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On the Floor at SHRM Las Vegas: New Products, Profiles, and Other Stuff
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In case you missed it, here’s what I learned on Tuesday cruising the Exhibit Hall at SHRM’s Annual Conference here in Las Vegas.
Beyond.com is upbeat. The founder and CEO Rich Milgram says that though it expects some normal summer slowness, it says it has grown revenue faster than Monster in the last year, has benefited from the Monster acquisition of HotJobs (which helped result in a Beyond.com partnership with The Network in Europe) and the lower profile of Jobing (“we don’t hear about them at all anymore,” he says).
Beyond.com’s site allows people to create profiles, but Milgram sees those profiles as not personal like Facebook, not business like LinkedIn, but simply about careers. He uses Facebook to drive traffic to his sites, but “I don’t want to bet my whole company on Facebook,” he says, meaning Beyond.com won’t go the way of BeKnown and BranchOut.
Multiple companies are launching new products for small and medium size businesses. One is Taleo, with a new onboarding program. SuccessFactors, meanwhile, enhanced its offerings for small and medium-size businesses. The package has improved compensation, performance-management/360-review modules, a new recruiting module for smaller firms, and more, including easier setup than before.
Another launch comes from The RightThing, which rolled out a CRM-ATS combo. Forget the acronyms: what this means is you can use the system to manage contacts (passive candidates) as well as applicants (what happens when the contacts become potential employees) for your jobs. The RightThing’s Whitney Killinger says this is a “huge, huge announcement” for the company. Boehringer Ingelheim, a drug company, has replaced its old system, BrassRing, with RightThing’s system.
About 19 other clients have also been using the system, which The RightThing decided to now sell to anyone, client or not. The company has opened up a Buenos Aires office and is growing in South America. It says 2010 was its best year ever.
Cybershift, which handles time & attendance and expense management, says it got more leads during the first three hours of this year’s SHRM conference than in last year’s entire show.
SilkRoad has seen something similar: more “qualified buyers” than at past SHRM conferences, and “fewer people with a grab and go mentality” hoarding tchotchkes, one SilkRoader tells me. Expect the company to issue an announcement of an announcement within the next few days. That wasn’t a typo: SilkRoad will hint at a new technology it’s working on, to then be unveiled in more detail this fall, technology that it says represents a slightly new genre in human resources software, rather than an improvement on an existing category like onboarding.
Look for Talx to also launch something around the time of this fall’s HR Technology conference in Las Vegas. It is working on developing new products that make more out of the 50 million employment records it has on file after all the screening it has done. With all that information on people’s pay and employment histories, it wants to develop analytics to extend its reach in hiring and retention.
Right Management’s Loren Walsh says “people are very burned out in the U.S.” and many are ready to quit jobs, even ones they’ve only had a few months, particularly if they find it wasn’t what the opportunity were sold by the recruiter and hiring manager. Even people with good jobs, she says, are much more willing to talk to recruiters about moves than they were a year or two ago. “People are moving more quickly,” she says. “People are being recruited strongly.”