Well, here we are mid-way through the year and the heat is on - literally - as well as in the business world. Recruitment and retention are back as the top issues facing employers, which in turn spins the rest of the employee lifecycle - including additional investment in leadership, training, development and of course, benefits and employee perks.
This leads to more entreprenurialship, reinvention and everything new is now old ... except, of course, in leadership where everything old is now new again. Karen Elmhirst, our Senior Leadership Analyst, and HR.com are going to try to change this, with the introduction of all our webcasts into an iPOD format to produce Podcasts of all our new and existing archived webcasts. We believe mobile learning like podcasts will be one of the most important new things HR professionals can bring to their organization ... learning that is relevant to the individual when they want it.
Let´s start with Job Boards ... Yikes! The millions of resumes, mining them, filtering them, assessing them, and short listing has led to an entire new class of providers that we call Recruitment Researchers. In the old days these people used to provide you with names of the 20 (put your job title here). Now they are expected to provide ready, available and matched profiles. Many of the traditional staffing firms are now offering this prescreening service.
What started out to be a technology innovation - resume databases, online job postings and matching software - turned out to be a commodity play (anyone can own job board software for free) - nothing but a marketing ploy. The ironic thing is that newspapers who had nailed the marketing aspect of recruitment better than anyone else are still the slowest to adapt to this medium and are still playing catch up.
Not much has changed in the technology realm when the market innovators started the job boards. In fact, the market innovator people who started these job boards - like Jeff Taylor (recently left Monster for his next big gig), Rob McGovern (ex-CareerBuilder) and Richard Johnson (Hotjobs Founder) - had all left the industry; until this month, when Rob McGovern re-entered the market with a new matching concept/job board called MKT10. The release of this product depends on suitability factors (more like a dating service) than a job board. The profile candidates create is based on work life factors in addition to skills. This is not unique in the industry (in fact two additional firms debuted this week on this concept alone called ebullpen.com and Redmatch), but what Rob and MKT10 do bring to the industry is:
1) A well-funded startup backed by some of the same VC´s that helped him start CareerBuilder.
2) Lots of intellectual property on the strengths of the recruiting industry, connections and a deep understanding of the good and bad things about job boards.
3) A minimal risk solution for the HR Executives which is something they love.
So what is unique about MKT10?
1) It is a guaranteed service. A recruiter only pays when they hire someone. The flat fee is $2,000 per hire.
2) The consumers will love the system as it provides feedback to them telling them where they sit on the match. For instance, you are currently ranked 89 on this job but there are four candidates who rank higher than you; if you traveled another five minutes to work you would also be rated as a top candidate.
3) They have already signed their first reseller - Peopleclick - who is in the high end acquisition space.
Of course, we are all waiting for a few things in the staffing world to happen. The most significant is for Google to make a major play in the industry. At SHRM, Yahoo! spent a considerable amount of time outlining why search is essential for finding the right jobs. They rightly believe their only competitor long term may be Google.
Yahoo! is now starting to scrape jobs (no one has made money on this in the past) to accumulate the largest amount of content. Finding the right content at the right time is very important because frankly most people are not very good at searching.
Dice on the other hand has expanded their verticals to include Security Clearance (government and government contractors) and added a job fair company to their roster. They have recently received additional capital for a top HR Venture capital firm General Atlantic Partners and XXX (a Media VC). General Atlantic has also recently invested in Trinet, a small market HRO player with 1,100 clients who predominately have under 100 employees.
SHRM, which represents the largest gathering of HR professionals in the world, (estimated attendance over 17,000 people this year with our guess that approximately 50% of the attendees were HR and 50% were Vendors) was jam packed in San Diego.
SHRM truly caters to the first level of HR professionals as well as the HR Generalists, which is what makes this show so successful. Where else do you get people standing in line for 1 ½ hours to have their picture taken with the CareerBuilder Superbowl Monkeys? This year´s event seemed to be a battle of the Job Boards with Monster, CareerBuilder and Yahoo! ducking it out in terms of who could have the most exposure. The award definitely went to CareerBuilder who had what we guess over 200 orangy/ peach shirts walking the floor or crowding their booths in addition to a whooping party with Hootie and the Blowfish. Both HR.com and Classified Intelligence estimate they spent over $1 million on this event. Maybe someone can explain to me how they intend to track that ROI? I really do not get it. A great presence and focus was what Dice did with information-friendly people staffing their booth. This was more than ample for the traditional budget the average SHRM attendee had for online recruitment. Did anyone even look at how much recruitment content was presented at the event? Not nearly enough based on what these sponsors did for the attendees!
Mergers and Funding
Qwiz, the leader in the skills-testing field, buys ePredix, the leading online assessment firm. This expands Qwiz´ footprint in the pre-hire space and will offer clients of both organizations a comprehensive range of products and services to improve the quality of hire. This is an excellent combination and with Qwiz´ strong management, should really expedite ePredix´ marketability. In the past ePredix has been rather difficult for partners and clients to deal with, not because of the quality of their product but because of key turnover at their executive level.
Authoria is well on its way to offering an integrated Human Capital Suite with the recent addition of Hire.com. As the leader in the benefits communication space they have acquired AIM (Performance Management and Compensation Management) and now the addition of talent acquisition with Hire.com probably makes them the best vendor with best of breed functionality and CONTENT (check out their advisors series which includes ´how to´ advice for their clients).
Open Positions and Available People
Seems to be a general realignment in the VP Marketing and Sales positions for Best-of-Breed HCM providers. Dianne Pardee (ex-Taleo), Chris Reed (ex-Unicru), John Haworth (ex-BrassRing) and Todd Chambers (ex-Authoria) all become available and Super Sales VP Tim Beaumont (ex-Recruitmax) is also on the market.
Most of these firms are looking for replacements.
Saba is currently looking for Product Managers (email tmartin@saba.com).
Congratulations to Rudy Karsen and his management team for a very smooth execution on their IPO (see yahoo http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=KNXA&d=t). This is one of the only firms that offers a fully integrated platform for the complete talent lifecycle of an employee. While most firms are struggling to integrate all the best-of-breed applications with ERP systems, Kenexa has been achieving significant traction quietly in the background with major client wins like Wachovia, Caterpillar, Storagetek, and Carnegie Mellon. The first full suite HCM player to hit the market (we are not comparing them to Workstream who still have many merge/acquisition pains), gives others in the industry a clear understanding of what the market is worth: $50 million sales = $200 million market cap, for a firm with $7.25 million Ebitda. Rudy has done an awesome job running this firm.
So every vertical needs a SxxT disturber. We think in the Talent Acquisition space this could be the Background Testing Vendors. A few of these have been sniffing around the space talking about integrating these for no charge to firms that use them for the transactional revenue associated with applicants (i.e. the fee per test). This could create more tension in the space and further drive prices down.
If you have a minute look at the excellent work Workforce and Caliper are doing to help the aging population get back into the workforce with CARP ( Canadian Association of Retired P People). This classification of workforce represents a major skilled labor pool that will pay a vital part of our labor force in the very near future. Tapping into this market is a very viable opportunity for most employers.
Many Peoplesoft clients are confused on their HR technology strategy. If you have a minute look at the recent webcast on the HR.com site from Jason Averbook (ex-Peoplesoft guru). Great tips and great work on helping clients get their technology strategy aligned.
Also coming to market in the very near future is Sapien Software. Building off a UK HRMS vendor, look at sapiensoftware.com for an overview of another integrated solution provider than combines the traditional HRIS capabilities with Human Capital Management functionality (Succession Planning, Talent Acquisition, Performance Management...). The interesting thing about this firm is the business model: $2.95 per month per employee all in... it includes all software, hosted environment, etc... This is truly an exceptional deal. A quick look at the applications also shows lots of functionality as well as end user configurability.
