM and Microsoft among its clients, the company has focused mostly on India and Europe. It’s coming to the U.S. soon, and seeing it through its debut will be among Burnett’s first order of business, when he joins the company January 3.

Enterprise adoption of BraveNewTalent’s platform will be  a challenge, says Burnett. “The world’s top and emerging talent is ready for a new model, as are truly progressive organizations, but garnering widespread adoption at the enterprise level will require a lot of work.”

At first glance, BNT appears similar to other business-oriented networks. But that’s deceiving, says Burnett, who explains that BNT is aiming to engage professionals for the long term, not just when they are looking for a job. The way companies use social networks now, he says, attracts job seekers who remain engaged only until they find work. “They are recruiting tools,” he says, and get “short-term engagement of active job seekers.”

BraveNewTalent aims for a different audience. “One of things that attracted me most about BraveNewTalent is that they made delivering value to the talent the primary goal, i.e. it’s a talent-centric solution,” Burnett says.

In the company’s grand vision, narrow-casted talent communities will be developed, where content will be targeted, useful, and current. These communities will have characteristics drawn from other sites; LinkedIn’s professional tone, for instance; Facebook’s strong social interaction; Quora’s crowd-sourced information, and so on.

In an email before our conversation, Burnett explained BNT this way: “It pairs skills communities with organization-supported talent communities, creating a diverse ecosystem where developing talent, organizations that leverage talent and individuals/organizations that impart knowledge and skills can robustly interact in a way that has become the new norm for those active on social media.

“While integrated talent management is a buzzword we hear a lot in this profession, very few solutions are truly integrated, instead they offer suites of silo’d tools.  The BraveNewTalent Community Platform that is currently under development (you’ll be able to see the first glimpses of it around Christmas) addresses employer branding, holistic labor sourcing (all labor types), development, performance management, and retention without any reference to traditional HR departmental boundaries, it’s truly exciting.”

Even after he begins his new job, Burnett says he anticipates continuing his active involvement in commenting on talent acquisition, offering his insights on emerging trends and developments, and continuing his relationship with John Sullivan. “We’ll discuss issues as we have,” said Burnett. “BraveNewTalent addresses the disconnects that John and I have observed, so, in that sense, it is an extension of our work.”

Halogen Courts SuccessFactors Clients

Halogen Software is making hay over the acquisition of SuccessFactors by SAP.

Suggesting that some SuccessFactors customers “may be disadvantaged” by the deal, Halogen is luring them with a special deal: Switch now and Halogen will  waive “any software fees for the remainder of the customer’s current term of their SuccessFactors contract.”

Happy Hiltonites

CareerBliss has named the happiest companies in America, with Hilton, Fluor, J&J, Nordstrom, Centex, and the Air Force among the leaders. CareerBliss examined about 100,000 employee reviews, evaluating work-life balance, one’s relationship with their boss and co-workers, their work environment, job resources, compensation, growth opportunities, company culture, company reputation, their daily tasks, and job control over the work that they do on a daily basis.

Taleo Is Not For Sale (For Now)

Taleo CEO Mike Gregoire told Dow Jones News that the company is going to stay independent for now, despite the “tire-kickers coming around all the time.”

He sees the SuccessFactors acquisition as creating opportunities for Taleo and other HR vendors with SaaS delivery systems. “You’ve got this brighter spotlight that this technology is okay for the enterprise,” Gregoire is quoted as saying, predicting it will reassure companies hesitant about the safety of cloud computing.

CVs Will Not Be Visible

“Unable to turn the site into a viable, self-supporting business,” VisualCV is closing up shop at the end of the month. Here’s an example of what one of these CV looked like; VisualCV says it will “destroy all user data” when the site ceases operations (unless, we suppose, a buyer swoops in).

Mass-calling Site to Launch

As you can see from the countdown on its home page, a site called “It’s a Job Calling” is launching in about 80 days, possibly first in the UK, soon after or simultaneously in the U.S., and then in the rest of Europe. You record a phone message about your job offer; the message is called out to candidates (the site has more than a million UK CVs) who can either press zero to talk to you now, or call back later. It’s a Job Calling can call about 100 people in less than an hour. Managing Director Chris Smith says “the business is based on and around granted patents in the UK and U.S. This patent relates to ‘tags’ which candidates can use instead of giving out/or putting their number online; this then creates a repeatable and parasitic revenue that will mean we can make money from wherever, whenever they ‘use a tag.’ A tag grants the user absolute control over who can reach them and when … they give out their tag rather than their number.”

Mobile Job Listings

Adicio has a new offering to make classified job listings more mobile-friendly. It’s aimed more at job boards than corporate recruiting departments.

Climber, Affinity Join

Climber — actually its parent company Mingle LLC — has acquired Affinity Circles. Climber, profitable since 2010, is a job site offering services both to employers and employees. You could call it a CRM for job seekers — used to manage your job applications, for example, or get sent a text message with directions to your job interview. Climber optimizes job seekers’ resumes/profiles to “actively market you to 70K+ recruiters through email, RSS, & Twitter.” Affinity Circles builds alumni networks and other networks for companies and associations. With the marriage, Climber, which says it already gets 60-70,000 new job seekers signed up monthly, gets access to millions of new job seekers. Mingle, the Climber parent, also owns Leadli, a site for managing social media recruiting and referrals.

Background Screening Baker’s Dozen

EmployeeScreenIQ has been named one of the top five providers of background screening services by HRO Today magazine. The company ranked fifth for its quality of service, breadth of service, and size of customers based on a survey of over 700 employers.

Free Or Fee, Job Seekers Decide

For $1.95 a week a new site that launched just a few days ago will email job alerts tailored to a seeker’s specifications. For free, Indeed and SimplyHired will do the same. Jobogram.com says it “aggregates listings from all the major online job boards, and sends them to your email.” Indeed and SimplyHired do the same, only they aggregate listings from tens of thousands of corporate sites and job boards. Plus they offer a variety of other services. So why use Jobogram? No idea.

5 Minute Lessons From Bersin

BersinBasics is a new series of 3-5 minutes video lessons on talent management for busy company leaders, HR professionals, and others.  The 100+ videos, selected research, tools, and case studies, are the latest offering from HR research and consulting firm, Bersin & Associates. Available only to clients, the modules can be used on a one-off basis as the need arises.

SuccessFactors says it will combine its “social, mobile, and collaborative recruiting management solution with Jobs2web’s leading recruiting marketing platform, creating an end-to-end recruiting system.”

Saturday’s SAP SuccessFactors acquisition touched off a rally Monday among the publicly traded HR tech vendors, as well as speculation about further consolidation in the industry. However, no mention was made of Jobs2Web.

Based just outside Minneapolis, Jobs2Web specializes in enhancing employer job postings to boost their findability by job seekers. The company optimizes job listings to improve their position on search results pages by, among other things, building micro-sites for each listing. Listings are also redistributed to multiple job boards, aggregation sites, and other places, with codes inserted for each listing so recruiters can identify the most effective marketing channels.

Jobs2Web has grown quickly since its founding in 2003. It has been named to the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies for the last three years. It ranked 419 on the 2011 list, reporting 2010 revenue of $9.9 million and a three-year growth of 824 percent.

When the deal closes, which is expected to occur before the end of the month, SuccessFactors said customers will have the option of buying Jobs2Web services as they have, or buying an integrated solution with SuccessFactors Recruiting Management. The integrated solution is being branded as a Recruiting Execution Platform. Pricing for the products will remain the same, SuccessFactors said.

In an interview this morning, Doug Berg, founder of Jobs2Web, and Susan Van Klink, VP product sales and strategy with SuccessFactors, said the integrated product will leverage the data collected by the recruitment management platform to refine the job marketing piece to more perfectly target high performers.

SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors may have been all about the cloud. But the Jobs2Web acquisition seems more centered on improving candidate attraction. Berg said that with the SuccessFactors data, Jobs2Web will “have the ability to identify what the highest-performing candidate looks like.” That will allow Jobs2Web to refine the positioning and even the language of listings to attract those high-performing candidates.

Besides pushing out ads and optimizing them, Jobs2Web also simplifies building talent communities, which, Berg added, will also benefit from the SuccessFactors data by providing better job matches. He wouldn’t go into detail, but Berg said Jobs2Web has a LinkedIn toolset coming that will automate much of the candidate identification and targeting.

That customers will be able to continue using Jobs2Web without having to move onto the SuccessFactors platform isn’t unheard of, though it is relatively rare. Typically, in an acquisition, the acquiring company will integrate the new product line and compel customers to switch.

Van Klink said “forcing (customers to switch) is not in the SuccessFactors’ DNA.” So Jobs2Web will continue to support customers regardless of what ATS they use.

Down the road, if SAP can make the SuccessFactors integration work, its experience with big data gathered via its enterprise solutions may well make targeting of candidates so effective that messaging can be sent to just high-potentials and a high percentage of them can be expected to respond. It’s an interesting, if elusive, goal that’s been pursued by many companies, including Yahoo when it owned HotJobs.

In an FAQ-style discussion on the SuccessFactors site, the company said that most of the Jobs2Web team will make the transition, with the company  operating as a separate unit. When the SAP deal closes, SuccessFactors will become an independent unit of the German firm.

There was no mention of the Jobs2Web acquisition Saturday when SAP and SuccessFactors held a conference call to discuss that $3.4 billion purchase. According to Bloomberg, that was because the deal wasn’t completed then. Berg said he was unaware of those acquisition discussions, but fully embraced the deal.

Taleo and Kenexa were both up by double-digits. Salesforce, trading well over $100, was up 4.5 percent. SuccessFactors, as to be expected, was the big winner, catapulting nearly 52 percent to close just below the $40-a-share SAP will pay.

The rally was to be expected, given the speculation about who might next be an acquisition target in the talent management/HR software sector. It was mere minutes after the conference call SAP held Saturday morning to discuss the sale that analysts began speculating about which company would be next to get bought up by whom.

Except for a bizarre TechCrunch post characterizing the deal as a yawner, the rest of the business press, and especially the HR analysts, saw the deal as both a validation of the cloud computing model and the likely start of an M&A war among the biggest names in business software.

Over at ZDNet, Michael Krigsman, CEO of tech consultancy Asuret, Inc., said the deal is a declaration that “CLOUD HAS ARRIVED.” (Caps are his).

MarketWatch today quoted JMP Securities analyst Patrick Walraven telling investors: “We expect this M&A trend to continue as it reflects the competitive pressure traditional software vendors are feeling from software-as-a-service companies and the margin pressures software-as-a-service companies face as they attempt to rapidly scale their distribution.”

The MarketWatch report cited an investment note from Citigroup analyst Walter Pritchard saying: “There is potential for Taleo to benefit here. Long term, we expect that Taleo will face a more competitive landscape and thus we’d expect will ultimately end up as part of a larger company. Oracle looks like the most likely candidate here.”

Several weeks ago Oracle, which, like competitor SAP, is heavily invested in the on-premises enterprise market, announced a deal to buy RightNow Technologies. The company is an SaaS provider of CRM and customer service solutions.

Thomas Kurian, EVP with Oracle Development, said of the acquisition, “Oracle is moving aggressively to offer customers a full range of Cloud Solutions including sales force automation, human resources, talent management, social networking, databases and Java as part of the Oracle Public Cloud.”

What does this mean for HR leaders?

First, as Krigsman says, the SAP acquisition of SuccessFactors is a validation of the cloud computing model. While there are different varieties of SaaS, all are cloud and all have the virtue from a financial standpoint of being less expensive to buy and manage. SuccessFactors has made a strong case for SaaS, building its business entirely in the cloud when that was considered a limiting business model. When Siemens AG embraced SuccessFactors in 2009 for talent and performance management, the company’s pioneering strategy was vindicated.

However, as Josh Bersin observes in his analysis of the deal, “The HR software market is highly fragmented, and for this acquisition to pay off over time the companies must build a strong integration roadmap.” While he is not at all certain that the integration will be either swift or easy, he points out that the trend for the ERP providers is talent management integration.

“If SuccessFactors gets bogged down with lots of integration, will they be able to keep pace with the billions of dollars of investment going into the ‘next generation’ of talent management?” he writes. “History says no, but time will tell.”

Analyst Ray Wang and Forrester’s Paul Hamerman both make similar observations about on-premises HRMS and cloud human capital management service. The former are the transactional systems that aren’t so nimble or innovative, thus enterprises with these systems tend to run best-of-breed HCMs in tandem, rather than use those solutions from their on-premises vendor.

As Wang writes, “While the core offerings provided a solid approach, these applications remained in the systems of transaction world and lacked many of the newer requirements for systems of engagement.”

Hamerman makes the same observation, writing, “The co-existence of best-of-breed talent management solutions (typically SaaS) alongside core HRMS (typically on-premises) is quite common.”

In other words, expect to see more consolidation as the largest vendors look to acquire the cloud expertise and market presence of HCM vendors with a hearty SaaS business.

Bersin says it directly:

This move is likely to set up a chain reaction. Oracle could decide to acquire Taleo. ADP could decide to acquire Cornerstone. Mercer could acquire Peoplefluent. IBM could decide to acquire another series of vendors. While I think this acquisition still has many questions to answer, large vendors will now see this as “the beginning of the end” of the era of independent talent management vendors — setting off a chain reaction of other acquisitions. I believe this market is still very young and has a long way to go — but the bigger vendors may just feel it’s ready for consolidation.

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?”

Don Ramer, CEO and founder of Arbita, said three employees were laid off Friday. One or two independent sourcers will close out the remaining projects, but by the end of the year Arbita will be out of the sourcing business.

The future of the OnePost job distribution service, is also “in flux,” Ramer said. The service distributes employer job postings to multiple job boards, tracking responses to provide source analytics. What exactly is to become of OnePost isn’t clear, though Ramer said he might “spin off” the posting business. However, he was adamant that its future will not include him in any kind of leadership role.

Ramer says the company has been “financially stressed and challenged since Q1 2010.” Responding to reports of delayed paychecks, missed reimbursements, and deferred payments to vendors, Ramer said, “Like many small businesses we have had to be open about cash flow with our employees and flexible in timing disbursements. During the last three years we have paid or earned out the bulk of the company’s debt to our job board partners.”

With the sourcing business closed and the future of the  job posting service uncertain, Ramer said he will be sorting through the options for the company and its seven remaining employees.

He said he is looking toward some form of “high-level consultancy” in which Arbita would work with senior-level corporate executives in a strategic talent acquisition and management role.

“We see opportunities at a more senior level,” Ramer said during a phone conversation Monday. The next several weeks will be spent “researching what to do next,” he said, “for the company and the brand in a calmer time.”

The last two weeks have been anything but calm. The sourcing community in particular has been buzzing about Steckerl’s decision to leave Arbita. Several messages about the company’s financial issues have been making the rounds by email and on Twitter.

Ramer referred to the “angry mob mentality I’ve been seeing on social media,” denying the company is folding and refuting suggestions he would “cynically go on vacation and decide to terminate a bunch of people.” Ramer spent part of this month in New Zealand. During the conversation he characterized himself as being “on the defense.” He also had some cryptic tweets over the weekend.

Steckerl himself has said little publicly about his decision to leave Arbita, where he had been executive vice president and head of the sourcing and training group. Steckerl merged his Job Machine training and sourcing consultancy with Arbita in May 2008.

A year later, Ramer credited the merger with helping Arbita grow by more than 600 percent. Many of the new customers were users of OnePost. However, Ramer said the new training unit — Arbita Consulting and Education Services — headed by Glenn Gutmacher was a strong contributor to the company’s growth.

“The JobMachine acquisition connected us with tens of thousands of recruiting professionals who have purchased workshops, consulting, professional development, or other products developed by Shally Steckerl and Glenn Gutmacher,” Ramer told HRrchitect. Gutmacher left Arbita at the beginning of this year.

However, during our phone conversation Ramer said the sourcing unit hasn’t been profitable for some time and that he has been considering its closure for months.

Steckerl refuted that claim, asserting sourcing and training were a significant source of the company’s revenue. Beyond that, however, Steckerl declined to comment publicly.

Since leaving Arbita two weeks ago, Steckerl has removed mention of the company from his LinkedIn profile. His Twitter account has been made private; you need permission to view his tweets. Steckerl said financial issues fueled his decision to resume his career as an independent cyber-sleuth and sourcing trainer. “I have to pay my bills and provide food for my children,” he said.

First up, is the story of Staffingbook and one man’s quest to alter the course of recruiting:

Steve Harari has ambitious hopes for the recruiting industry. Not content to simply help recruiters place candidates and employers find talent, Harari wants to convince recruiters to mentor their talent over the long term.

“I don’t think it’s too far-fetched that a recruiter might be mentoring a candidate,” says Harari, who has launched his culture-changing effort at Staffingbook.

Were he talking about boutique search firms working at the highest levels, it wouldn’t be far-fetched at all.  Even less-lofty placements involve some amount of coaching and mentoring to at least prepare a candidate for an interview.

But Harari’s quarry is the independent recruiter who lives for their next placement. His plan is to convince these recruiters to nurture their candidates for 5, 10, even 20 years.

It’s “a significant behavioral departure for recruiters,” Harari admits. His trump card is that a long-term relationship can lead to multiple fees. “Over 10 to 20 years I might place the candidate four or five times.”

Staffingbook, branded as “The Marketplace for Passive Talent,” is the platform to make it happen. Recruiters post their candidates here. Employers peruse the inventory to find those they want, then, facilitated by the Staffingbook platform,  notify the recruiter who decide whether to present the candidate.

If it sounds a little like some mashup of BountyJobs, TopEchelon, and LinkedIn, you would be sort of right. Except at Staffingbook, everybody pays a fee and splits aren’t in the picture.

Setting it all apart is that mentoring issue. Staffingbook will encourage its recruiters to stay in touch with their candidates and have a conversation at least quarterly.

Kenexa Buys Restaurant Talent Consultancy

Kenexa acquired Batrus Hollweg, a hospitality industry talent management consultancy and tech vendor. The announcement was made this week. Kenexa said the addition of Batrus Hollweg will enhance its existing research and content portfolio.

Headquartered in Plano, Texas, BHI is especially strong in the restaurant industry, where it focuses on helping companies select and develop hourly and management workers. It also offers an ATS branded as Click and Hire.

“BHI’s wealth of research and content regarding talent best practice, as well as their assessment solutions, are recognized as some of the top-notch content and solutions in our industry today,” said Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan. “The combination of Kenexa and BHI will provide the most researched and proven talent solutions content, particularly in the hospitality industry.”

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Earlier this month, Kenexa reported an especially strong 3rd quarter. Its 23 cents per share earnings on $77.2 million in revenue, handily beat Wall Street’s consensus estimate of 20 cents a share. The company predicted its 4th quarter would be equally strong, with revenue in the range of $76 million to $78 million and per share earnings of 25 to 26 cents per share.

CareerFruits Job Site

Proving that every variation of the word “career” has not yet been used in the job-site field, in January 2012 we will have CareerFruits. While the site is being built, a blog and LinkedIn post briefly describe what the company is up to: candidates will “search a job or shortlist many jobs and apply to all of them using LinkedIn/Visualize.me/Video Profiles. You can even add comments to a job and vote if you like a job. You can even ask questions and refer friends in single click to earn reputation and rewards.” Recruiters “can post jobs for free and track responses online, rate/comment on a candidate profile so that others can get benefitted with your feedback, and set up your own team and share profiles that you feel your teammates can utilize.”

The managing partner, from Singapore, tells us that “the seamless tracking of candidate responses and automated workflow to schedule and track overall interview loops are one of the most sought-after features we are working on.” The site is mainly funded through family and friends; a few investment proposals last month were rejected.

Tech/marketing Jobs Site 

Out of the UK comes JobPage, in beta, for technology jobs and marketing jobs. The JobPage team also was behind Page/Do, an award-winning site for making landing pages. JobPage is a sort of a one-stop-shop for posting a job. You use the site to post a job; broadcast it to various job boards like Indeed and share it through your social media sites; get analytics on who’s viewed the job; and manage the whole process, such as make a note that you need to do reference checks. This pricing chart (in British money) gives you a sense of what you can do with JobPage.

Jobs Sent by Text 

And out of Idaho we have InstantJobFair.com launching this week. You pay $100 to send jobs to a category of people who’ve signed up to receive text messages; for example, southern California salon-health/fitness-beauty job candidates. Job seekers who get your text message are directed to a basic web page with info on where to email their resume.

• 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.”