Technology Ramblings

You hang around HCM technologies as long as I have and you start to get jaded. But occasionally things start happening that gives you hope that real leadership and innovation will come to this critical market. I have already talked about why I am such a Simply Hired fan. Some other technologies and news that are keeping me excited about our space…

Innerworkings – Innerworkings has developed an automated code judging engine for the training and development (learning) marketplace. The technology is truly fantastic. They have spent thousands of hours figuring out what best practice looks like in the .NET (C# and VB specifically) development environment, and then figured out a way to have a system evaluate not just the quality of the code written by a developer but also the effectiveness of the approach the developer took to solve a particular programming problem. While Innerworkings is presently focused on the area of training and development (learning), it doesn’t take a genius to see that this could be the first really effective technical assessment tool in the market place. Here’s hoping they get the customer momentum to move in that direction.

MS CRM / Salesforce.com – The ATS market has been begging for a disruptive technology to justify ongoing investment since 1995. Time and again vendors claim nirvana and deliver nothing. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the big ones is that ATS vendors design to win sales, not user acceptance. Over time this model leads to the ridiculous customer turnover that we have all witnessed. But this may finally be changing. With Microsoft’s release of MS CRM 3.0  (full release scheduled for December of this year), their CRM capabilities have been fully woven into the Exchange Server / Office System framework, which is where over 57%   of all corporate recruiters and hiring managers do their work. It has long been known that having to conduct a transaction (i.e. sending a candidate a meeting request) and then having to tell your ATS what you just did (usually by assigning a tracking action) typically ends up with bad data in the ATS. And while MS CRM is not (yet) targeted at the ATS market, the basic ATS functionality is so well defined and so static at this point that it would take an infinitesimal portion of Microsoft’s technological prowess to embed the needed fields, workflows, posting mechanisms and search technology into MS CRM to absolutely crush most of the ATS players out there now.

But MS isn’t getting cocky (much to my surprise). They hear footsteps: the sound of Salesforce’s Appforce platform coming on strong. Appforce shares many of the benefits of MS CRM (its Office integration isn’t as strong, but that is more due to its status as a hosted play than any architectural inability to fulfill that vision), and it is cheaper and easier to deploy and manage. The recruiting team at Salesforce has been using an earlier Salesforce product to run its recruiting operation for the last couple of years. Their results speak for themselves.

Oracle Kills Siebel (for us anyway) – With the sales of Siebel to Oracle, the internal skunk-works project to take Siebel’s CRM platform into true candidate relationship management territory will likely die a quick death. No need to have yet another internal program competing with Oracle’s (formerly PeopleSoft’s) astoundingly bad ATS play. Yet hope springs eternal in the land of enterprise software. SAP seems to be finally focusing its guns on the HCM space (hopefully Mark will do better freed from the shackles of Peoplesoft's "Recruiting isn't HR" arrogance). Who knows.... maybe SAP will get religion and finally buy an ATS firm so that they can get into PeopleSoft accounts through the back door.

Jobster – I am not a Jobster customer, but I hope to be someday. While the market talks ad naseum about Jobster’s slick advertising, great capitalization and killer board of directors, my hope lies with the quality of their leadership. I am a big Dave Lefkow fan, and I have been impressed with my interactions with CEO Jason Goldberg . So why am I not a customer? Mostly because I don’t believe that email job posting and referral chains are the next killer passive sourcing technique. But what the market seems to miss is that Jobster is creating a killer opt-in marketing vehicle. Sure they are replicating functionality that already exists in most email marketing engines, and the WorkZoo acquisition may be distracting in the end, and the email thing will get stale fast (when predictions say that by 2009 80% of all email traffic will likely be spam you have to wonder how many Jobster messages will get filtered out over time). But… who cares? If you take a company that has smart leaders, good positioning and the humility and capital to figure it out, all those negatives will pale in comparison to the positives: a true distributed opt-in marketing network. Put contact management and robust passive candidate profiling tools on that framework and you have something that could really compete against the coming juggernaut from Salesforce and MS. None of the ATS players is prepared to head that off. Only Jobster has hope. And once that hope is fulfilled (and assuming they continue to move to a really rich integration platform a la Niku), then I will be signing up. Of course they are still going to have to deploy that Outlook toolbar….

Recruitforce - And I am the only one who was sad that Recruitforce sold out to Taleo? Matt Robinson may have been the first technologist to really get it in this space.

WetFeet - All eyes on WetFeet. Someone is going to figure out that Gary and Steve are every bit as good as the Taleo team, and that EIS is hands-down the best efficiency engine for high volume hiring in the entire ATS marketplace. Their tech team is top notch, and WetFeet Recruiter is perhaps the best mid-market ATS out there.

Comments

[larry]

I came across an interesting article titled “And to Hell with the Applicant or How We Need to Improve the Application Process” by Gal Almog, the CEO of Redmatch.

Redmatch creates applicant tracking systems with highly refined parameters.

Gal focuses on the dearth of talent available, and how to enhance the hiring process so as not to alienate the talent. It seems like the kind of article that will inspire some spirited discussion. To view the article, click on http://www.onrec.com/content2/news.asp?ID=8861.

Sincerely,
Larry

[Heather]

"But MS isn’t getting cocky (much to my surprise)." Dude, what are you talking about? ; )Ahh, just having a little fun.

By the way, here's what Jobster offers that other e-mail marketing engines don't: ability to track exactly where the good candidates are coming from so you can devote your resources to targeting the people in their path to you. Also, the fact that you don't have to establish bogus "trusted connections" to engage with someone. My experience is failry limited so there might be other tools out there that do the same? I don't know.

Keep up the great content!