Ending what, for most, is a short week, we bring you the penultimate Friday roundup for 2011. Today’s collection includes mystery applicants, a police recruiting campaign gone bad, and Salesforce’s Rypple.
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.”