The following is a condensed version of the May 2005 analyst update.
There is a rumor that David Duffield might be back in the ERP game again and might be challenging Oracle in a year or two. He talked about developing a new product, but it is very hush, hush as to what it is.
There were several vendors at the IHRIM show in Reno, Nevada including:
Kenexa
Recruitmax
Taleo
BrassRing
VirtualEdge
Peopleclick
Deploy
HR Smart
Webhire
I thought it was interesting that a lot more companies are spending more time talking to people other than their customers and their install base. They seem to be looking for suggestions from people outside of their field as to where talent management is going. I think we´ll see some interesting developments in certain areas over the next little while including scheduling and a lot more candidate relationship management.
Vendor News
2005 started on a positive note for Bond International Software. Bond and E-Impact (a staffing and recruiting software provider) have joined forces. In the first quarter, they brought in more than 50 new U.S. customers, exceeding expectations. Bond has also announced that it has created a corporate workforce management division that will focus on a groundbreaking new human capital solution. It is headed by the newly hired chief of one of the applicant tracking system providers.
There is a new tool announced for job seekers targeting their biggest challenge. The challenge is that recruiters have to narrow down a long list of potential applicants in an attempt to find the person who best fits the position in their organization. A new service called Voice Icon will solve problems by giving job seekers an easy and innovative new way to talk to the hiring managers earlier in the process than ever before in a pre-recorded voice cover letter. It goes beyond a resume. It serves as a pre-interview tool highlighting personality and accomplishments giving the hiring manager insight into future achievements. They showed Voice Icon to hundreds of people at a career fair in the Northeast just recently and they were told repeatedly that it was a terrific service because it was inexpensive, easy to use, unique and a valuable job search tool.
Voice Icon is like recording a commercial for prospective employers to listen in on your voice. When you talk about your strengths and achievements, you can set yourself apart with poise and confidence. It is a subscription service that companies can use as an additional attraction tool for candidates interested in their company.
HireAbility has partnered with Position Manager. Position Manager is an applicant tracking system that has been specifically built for healthcare recruiting. They have actually integrated HireAbility´s Alex resume parser into their applicant tracking system. A resume parser is technology that is able to scan a resume for vital information. This new functionality is available to Position Manager´s 470 clients.
Recruitmax announces Impact: Best-of-Breed Employee Performance Management Application that helps build great workforces. They had announced this some time ago and ended up in a vendor shoot out. They actually bought the product from CCH Knowledgepoint. It was part of a larger organization that really wasn´t doing much with its performance management tool. Recruitmax was looking to expand its footprint and obviously decided that performance management was the next step for them. They are announcing that it is now generally available and their solution has been in use for some time in a couple of their existing clients. Impact is now available to their entire client base and all prospects that are interested in using Recruitmax.
Geolabour (geolabour.com) has a product called The Atlas and it provides a comprehensive set of maps, data, charts, tables, and comments relating to the links between demographic changes, mobility and migration flows. The Atlas helps in anticipating global and local changes in the labor supply. The projection horizon is in most cases limited to 2020. It really focuses on when the market will switch from a buyer´s market to a seller´s market. In some instances it is already happening.
Yahoo! Hotjobs is getting creative with tools to help attract unhappy workers, specifically with interactive Web games. This is a very interesting way to source candidates and recruit people. They are utilizing this for product placement purposes and adding a twist. They are trying to create their own product placement scenario by creating and feeding two brand new viral games as part of their larger spring break promotion. They both feature unsatisfying work experiences and are cleverly branded with Yahoo! Hotjobs logos.
http://hotjobs.promotions.yahoo.com/axi
http://hotjobs.promotions.yahoo.com/flip
CollegeJournal.com is saying that it is a rosy job outlook for 2005 for graduates. Apparently, this will be a better year after a few dismal years and they are expecting to see a lot of growth in job opportunities for new college graduates for the first time since 2000. This is the Wall Street Journal´s guide for career minded college students. More than half of the employers surveyed by the Collegiate Employment Research Institute say that the market was good for college labor. Forty-seven per cent of the respondents said they would definitely hire new college graduates in 2005. That´s an 11% increase from two years ago. If employers are more optimistic about the labor market for college graduates, it means that they are generally optimistic overall. Hiring college graduates is expected to expand by 20% this year. Economic sectors showing strength this year include retail sales, transportation, health services, lodging and entertainment and real estate. Sales and marketing positions are also in demand. Computer science and Information Technology majors will see an increase in opportunities for the first time since the collapse of the dot-com sector. Chemical engineers have the best prospects among technical graduates.
Yahoo! Hotjobs has announced that they have a partnership with MediaNews Group. MediaNews Group is one of the nation´s largest newspaper organizations. The partnership will bring local job listings directly to the Web via Hotjobs. At the same time, the agreement expands Yahoo! Hotjobs´ access in local markets allowing corporate and staffing customers greater opportunities to reach job seekers in the communities where they conduct business.
Between May 2004 and 2005, there was a 71% jump in career-related searches performed on the Yahoo! Network. Between 2000 and 2004, consumption of radio, TV and print has dropped while Internet consumption has grown 20%, according to SRI´s Knowledge Media Scan.
Peopleclick Research Institute´s Lisa Harpe has presented litigation advice for class certification classes. After providing an introduction to the federal rule of civil procedure, which governs the litigation of classification, Harpe presented information on conducting studies during the classification stage of a class action lawsuit. Analysts should always examine a filed complaint along with the policy and procedures for personnel in order to correctly answer questions. Job factors that affect the decision such as pay or promotion should be addressed before a statistical model is chosen. This is the PRI Institute that was purchased by Peopleclick a few years ago. They have constantly been leaders in comprehensive industrial psychology and consulting services.
Litigation advice for class certification cases is vital for anyone who is in that situation and Peopleclick has been known as an expert in that area.
MrTed, a talent management and application tracking company, is based in Europe and since 1999, they have been providing corporations with services and technology dedicated to recruitment stability. They have a product called MrTed Talent Link, which is now the talent management source of choice for many companies that are looking for a global presence. They have been operating in China since 2001. MrTed has apparently successfully delivered the product to customers in China and they have decided to open an office there to have a physical presence.
BrassRing Enhances Enterprise Offering, Supports Total Talent Management Lifecycle; Powerful Convergence of Technology, Consulting and Outsourcing Helps Organizations Create a Workforce by Design. As we all know, BrassRing has been around for a while and they have had an enterprise offering for quite some time. They´ve done a pretty good job of developing their consulting practice and have recently decided that recruitment process outsourcing would be a way to round out those services. Now, they are packaging that all together and that is what they are announcing here.
Recruitmax has signed 13 new enterprise clients in a strong first quarter. They´ve added Boeing to its list of Fortune 100 companies. That adds to the already impressive list of corporations that they have been dealing with. It´s an interesting transformation for this company who was at one time dealing strictly with third party recruitment companies.
Kenexa Introduces New Analytics Application to Effectively Measure Talent Management. It´s a very impressive product. They have developed a cool looking interface that is a very functional application. They´ve designed this from the ground up to provide organizations with critical information in metrics.
Accenture Report Shows How Investing in Human Capital Increases Corporate Productivity and Revenue Growth. The best corporate leaders focus on attracting and retaining people with the right character and developing them into leaders. The book that they have developed in partnership with Montgomery Research offers fresh insight into executives who understand that people are the greatest competitive asset and want to create an environment in which those people can thrive. www.people-project.com
It features interviews with industry leaders about how to increase overall performance through investment in human capital. It also addresses technology and ways to improve human resources functions like recruitment and assessment.
HireRight and VirtualEdge Corp. develop an integrated employment screening solution. It´s interesting that we have an announcement from these two companies. HireRight has been around for a long time. This provides an application for companies to verify information submitted by candidates for employment. It actually avoids the potential for error and fraud in multiple entries. HireRight´s employment screening process complements the VirtualEdge staffing solution creating an automated process to verify the factual information submitted by applicants. It includes criminal and employment history, educational credentials, credit reports, motor vehicle permits and the like.
Yahoo! Hotjobs recently surveyed more than 700 college seniors from around the country. Yahoo! found that more than half, 52%, of soon to be graduates have either found jobs or are extremely optimistic they will have one. Students are being more proactive about their career plans. 37.4% begin their search before graduation, which is up from 14.4% last year. More than 53% already have a resume they feel good about and 85% have gone on interviews already. More than 35% of graduating seniors feels landing a foot in the door is better than accepting more money somewhere else. 21% say they would travel as opposed to taking a job they didn´t want to do. College grads are being much more selective and it means there is pressure on organizations to prove themselves as employers of first choice.
TopJobSites.com Announces the Updated Top Job Sites Rankings in Each of Seven Job Categories. TopJobSites uses Alexa rankings. If there are a million websites out there and only 500,000 of them are using the Alexa product for ranking purposes, then only 500,000 of them are going to be ranked. It doesn´t mean that they are not popular, it means that they are not subscribing to Alexa. They have it broken down into the following: General, the Monster site, CareerBuilder, and HotJobs, in that order.
College is collegegrad.com, erecruting and NACE, as the top three.
Executive jobs is Career Journal and Executives on the web.
In Niche sites, Dice is number one, Career Bank.com is number two.
For a complete list you can go to topjobsites.com.
Tribune Co. Launches free-ad Recycler.com web sites in six new cities. It extends the brand of its successful Los Angeles recycler. The new sites offer free ads for private parties and aggregate listings from Career Builder, Craig´s List. Tribune owns TV stations in Dallas, Houston, Seattle, St Louis, New Orleans and Indianapolis, which will make the brand extension an easier sell. Recycler is a test kitchen for new ideas.
Experience, Inc. announces new services to help recruiters connect directly with the hard-to-reach college-educated job seekers. They have candidate connect services. Recruits can more effectively connect with college students and candidates based on their attributes and qualifications such as major, degree, region, school, and diversity. Some of the services that they are providing are targeted emails, monthly e-newsletters, and custom surveys. They have already tested this with companies like Accenture and American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Internal Revenue Service. They have all reaped benefits of targeted recruitment markets.
HR.com Employer of Excellence
Our event in September (25-27) is taking place at the Pointe South Mountain Resort in Phoenix, Arizona. All of the information about registration and who our guest speakers are is found on HR.com/events. People like Jim Collins, Coleman Peterson, and David Whyte will be there as well as a host of other notables.
Those interested in the Staffing vertical should note that we have some interesting workshops:
Staffing Brainstorming and Networking Session
Extreme Makeover - Sourcing Edition
From confusing to irresistible: Reinventing Graduate Recruitment at PwC
Recruiting, Rewarding and Retaining your Top Performers in a Rebounding Economy
Hire Passive Talent
High Energy Hiring
Delivering Strategic Value Through HR: From the backroom to the boardroom
Talent Acquisition: Winning the War for the Best Talent
Building an Internal Executive Recruiting Function
These presentations are not vendors coming in to plug their product. They are Directors, VPs or senior people in the organization who have implemented the solutions on their own.
I hope you can join me for my next analyst update, which will take place on June 8th. You can register online at www.hr.com.