The RightThing, an RPO, acquired AIRS, a technology and training firm, in 2008. About the same time, CareerBuilder launched Personified, a recruitment consulting and outsourcing business. Two months ago, recruitment technology vendor Taleo acquired Worldwide Compensation, a comp management technology and services provider.

The oddest diversification, though, has to be TalentHook’s launch of a directory of, ahem, gentlemen’s clubs and their entertainers. The company that provides resume search software to hundreds of employers now lets you search for what less euphemistically are called strip clubs.

Gentlemen’sNightLife.com claims that it has “information on over 2,400 clubs and their performers.” I did not test that claim, at least not thoroughly, though I found that the performer list was limited to only a handful of cities right now, including Las Vegas, TalentHook’s headquarters.

I did find a number of fields you won’t find in TalentHook Sphere, a resume sourcing tool that searches out resumes from the public web and pay boards. On TalentHook Sphere you find fields for experience, salary, and education, among others. On GentlemensNightLife you search for breast size, butt, and body, among others.

It looks to be a membership site, since there is a signup page and a member login. So the searches I was able to do might be limited as a preview.

I emailed Phil Gonzalez, owner of both GentlemensNightLife and TalentHook, but he didn’t get back to me.

Purello’s departure marks the third change in the CEO office since Mullarkey left the job in 2006. His successor, Deepak Gupta, was gone less than a year later, succeeded by in February 2008 by Purello, who held general manager positions with Workstream subsidiary 6FigureJobs and the career networks business. Purello had been with the company since 2003.

The company has also gone through two CFOs and had a complete change in every C-level position. This morning’s announcement said Andrew Hinchliff was rejoining the company as senior vice president of North American sales. He previously held the job from 2001-2003.

Workstream hasn’t made a profit at least since it began reporting its numbers publicly in 1999. For the most recent quarter, it lost $360,000 on sales of $4.2 million. That compares to a $2.1 million loss on sales of $5.6 million for the same period in 2008.

(The company’s fiscal year runs from June 1 through May 31, so the most recent quarter is the company’s first for the 2010 fiscal year.)

In its last fiscal year, Workstream lost $4.9 million compared to the $52.6 million loss for the 2008 fiscal year. That loss included a $28 million hit for a writedown of goodwill.

An expected merger with human capital management and outsource payroll company Empagio fell apart in mid-June 2008.

The financial turmoil has taken a toll on Workstream’s stock price, which sank to an all-time low of  2 cents a share last December. Though it recovered and rose to a year high of 48 cents in May, today’s price is 28 cents a share, down a penny on the day.

The stock trades on the Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board, an exchange typically for very low-priced stocks,  following its delisting by NASDAQ in the spring for failing to meet exchange requirements.

Despite all that, Workstream’s products have won praise from HR analysts. TalentCenter 7.0, released in fall 2007, was called a “truly integrated” HR platform and “not just a bunch of disparate applications” by Leighanne Levensaler, principal analyst with Bersin & Associates.

Job board 6FigureJobs won a place on Peter Weddle’s User’s Choice popularity list this year. It was also named a top 100 job site by Weddle.

And its Workstream Compensation won HRarchitect’s “Beauty Pageant” in April for compensation management systems.

In assuming the CEO position, Mullarkey said in a prepared statement that, “It is my firm belief that this company, now 10 years of age, has significant opportunities for substantial growth. The Board of Directors has asked me to return as our leader in order to accelerate the timelines for this growth, and for a return to long-term profitability, which our shareholders so rightfully expect.”

Norwest Venture Partners, a $3 million participant in an earlier round of financing, put in $1.8 million. The balance of $2.8 million came from new investor Storm Ventures.

Originally based in Dallas and now in Silicon Valley, RiseSmart cleverly developed a technology approach to classic outplacement, focusing on providing job leads, resume editing, and networking suggestions. Its Job Search Concierge uses offshore researchers to scour online sources for job leads matching candidate interests. Instead of searching, candidates spend their time contacting companies and networking.

The Job Search Concierge is a consumer-focused service which individuals in the $100k salary category can subscribe to for $43.95 a month. The service has been likened to The Ladders, with the searching and filtering done by others rather than the job seeker.

As a human-mediated job search service, RiseSmart doesn’t have a lot of competition. JobSerf, coincidentally also founded in Texas, searches and also applies for jobs on behalf of candidates. It charges either $49 or $98 a week, depending on the number of hours candidates want.

RiseSmart, however, packages Job Search Concierge with phone consultation, resume writing, a bio/profile for posting to social and business networking sites, and some career coaching to provide a low cost outplacement service it calls Transition Concierge.

Unlike classic outplacement services that provide a mix of  counseling, coaching, and personal career consultation, RiseSmart’s focus is on getting the outplaced worker a new job as quickly as possible.

Since the start of the recession, its target market has been companies with layoffs and staff reductions. RiseSmart says its client list now includes some of the Fortune 500.

The company got its first seed money of $1.5 million after its launch in 2007 from a group of recruitment industry heavyweights including Craig Stamm, former CFO at CareerBuilder.com and Headhunter.net, Mark Hamdan, founder and CEO of HRsmart, and Louis Ramery, senior vice president of relationship marketing at Sears Holdings Corporation.

Its first A round in June 2008 brought it $3 million from Norwest Venture Partners (NVP).

NVP’s Venkat Mohan, who joined the RiseSmart board last year, said in a press release announcing the new round of investment, “RiseSmart has grown rapidly … The company has gone the extra mile to provide an excellent customer experience to both corporate clients and transitioning workers — and that has paid off in word of mouth and new business referrals.”

JIGSAW

The business intelligence and sourcing site has upgraded its community forum, giving it a cleaner look and implementing such to-be-expected features as tagging and contributor ratings. Tags are especially welcome, given that forum posts aren’t easily searched.

No one is going to mistake the new community platform as avant garde; think of it as functional, especially so if it adopts the name “The Corner,” which is beating out “Puzzleville” in the name voting.

The company also has an iPhone app that’s going into beta. Jigsaw is looking for iPhone users willing to provide feedback to the team in exchange for being the first to use the new app to “search, download and export contacts directly.”

CEO LONGEVITY

Challenger, Gray & Christmas say CEO turnover has slowed since the dark days of September 2008 when the outplacement firm recorded 140 CEO departures. Last month, the firm counted only 105 departures.

Since the beginning of the year, 939 CEOs have left their posts, a 17 percent decline from the 1,132 departures announced through September last year.

Health care CEOs have the biggest worries when it comes to job security; 151 have left their job so far this year, the most of any sector. Government/non-profits are next with 116 departures.

RISESMART

This Silicon Valley HR startup is rightfully boasting about the latest member of its board of advisers. Pat Pittard, the former chairman, president, and CEO of Heidrick & Struggles, signed on to RiseSmart’s board, saying, “I believe in what the company is doing, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

RiseSmart has been getting noticed for its imaginative blending of traditional outplacement services with 21st century technology. The company stripped outplacement of the group coaching, counseling, and consulting to focus on the job getting. Services are delivered online and by phone, keeping overhead to a minimum.

Considering the cost and the focus of the program, it’s not surprising that Pittard called RiseSmart’s business model “disruptive.” He said it is “transforming how corporate outplacement works – leveraging technology, along with a laser-like focus on results, to squeeze out the inefficiencies of traditional outplacement services.”

EnticeLabs, whose first product is an online advertising platform, got an infusion of $2 million from a group of investors lead by First Advantage. The company says the money “will be used to accelerate system development, accommodate higher-than-anticipated sales, and build out the infrastructure warranted by the rapidly expanding client base.”

It also gained the expertise of former Monster VP Neal Bruce, who joins its board of directors.

HireVue, which facilitates video interviewing, received a Series A round of funding led by Peterson Ventures joined by The Garber Fund of Penn State University, and others.

The company didn’t say how big the investment is, though it did say the money would be used to expand management, “strengthen market awareness, and make product enhancements.”

Via its Virtual Video Interviews, employers can automatically screen candidates by having them respond on camera over the Internet to prerecorded questions.  HireVue also offers two-way video conferencing for live interviews. Both types of interviews are recorded for later review.

With companies counting pennies, there has been an upswing in the use of Internet video for initial candidate interviews. HireVue says it has grown rapidly — 500 percent — in the last year, adding such Fortune 500 clients as Dish Network, CDW, and Murphy Oil. It also partnered with Taleo to make its video interviews accessible from within the company’s software.

HireVue, which competes in an increasingly crowded market for video interviewing,  was named HR Product of the Year for 2009 by Human Resource Executive magazine just two weeks ago.

EnticeLabs, in part financed by the people who founded web analytics company Omniture, introduced TalentSeekr more than a year ago to positive reviews. TalentSeekr leverages some of the same principles as Omniture, but for job postings. Besides creating a variety of ad types from a standard job req, the program places the ad, monitors its performance, and makes adjustments on the fly. Recruiters can manually manipulate the process if they want, but the strength of TalentSeekr is that it can improve ad performance all by itself. (A more in-depth description of how it works can be found here.)

The most recent $2 million investment follows an initial $1.3 million. It’s not an official A series, and with the company a bit beyond startup, EnticeLabs is calling it a strategic round. Besides money, the company is also getting the benefit of recruitment industry veteran Neal Bruce, who joins the board as the representative of First Advantage, where he is is senior vice president of product management for First Advantage’s Employer Services segment.

The well-regarded Bruce is a former vice president of the global innovation group at Monster.com, where he worked for 4 1/2 years. He previously was a recruiter for Ernst & Young, and later director of global staffing for PTC before joining Monster in August 2003. He joined First Advantage in May 2008.

Besides spending like it was 1999, Jobster changed, enhanced, modified, enlarged, annexed — choose your favorite adjective — business models often enough that the enterprise resembled Mrs. Winchester’s house. All of this playing out quite publicly via leaks, corporate PR, and the CEO’s own (defunct) blog.

In fairness to the now departed Jason Goldberg, he was a visionary. When Jobster launched in 2004 it tapped into the then-unnamed and not even  recognized phenom we now all know as social recruiting. To briefly, and only inadequately, explain it, Jobster was a corporate recruiter’s tool to tap the connections of the company’s employees; a digital employee referral program.

Over the next three-plus years Goldberg made well-timed investments, buying a job search engine called WorkZoo, a job tagging service called Jobby, and the blog Recruiting.com. Jobster would eventually relaunch as a career networking site, loosely tying in the referral program of its youth and bits and pieces of the acquisitions. Much of the best parts, however, languished, suggesting the visionary lacked a vision.

Now, just about two years after Goldberg announced he would leave the company, Jobster has been reborn as a recruiting services provider with the name Recruiting.com, which it adopted in the spring. Jobster.com lives on as a classic job board where you can pay to post.

The product now that is the hope of the investors who have poured some $55 million into Recruiting.com nee Jobster is a sourcing, searching, and organizational tool. It’s an ATS without the jobs; candidates only.

The key job of Recruiting.com is to quickly search your talent database (Talent Bank), which can be imported from multiple sources, including an ATS. A recruiter drives — there’s no job matching here. The process relies on keyword combinations or Boolean search to produce relevancy ranked lists of candidates. These prospects can be organized into folders named as the user desires.

Pull up a prospect and you can see from where they were sourced and see if there’s any contact history. You can add a note yourself.

Now what does this sound like? Say it with me, “ATS.” Or, if you prefer, “talent acquisition system.”

Jeff Dixon, the VP of product who handled the demo, was insistent that Recruiting.com is not an ATS. For one, he says, there are no jobs in the system. And without a req and the candidates associated with it, there is no tracking.

In that sense, he’s quite right. He’s also right that many of the systems on the market do a poor job of sourcing. Some of course, do a fine job. The bigger, beefier, and costlier ones can search internal and external candidate databases, social networks, and the web at large, creating lists of prospects and handle the contact management. Just this week a new tool from Jobvite was released that can do the same.

Dixon, though, says Recruiting.com’s market research revealed that even users of these systems find them intimidating. That’s my word, not his. What he actually said was, “What you hear (from recruiters) is ‘My ATS is a necessary evil’.”

Recruiters either can’t source from their ATS (very unlikely), find it too difficult (much more likely), don’t know how (?), or simply don’t. The latter is my choice for the most probable explanation for a datapoint from Dixon that one of Recruiting.com’s test companies discovered that 40 percent of its hires sourced externally were already in the ATS.

Think of the waste, even if the percentage was half that.

Considering that many companies have decimated their recruiter ranks, Recruiting.com may have just caught the tide of another trend, not as glamorous as social recruiting, but eminently more marketable in this economy: efficiency.

“Our tool is much more of a how-do-we-make-the-lives-of-recruiters-easier approach,” Dixon said.

My demo didn’t cover all the ground, but compared to some ATS search demos I’ve seen, Recruiting.com is simple to use. Once, that is, you have built the Talent Bank index. Some ATS databases are easier to port to Recruiting.com than others. Inbound resumes still go through your ATS or can be processed by a Recruiting.com connection, which I didn’t have time to see.

Capturing and parsing data from LinkedIn I did see and it was a snap. Dixon told me it was equally easy for resumes found elsewhere on the web. As a pure sourcing tool, it’s not as versatile as some of what’s coming on the market now, but it does the job.

Oddly, Recruiting.com shies away from the social networks. Certainly the unpredictability of formats and the content, as well as the accessibility issues are all, undoubtedly, part of the reason. But Recruiting.com CEO Jeff Seely’s belief that social networking is not  recruiting’s “secret sauce,” as he put it, is a factor.

“I just don’t get it,” he candidly said during a conversation earlier this week. “I’m a reluctant participant in Facebook. I’m not on Twitter.” He believes that the social networks will never be fertile ground for recruiters.

So in the year after he assumed the CEO job, he decided the company’s best bet was focusing on products to improve business performance. With Recruiting.com, that’s what he has done. It’s a bet that needs $55 million just to cover.

You can see Recruiting.com for yourself if you are heading to Chicago next week for HR Tech. The company will officially unveil the new product at the show.

Google is a sourcing tool, but while it may get the job done, how long will it take to sift through the results? Jobvite Source is more of a blend of the best attributes of ZoomInfo and Broadlook with access to the social networks as well as the entire Web.

Last week, during a demo, Chief Product Officer Jamie Glenn did a search for an online marketing manager and came up with the resumes of, maybe, a couple hundred possibles from all the Web’s free sources. A similar search on Google turns up results in the hundreds of thousands.

The difference is Jobvite Source can compare the results to the job req, sifting out the job listings and other stuff, leaving you with resumes that match the requirements. It does the same as a well-structured query to your ATS or a resume database.

Before you say “Yeah, so,” consider that what Jobvite Source does for the job req, it can do for the candidates. Once you’ve compiled the initial candidate list, applied whatever additional filters you want — Glenn limited the search to candidates in the San Francisco Bay Area — and are satisfied, you can toggle over to a view of the candidate and whatever background is available online about them. The compilations are not as extensive as the summaries on ZoomInfo, but they are detailed enough to let you decide whether to look more closely.

Once you’ve narrowed your candidate list, you can import them into your ATS or create a campaign right in Jobvite Source. Either way, you send them a Jobvite, inviting them to apply and letting them know you’re interested. Likewise, any employee can use Jobvite Source to send a personal invitation to friends and connections in their social networks that the technology has matched to the job description.

The candidate contact is the very essence of Jobvite. Says Dan Finnigan, Jobvite CEO, “The Jobvite is the way to engage the candidate.”

Earlier this year, Jobvite introduced an application allowing it to access the  LinkedIn and Facebook connections of a company’s willing employees. It searches out contacts who best fit the job requirements and suggests to whom a Jobvite ought to be sent. To use it, you had to take the whole Jobvite package. Jobvite Source is a standalone application that works with any ATS.

With so many companies moving toward integrated products, Finnigan explained that Jobvite choose to make Source available as a separate product in order to reach that part of the market that already has an ATS and doesn’t have the money or the inclination to switch.

Companies, Finnigan says, have been “obliterating their recruiting departments.” But they still need to fill jobs. He believes that recruiters are moving away from the for-fee resume databases to search for candidates elsewhere. “The world has changed to the open Web,” he says, mentioning all the networks and personal blogs and sites that have cropped up in the last five years. “What we think recruiters need is a way to integrate with all this stuff.”

Jobvite Source, with its automated searching and parsing and filtering, makes it possible for what remains of the recruiting staff — or an HR generalist, in the smaller shops — to source, rather than post and pray. It isn’t going to replace a sourcer like a Shally Steckerl, but there isn’t an employer who wouldn’t welcome a way to cut down on the average recruiter’s time spent looking for candidates.

With a starting price tag of $500 a seat, Jobvite Source can help the SMB market play on a leveler playing field with the bigger firms at a competitive price.

The Dublin, California-based company has been on a tear this year, tripling its stock price as it declared itself officially on a shopping spree. As if to prove it isn’t just blowing smoke, Taleo, Tuesday, spent $16 million buying its strategic partner Worldwide Compensation Inc., which sells global compensation planning solutions.

The deal was announced in Las Vegas at the annual TaleoWORLD user conference, where the company also unveiled Taleo 10, the newest iteration of its integrated talent management platform. Taleo unabashedly describes its new platform as “the fastest, most social, and mobile talent management system on the planet.”

It’s a major play for Taleo, giving it a product with which it can correctly claim it has an end-to-end solution.

The new Taleo 10 incorporates some of what was missing in earlier platforms, particularly a development module the company, appropriately enough, calls Taleo Development. It is planning oriented, including classic succession and personal development planning tools as well as what Taleo calls “social learning,” which is a form of internal networking.

It works with learning management systems, but Taleo, through a partnership it announced Wednesday at TaleoWORLD, is connecting Development to Learn.com. The integration will allow Taleo Development to link directly to Learn’s training courses.

Taleo 10 has one of the tightest Outlook integrations on the market, making it possible for recruiters and managers to access candidate information and even do performance reviews right from Outlook. Its still-to-come mobile uses, via Blackberrys and iPhones, will make it possible for candidates to browse jobs, apply, and even track their status.

All of that, and the other features and enhancements in Taleo 10 (Taleo says there 100-plus new ones in recruiting alone) alone would make it worth a look, but the Talent Grid piece shows the company has been paying attention to the market and figuring out how to leverage its already substantial presence.

Taking a cue from the talent network AllianceQ, Taleo has developed Talent Exchange where candidates and Taleo customers can share job openings and resumes, which the Grid calls Universal Profiles. The potential is up to 13 million candidates a quarter and as many as 500,000 jobs, should all 4,100 Taleo customers participate.

There’s also a knowledge base, built around a social network, and an iPhone-like applications store of ready-to-use products and services from Taleo, its partners, and customers. All of that handy and undoubtedly useful stuff, but the Talent Exchange may be the most valuable as companies begin hiring again.

Josh Bersin, in his overview of Taleo 10, calls its release “a very important announcement for the HR software industry.”

Buying Worldwide Compensation now enables Taleo to offer a performance management solution that directly integrates with compensation planning. The company has historically been strong in recruitment. Its roots, after all, are in talent procurement, having started life in Canada as a job board, before moving to the U.S. and introducing an ATS.

In the last several years Taleo has moved aggressively toward a complete lifecycle solution, and toward growing its market share. Acquiring Vurv in 2008 achieved both objectives. Vurv had a strong talent management platform and 1,700 customers.

Michael Gregoire

The expansion of pay-for-performance compensation was already well underway before the recession took hold, and if anything it has made companies look ever more carefully at how they dole out raises and bonuses. Having a comp management component can only strengthen Taleo’s position in that area, a goal that was clearly on the mind of company CEO Michael Gregoire when he discussed the acquisition with a Reuters reporter.

“In the performance management market we are relatively nascent and have less than 1 percent market. We would like to see ourselves (increasing the share) to mid to high single digits over the next couple of years,” Reuters quotes Gregoire as saying.

Worldwide can accurately be described as a leader in the compensation planning field. Gartner positioned Worldwide in its Performance Management Magic Quadrant, recognizing the firm’s “Best-in-Class Global Compensation Functionality, and Deep Global Compensation Expertise.”

Gregoire foreshadowed the acquisition — and probably others — in an interview with the Oakland Tribune in August. He told the paper Taleo might spend as much as $50 million to buy companies with the technology it wants. It has $62 million in cash to shop and could, the paper reported, go to the equity markets to raise more if it needed to.

It’s a long way from the dark days of last November when the company had nothing but bad news to report. It’s third quarter financials released at the beginning of the month showed an $8.2 million loss. That was followed in rapid succession by a notice that its financial filings would be delayed pending an audit of its income recognition practices. Over the next few weeks it was hit with class action lawsuits over its accounting practices and its financial disclosures.

On Nov. 4th, the day after the financials were released, the stock closed at $14.94. The loss, though sizable, was explained by costs associated with the Vurv acquisition. By Dec. 1 Taleo was trading at $5.69.

The company has since come current with its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and resolved its accounting problems with an $18 million adjustment. It’s still facing three shareholder class action suits. A hearing on the company’s motion to dismiss it is schedules for Nov. 13th. Another lawsuit over patents is being waged with Kenexa.

Financially, the Vurv acquisition continues to be a drain. Most of the $2 million Taleo lost in the first six months of the year is due to costs associated with Vurv. But the $100k profit it eeked out in the 2nd quarter is a hopeful sign that the worst may be behind.

Yahoo Finance says Wall Street analysts are expecting Taleo to earn 16 cents per share on $49 million in revenue for the current quarter, which ends Sept. 30.  Since the beginning of the year, Taleo’s stock has been upgraded by several of the firms that follow the company with the consensus leaning toward it being a “buy.”

Entice Labs

Earlier this year, John Sumser described the company as a “game changer.” In June, Susan Burns, president of Talent Synchronicity, said the company’s TalentSeekr product is “a sleek and effective approach to targeted employment brand positioning.”

Now, TechCrunch has said of the company, “it still beats hiring a headhunter.” OK, so that’s not as scintillating an endorsement as either Sumser’s or Burns’, but then TechCrunch is a site for geeks, not recruiters. But you gotta figure that a product that wows both techies and recruiters is worth taking a look at.

So let’s start with the elevator description: TalentSeekr is a recruitment advertising program that creates interactive ads out of standard job postings, targets them by the criteria you specify, places them on sites in its ad network, then monitors the results, adding exposures here, reducing them there and deleting ads entirely from sites that provide too few or too poor results.

The ads can be of all types, including video, Flash, banners, and text ads, for example. Formats and placements are tested and refined in real time. Recruiters can monitor the performance of individual ad types and placements and make changes. But the automated adjustments are the real selling point. As candidates click in and are qualified, TalentSeekr learns what performs best, and provides more of the same. The longer the campaign, the better the performance and the lower the cost of each applicant.

This heuristic capability sets TalentSeekr apart from mere monitoring systems that provide lots of information but don’t act on it. With the potential of having an ad appear on hundreds, thousands, and even more websites, being able to make changes on the fly can save money on PPC postings and improve the quality of the candidates overall.

The other, and equally important capability, is the potential for capturing passive job seekers. Ads can be placed on all sorts of sites and places. Adidas managed to snare a candidate who saw an ad when checking their  Gmail.

Targeting can be contextual, behavioral, geographic, or by social media type or all of these. There’s a video on the TechCrunch site that says Entice Labs can target as broadly as a nation or as narrowly as an individual building.

On her Talent Synchronicity Burns describes the process:

“EnticeLabs begins by collecting information from the recruiter about a job or a job category to develop a highly relevant positioning strategy. They’ll work with you to understand key markets (talent and geography) and create text, image, picture, video, or flash ads that will appeal to passive and active seekers.

Then, TalentSeekr automatically generates an engagement page that serves as a “storyboard” type concept to enhance the prospect’s experience with your company’s brand. Through the engagement page, TalentSeekr weaves together video, photos, referral capability, and links to your career site, job posting, community interface, or any other digital real estate to which you want to drive traffic that results in a valuable employment experience.”

In the interest of complete transparency I should point out that Burns and Sumser are members of the Entice Labs Expert Panel. But having seen some of what TalentSeekr can do, the descriptions are apt, if understated.

The heuristic nature of the system sets it apart from other advertising networks, most recently SnapTalent, which closed up shop in August.

TalentSeekr, as its VP of strategy and alliances, Joshua Westover, says, makes the most sense for continuous recruiting. Small companies with only the occasional need to advertise positions or those that care little for branding are not Entice Labs’ best prospects.

But, as Stephen Fogarty of adidas explains in a video Burns did with him and Westover, TalentSeekr can help fill even challenging positions, the kind that adidas used to turn over to headhunters. In her blog posting, Fogarty reports that in a test campaign to fill a difficult job, TalentSeekr produced several qualified candidates in two weeks.

Writes Burns, “The prospect adidas hired had seen the ad on their Gmail page and was so taken by the experience and highly relevant content they were blown away.”

• Amazon is live with a new talent acquisition system, courtesy of iCIMS.
• Cytiva, whose product is SonicRecruit, says its third quarter will be the best of the year, and says it is seeing a “definite loosening of budgets.”
• JobTarget has bought Career Liaison, a company that’ll help it keep better track of source of hire, such as whether applicants arriving via Craiglist are less likely to complete an online job application. Word has it another acquisition by JobTarget may be coming.
• McLeod Health saw an uptick in applicants, according to the folks at SilkRoad, after it added a video to its careers site touting the fact that it helps employees with financial education.

The company announced the Series B funding tonight. The round was led by ATA Ventures, whose co-founder and managing director, Hatch Graham, will join Jobvite’s board of directors. In December 2007 Jobvite received $7.2 million in Series A funding from a group led by CMEA Capital.

Jobvite says it grew its client count by 300 percent in the last year and now counts Accuweather, Mozilla, TiVo, Yelp, and Zappos among its customers.

One reason for Jobvite’s success is its versatility. Not only has the company built a nicely featured ATS, but it took care in the development to include the kind of networking capabilities that recruiters want. The recruiting platform allows for internal collaboration, encouraging employees to make referrals and, to the extent company culture and hiring managers allow, they can participate in the hiring process.

Making this a more active exercise is Jobvite’s behind-the-scenes job matching capability. Employees can choose to connect Jobvite to their Facebook friends,  LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers. Jobvite analyzes the profiles of those connections and suggests good matches with company openingx to the employee, who can choose to send a “jobvite” invitation to their friend, follower, or 1st degree connection.

Jobvite is an on-demand system with a yearly subscription fee priced for the SMB market and designed to be less demanding of recruiter time.

“This recession is fundamentally changing recruitment, pushing companies to become more cost-effective, innovative, and strategic. Companies are looking to the technology industry to make this possible,” says Dan Finnigan, president and CEO. “Our growth this year proves we’re serving a big need and delivering immediate ROI to our customers. With this new investment, the strong additions made to our team this year, and the on-going advancements in our technology, I’m looking forward to what Jobvite will do for our customers.”

After taking a whirlwind tour through some of the things OrcaEyes can do, I have no hesitancy in admitting that “I’m not smarter than those 4th graders.”

Of course the significance of those reports was lost on the kids. Hilbert just wanted to make sure the navigation was easy to use and the red-yellow-green alert system easy to understand. And they are.

But it’s those reports that make the $200k a 20,000-employee firm can spend on OrcaEyes seem like a bargain.

Before I get into how, here’s a bit about the what, as in just what is OrcaEyes? Hilbert describes it as HR System Management Software. You can think of it as ERP for HR. Either way, the system provides an overarching view of how human capital impacts the enterprise. It does this by connecting to a company’s existing business systems — hooking into finance, sales, operations, supply chain, or an ERP (if there is one), the HRIS, HRMS, and whatever others may be there.

OrcaEyes crunches the data it extracts from these systems and combines it — for certain uses, like recruiting and salary setting — with data Hilbert obtains from such external sources as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census, and private data providers. Thus, in an instant, literally, an HR recruiter and a division VP can tell the cost in lost business for staffing shortages in the North Sea unit of Exult Energy’s refining and petrochemical division.

I thought that was nice information to have, but no special feat since any CFO can do revenue averages per year-end headcount. But as every CFO and line manager knows, being down one position doesn’t translate into a direct or immediate loss of revenue. Depending on the size of the unit, other workers will pick up the load.

Here’s where the magic of OrcaEyes comes in. The system is too smart to simply say you’re in danger of losing $1 million in revenue just because that’s the average. Nope. It knows, because you’ve told it during the setup, that losing one worker for a short period will have a minimal impact. But as the number of vacancies increases and the vacancy time lengthens, the bigger the effect and more bars on the OrcaEyes report turn red.

This is also a modeling program, not just a “what is” program. So OrcaEyes knows that besides the current vacancy, the attrition rate is such that there’s a high probability of losing more employees in the unit soon. And retirements will add a few more. Now OrcaEyes can tell you what the impact of all those things occurring — or some of them — will be.

That’s but one example of what this data-based analytics program can do. Even though OrcaEyes has only just recently come out of the incubator, there are plenty of other examples of its value from the 10 Fortune list companies that have been testing it now for several months.

I asked Hilbert for a sampler and here’s what he sent:

• A global manufacturing company discovered that when overtime for operators, maintenance, and skill trade workers exceeds 12.5 hours for three weeks, accidents increase by 105 percent. When the company added staffing to reduce the OT, the savings from fewer accidents came to $370 million in just two quarters;
• A retail company discovered there is a correlation between store clerk overtime and theft and customer complaints. When OT begins to exceed an average of 11.8 hours for three consecutive  weeks, thefts increased by 41 percent and customer service complaints increased 52 percent. The retailer loses one customer for every 2.6 complaints.
• That a manager with poor ratings by their staff affects bottom line performance is not an “Aha” moment. But just how much? Hilbert tell us that a retailer found store sales revenue dropped by 1.2- 1.8 percent for each 10 points below a 75 percent manager approval rating.

OrcaEyes, says Hilbert, provides “just about every metric you can imagine.” And many you might not have thought of.  Another example: Our mythical oil company Exult Energy needs chemical engineers. Where in the U.S. are prospects the best for finding engineers who are most likely to come to work for Exult? Would you believe Bay City, Michigan?

OrcaEyes was born out of Hilbert’s years with the much lauded Valero Energy. He was Global Planning and Talent Lead for the fast-growing oil company, landing the job with almost no direct HR experience, but a broad business knowledge from having CEO’d tech firms. During his four years at Valero Hilbert won award after award for his programs, including five from ERE alone.

It was during those years he came to appreciate the integration of HR and business purpose and metrics. In the process, he turned Valero into a poster child for data-driven recruitment. Dr. John Sullivan, a recruiting thought leader, industry consultant, and proponent of scientific recruiting, wrote of Hilbert and Valero:

“its primary differentiator is that the company takes a business-like, almost scientific, approach to recruiting. Most recruiting departments treat recruiting as an art. Valero, in direct contrast, utilizes and directly borrows from other successful business systems like supply chain, IT, Six Sigma, and process reengineering to craft a function whose performance can be measured (and improved) down to the minutest degree.”

Some two years in the making and months in the testing, OrcaEyes is Hilbert’s effort to bring the same principles and discipline he used to transform Valero’s recruiting to the rest of the world.

Because of its price tag and the system’s hunger for business data, OrcaEyes is clearly not a tool every company can afford or can use. But if you get a chance to do an OrcaEyes demo, do it just for the chance to see what recruiting will be like in the future.

And to ask Hilbert how he came up with the name of the company. (Hint: He didn’t. A marketing acquaintance did. And it has something to do with the fact that orcas — killer whales, as they are often known — don’t ever completely sleep and have sonar vision, just like the program.  And it’s a name people don’t forget.)

Now, the details.

Elance

TechCrunch, the business blog about the tech industry, reports that outsourcer Elance had user information stolen via a security hole on its website.

Elance sent emails to its users alerting them to the hack and reassuring them that though name, email address, telephone number, city location, and Elance login data was stolen, no financial, Social Security numbers or credit card information was compromised.

Elance facilitates connections between information contractors and companies needing project help. Employers post jobs or RFPs and can also search the list of profiles to find a match. Professionals can bid on jobs. Elance collects a percentage for facilitating the match and handling the payments. Technical work predominates, but there are opportunities for marketers, contract sales, public relations and editorial and design workers.

Elance didn’t say how many records were stolen. The disclosure, though, comes at a time when TechCrunch has been in the news over its release of internal Twitter documents that it was sent by a hacker who gained access to an emplyee’s account.

Cytiva

With hacks making the news, it’s serendipitous that HR software provider Cytiva has come out with a white paper dealing with ATS security. (You may know the company better as the maker of SonicRecruit.)

The report understatedly admits that, “Despite all the benefits of SaaS applicant tracking systems, there have been a few bumps in the road with regard to data security.” It then goes on to mention three incidents, including the infamous Monster hack of August 2007.

“When it comes to HR data in general, since early 2006,” the report notes, “There typically have been four to six media accounts of HR data breaches per month, according to consulting firm HR Privacy Solutions.”

What’s particularly refreshing about this white paper is that it’s not a sales job for SonicRecruit. The paper actually offers helpful information for HR professionals concerned about the security of their system. (If you aren’t, you should be, especially if you use a SaaS-provisioned system.)

You may already be thinking about changing passwords and making sure the vendor has a tech staff that monitors the system for, among other things, suspicious activity. But would you think to ask your vendor about the physical security at the server site? Get the paper and you will.

Kenexa

First sued in June on allegations it didn’t disclose certain information it should have, Kenexa has now been sued by a second law firm sponsoring a second class action.

A legal piling on, the new suit by Barroway Topaz Kessler Meltzer & Check, LLP, repeats the same claims as the first: That in the summer and fall of 2007 Kenexa officials knew, but failed to report, that one of their bigger RPO customers wanted out of its contract; that sales cycles were lengthening, which meant revenue growth would be curtailed; that international sales were suffering; that financial controls needed improvement, and; because of that company executives had no reasonable basis for making the claims they did about Kenexa’s financial well-being.

The press release issued by the law firm doesn’t say how much is being sought by way of recovery. But based on the number of shareholders and the stock price differentials, it’s at least into the eight figures. (The stock price dropped by about a third on the day in 2007 when Kenexa released its quarterly financial report.)

Kenexa didn’t respond to a request for comment in June and hasn’t so far this time, either.

One coincidence that will at least make these cases “green” in the environmental sense: Kenexa and the two law firms are all in Pennsylvania, though, fittingly, Kenexa is at the western end and the lawyers are in the east.

If you’re at all similar to the thousands of other HR leaders that have gone through the process, you probably assembled an inter-departmental group from across the company and began creating lists of all the features anybody suggested.

Like other companies, that list probably didn’t include such vendor questions as:

• What is the turnaround time on resolving system problems?
• What is the turnover in your customer support staff?
• Can we request a change in our primary customer representative?
• When do we have to pay for system upgrades? Can we refuse an update and still receive support?

An article in the September issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership addresses the issue of post-sale service and support for HR technology systems. The article (available only by subscription) talks about the advice experts like Leighanne Levensaler of Bersin and Associates and HRchitect’s Rick Fletcher and Matt Lafata have for companies planning an investment in HR technology. (Incidentally, they all agree that mere lists of features is the WRONG way to go.)

They, and, surprisingly, the vendors I spoke with for the article, all agree that the most overlooked area in systems acquisition is customer service.

After the system is up and running, the most important feature becomes service and support. That the systems have user-defined fields and configurable screens matters hardly at all if you can’t get the vendor to help you batch post job listings to multiple sites.

That’s why Andrew Curtis, director of customer support at iCIMS, suggests that once you’ve got a short list of vendors, and are making a decision, the post-sale support and service “should carry a 100 percent weight.”

OK. So that might be overkill, but SilkRoad technology’s COO, Brian Platz, says, “How much weight would I give to post-sale issues? I would give it 50 percent of my criteria.”

Now that you’ve got some sense of just how important the post-sale service is, how do you go about checking out the vendor? The Journal article offers more detail, but here are some tips from the consultants and vendors.

Who to interview when checking references

• A regular system user in HR. For talent acquisition systems, this is probably a senior recruiter, or lead.
• The primary liaison between the user and the vendor. This may be the project lead or the “go to” person, but not necessarily.
• The user’s in-house tech support system. Large companies may have an HR tech specialist. Most others will not, but they may have one person who has more specialized knowledge of the system than other techs. In the smaller companies, there may not be an IT support person. In this case, find out who gets asked the “How do I do this” questions.

What to ask

• Does the vendor have a single support contact person for the user? How often does the contact change?
• Is the vendor proactive? Is the vendor interested in how you are using the system? Do you get advice and tips on improving efficiency? How regularly do you hear from the vendor, not counting sales calls?
• How often is training offered? How effective is it? What’s the method of training?
• Is there a portal where training materials are available, information is posted, updates are announced, and especially, is there a user forum or online discussion where users regularly exchange information? (Ask the vendor for access to it and see what users say.)
• How long does it take to get through to a live person when you have a support call? What is the quality of the response? What has been your experience when the problem is more complex than the first-level support person can handle?
• How long does it take to get a call back in an emergency situation?
• What do you like most about working with this vendor?
• Would you use this vendor again?

Tips

• For the demo, ask the sales team to bring a support person or client relations manager. Sales will bring along the best person they have. That’s the person you want to insist on as your own contact.
• Specify in the Service Level Agreement that you have the right to approve and change the support contact or client rep.
• Require that the lead implementation person remain onsite (if an on-premises installation) or otherwise be available for a period of time after going live with a new system.

Revenue for the quarter, which ended May 31, was $186.2 million. Last year, revenue for the same quarter was $233 million. For the year, Lawson brought in $757.3 million versus $851.9 million in 2008. Lawson, a multinational, said that revenues were negatively impacted by overseas currency fluctuations, but helped improve earnings per share (of 11 cents) by about a penny.

Adjustments for one time expenses and restructuring costs resulted in a fiscal 2009 profit of $58.7 million, or 35 cents per share, in line with analysts’ expectations.

The St. Paul, Minnesota, firm reported its fiscal 2009 financials after the market closed Thursday.

For the year, operating expenses were down $54.7 million over the previous year, not including a $20 million restructuring charge.

The company has made deep cuts in expenses. Last fall it cut 200 jobs and in May it announced an additional 150 layoffs to its 3,400 workers saving some $60-$70 million cumulatively in payroll annually. Most of the layoffs came in its European workforce.

In its financial report, Lawson did not provide full year estimates for the 2010 fiscal year that began June 1. It did estimate that its first quarter earnings would be in the range of 1 to 3 cents per share on revenue of $160 million to $165 million. The per share estimate after excluding one-time expenses is 5 cents. Analysts had been anticipating earnings in the range of 8 cents per share on revenue of $165.8 million.

Lawson’s stock was trading down 11 cents to $5.29 a share at midday, New York.

New LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask it a more objective question and the answers are specific and immediately helpful. For instance, Hunch made four recommendations for website builders when it was asked what website builder to use. Rerunning the query, but answering the decision-tree questions a bit differently, produced two different recommendations among the four it offered.

The results would be even more customized if I had taken the time to open an account and answer a string of questions about myself.

Now, if you’re not in the mood to bump about asking questions, but you still need answers, try Microsoft’s  Bing. This is indubitably a search engine, even if Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi told TechCrunch it is “more of a decision engine.” (Watch that phrase, it could become the “in” name for 2009.)

Setting Bing apart from other search sites, besides the spectacular home page photos, is the categorization that helps narrow down results. Searching for a Toyota Prius in the Web tab yields completely different results from Shopping. Not much of a big deal until you look off to the left navigation to discover that Bing is offering to skip right to “Reviews,” or “Recalls,” or “Dealers” or any one of five more topics.

I didn’t find candidate sourcing much different on Bing, though it was easier to cut through the duff. An especially handy feature are the expanded snippets for each of the search results that you can check with a simple mouseover. Between the search results and the abstracts it’s often not necessary to leave Bing to find something worth clicking into.

Others are discovering Bing, as the Comscore traffic numbers show. Microsoft, with its tired old search engine, had about 9 percent of the search market at the end of May. That jumped up two points when Bing was introduced in the first week of June and the number continued to rise last week by almost another point.

Google is no doubt watching Bing closely. The New York Post reported the company had gone so far as to assemble a task force under the personal direction of founder Sergey Brin to decode the search engine. However, the company doesn’t have much to fear. Comscore, in another press release today, said 65 percent of all searches conducted in May were done on Google.

About that Facebook question. Hunch said don’t do it. What do you say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a hitch. (You didn’t think it was going to be that easy, did you?) You can’t be wearing the logo of any vendor, unless it happens to be CompareHRIS. You have to consent to having your picture taken with Clay, and having it posted to his blog. And you have to be among the first to greet him.

You’ll probably also have to listen to a pitch about CompareHRIS. In the long run, that could be worth more to you than the $100. CompareHRIS makes its money from selling leads to HR technology vendors, but don’t let that deter you. The site has a wealth of information about systems, features, and the buying process. I wrote about it a few weeks ago. To be fair, it’s not the only site that lets you compare and select systems, but it is one of the better ones. And Scroggin is pushing hard to promote the site and a new sister site for Europe, HRcomparison.com.

So now, how do you find Scroggin? It won’t be easy, given the thousands of people expected at the conference. He’ll be the guy wearing a logo of CompareHRIS.com on his polo shirt.

I preferred his original idea, which was to wear an LED-laced shirt flashing the logo and whatever else he thought of. But at $5k to buy it, plus however much for training and support, Scroggin figured his money would go further doing something different. “No $5,000 t-shirt for me,” he confessed today from his office in Florida. He was a little more florid on his blog, “I’m so bummed.”

So am I. Ever since seeing this (below) little confection from Wales, which made the rounds of the canine herding lists a few months ago, I’ve been hoping to see the real thing. They’re available from a few places. Scroggin got his quote from Lumalive.

I now return you to the Social Recruiting Summit.

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

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

A Kenexa spokesperson could not be reached for comment.

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

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

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

No specific amount of damages is detailed in the complaint.

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