Gartner: SAAS to Make Big Jump in Business Software by 2011

By John Hazard

More than a quarter of business applications bought and sold in 2011 will be delivered as software as a service, according to Gartner projections.

A report released Sept. 26 by the research firm said that adoption is well on its way, with SAAS accounting for roughly 5 percent of business software revenue in 2005, and more in some markets such as CRM—8 percent in 2005 and an expected 12 percent this year.

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On Software as a Service (SaaS)

By Steve Keifer, Vice President, Global Marketing, and Mark Morley, Industry Marketing Director, GXS

Industry analysts, software vendors, technology press and even the investment community are all talking about Software as a Service or SaaS. But what is SaaS? And how is it different from traditional software approaches? More importantly, how is it relevant for your business? The concept behind Software as a Service (SaaS) is very simple. Instead of licensing a perpetual software license, SaaS users subscribe to an application for an ongoing monthly recurring service fee. The SaaS vendor hosts the application in its own data center providing all the maintenance, upgrades and support activities. This, of course, differs from the traditional software model in which a corporation customizes, manages and operates the software themselves.

SAS model
How do SaaS Environments Work?
Introducing SaaS 2.0

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Information Builders’ Software Lets Smartphones Manage BI Reports

By Mary Hayes Weier

Information Builders on Wednesday released new software, WebFocus Mobile Favorites, that lets professionals organize business-intelligence reports they access
through their mobile devices.

Various BI vendors have begun offering access to reports via mobile devices in recent months, but customers aren’t exactly flocking to the capability. Information Builders executives insist that’s about to change with the new and better generation of smartphones offering bigger screens with better resolution, and better form factors and
navigation capabilities.

Using Safari on the iPhone, “you can meaningfully navigate [BI reports] on these phones,” said Rado Kotorov, the company’s technical director of strategic product management. Kotorov says Information Builders has a handful of beta customers testing mobile access to BI, including NASA engineers accessing space-shuttle data. However, they don’t recommend sending large fields and reports,” he said.

Information Builders’ mobile users access BI dashboards containing business data residing on Web servers through their device browsers. A traveling salesperson can view sales results, for example, via columns, pie charts and fever charts. Information Builders is targeting executives, salespeople, and other on-the-go professionals with the software. The new Favorites feature, installed by an administrator onto a Web server and accessed by the user through a Web link, lets users add or remove frequently accessed BI reports.

The standard-browser approach helps businesses get around the problem of having to develop or purchase applications customized for mobile devices, and then support that separate software. Since users’ favorites folders are on a Web server, they can change or
use different devices, including a laptop, PC, or different mobile device, to access their frequently used information.

Information Builders’ s browser approach to mobile BI is distinctive since its focus is to make BI accessible regardless of the mobile device used. Cognos began shipping Cognos 8 Go Mobile in February for accessing BI reports on the go, but it’s currently limited
to Blackberry devices. Microstrategy last month also began offering mobile access to BI reports, but that’s also limited to BlackBerrys.

Business Objects, like Information Builders, has taken a more open approach, and in May began offering software that lets professionals access and interact with reports residing on their companies’ BusinessObjects XI Release 2 deployments, from Blackberrys, Windows Mobile, and “various other” devices.

Source:Intelligent Enterprise

More on WebFocus Mobile Favorites

Information Builders Mobile Favorites™ offers business decision-makers a unique tool that is compliant with emerging mobile technology trends. It is a low cost solution that does not require any additional software or hardware investments, and no special security enhancements. Mobile Favorites™ allows the user to vary their information requests through simple, interactive forms, thus providing a greater variety of information.

With its innovative pure browser-based approach to mobile computing, Information Builders has established itself as the leader in delivering mobile reporting to business and non-technical users. With just two clicks, content can be easily added or removed from the Mobile Favorites folder in Information Builders’ standard BI Dashboard. The process is no different from adding content to the favorites folder in a Web browser. From an end user perspective, reporting through Mobile Favorites™ is as easy to use
as using e-mail or the Internet on a mobile device. Viewing a Mobile Favorites™ report is similar to scrolling through a Web page. Experienced mobile users can take advantage of parameterized reports and active reports, which allow users to customize content and apply analytics on the go. And, Active Technologies also allows interactive dashboards to
be delivered to mobile devices.

Some of the benefits of WebFOCUS Mobile Favorites™ include:

• The ability to share documents across multiple devices    organizations can deliver applications and content to mobile devices    without having to change their underlying systems infrastructure. Users    typically change or upgrade their devices every 18 months. Once in place,    Mobile Favorites allows BI consumers to be device independent and also    eliminates programmers’ burden of customizing reports for multiple devices.
• No device software to support — reports are delivered directly to a  device’s browser, eliminating costly maintenance, updates, and versioning for different operating systems; reports are available on all mobile browsers.
• No additional hardware required — standard Web and BI technologies are used so that dedicated mobile servers aren’t needed to convert BI content to mobile formats or manage interactions.
• No unique design and delivery tools needed — create mobile reports and make them immediately available using standard development and delivery tools; existing reports can be distributed to any mobile device without conversion.
• No special security considerations — provide a secure connection through mobile device and virtual protocol networks (VPNs); WebFOCUS Managed Reporting is used to manage user access and any Managed Reporting user can be immediately given access to mobile content.

Source: MarketWire.com

Web 2.0: Buzzword, or Internet revolution?

By Jon Brodkin

Web 2.0 could be a meaningless marketing buzzword. Or it may represent a whole new paradigm for the Internet, one centered on user-generated content that could hasten the death of the newspaper industry.

There are lots of opinions about Web 2.0, and some of them – mostly of the pro-Web 2.0 variety – were on display Tuesday in a panel discussion during the annual meeting of the Mass Technology Leadership Council.

“Meet the new influencers,” said Paul Gillin, a writer and commentator on the tech industry and a former executive editor of Network World sister publication Computerworld.

Gillin relayed the well-known story of Vincent Ferrari, a 30-year-old blogger who recorded a phone call with a rude AOL customer service representative who repeatedly refused to grant Ferrari’s request – actually, at least 21 requests in five minutes – to cancel his service.

Ferrari’s blog crashed when 300,000 people tried to download the audio file last year, according to Gillin. He ended up in the New York Times and on the Today Show, where the clip was played for tens of millions of people, Gillin says. AOL fired the employee and sent Ferrari a written apology, but not before its reputation took a hit.

“Individuals and small groups of people have the ability to move markets that didn’t exist a few years ago,” Gillin said. “Fark.com is doing 40 million page views a day, which is more than the Chicago Tribune. It has the full-time equivalent of two employees. Craig Newmark of Craigslist.com is quietly killing the newspaper industry.”

Gillin predicted a rapid decline in the newspaper industry over the next two decades, saying the industry’s market model is unsustainable because it costs so much to deliver information. Markets will be smaller and more focused on particular audience segments because of Web 2.0, he predicted.

But what is Web 2.0?

“It’s never really been adequately defined,” said panel moderator John Landry, chairman and CTO at Adesso Systems in Boston. “It is, in many ways, a meaningless marketing buzzword.”

The significance of the term “Web 2.0” has been dismissed by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium.

In an IBM podcast interview last July, Berners-Lee was asked about the common explanation that Web 1.0 is about connecting computers and making information available, while Web 2.0 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration.

Berners-Lee replied, “Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”

Tuesday’s panelists didn’t offer any new definitions of Web 2.0, but Landry said the basic concept is that everyone can participate, everyone can be a publisher.

According to Landry, if Web 1.0 is symbolized by Encyclopaedia Britannica and similar expert organizations, Web 2.0 is about Wikipedia, and content generated by users who may or may not know what they are talking about.

Landry said Web 2.0 is also seen in software as a service (SaaS), with its continual improvement of services replacing traditional product releases.

The City of Boston is getting in the Web 2.0 game too. Last June, the city hired Bill
Oates away from New York-based Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide. As CIO at the hotel chain, Oates said his team created a site called the “lobby” where customers could talk about the hotels and ask questions. They also built a “loft” and hotel in Second Life, a three-dimensional online world built and owned by its “residents,” of which there are nearly 2.9 million worldwide.

Second Life , which has inspired parodies such as http://www.getafirstlife.com/, allows users to buy real estate and build assets, and has its own economy. Starwood Hotels used the site to reach a younger audience, and now the City of Boston is considering Second Life as well.

“Trust me, in the city we’re not spending a lot of time thinking about Second Life,” Oates said in yesterday’s panel discussion. “But we are thinking about it as a way to do community events and meetings.”

Second Life may also be a place where Boston could unveil a design for a new City Hall, Oates said.

In the real world, Boston is pursuing a wireless initiative to give residents low-cost Internet access anywhere in the city, and using its Web site to let residents pay bills and connect them to various municipal services.

For Oates, sharing information and engaging Boston residents is the key to Web 2.0.

The panel also included Judith Hurwitz, co-author of Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies. Hurwitz talked about a connection between SOA and Web 2.0.

SOA is an approach to building IT systems that makes it easier to reuse applications for a variety of purposes across an enterprise. The ability to use Internet-based services inside an enterprise have led some to call Web 2.0 the “universal SOA.”
“We are now looking at Web 2.0 and service oriented architecture as a cultural revolution,” Hurwitz said.

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Revolution Online Money Transfer Service Pits Itself Against PayPal

By Antone Gonsalves

Startup Revolution Money, an online payment service that’s up against EBay’s popular PayPal, launched on Thursday as a new alternative money-transfer service.

The company’s Revolution Money Exchange service enables subscribes to transfer money from their bank accounts to each other. People interested in the service, which is available at no charge, must sign up through the company’s Web site.

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More Jobs Being Found Online, but That Doesn’t Mean It’s Easy

By BARBARA WHITAKER

One of the first things Brooke Christiansen did as college graduation neared last spring was post her résumé on three of the largest Internet job boards: Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs.

For the most part, she said, it was an exercise in frustration.

“You get piles and piles of jobs that no matter what you type in, come up with every single search,” she said. “It’s very hard and very time-consuming to find something you’re actually interested in.”

In addition, she said, it is rare to hear back when applying for jobs found on the sites.

Mary Riley Dikel, creator of The Riley Guide, a directory of employment and career resources on the Internet, said: “One job seeker told me, ‘I think I’d be more successful distributing my résumé by opening my window and throwing it out.’ You do feel like you’re going into a black hole.”

To that frustration, add the risk that identity thieves may steal information from résumés posted on job sites – and to estimates that only 3 percent to 5 percent of job seekers find employment through the sites – and it is reasonable to ask, Why bother?

Recruiters and career counselors typically turn the question around and ask, Why not? Applicants, they say, need to recognize that job boards are but one tool among many that can be used to find work.

“The Internet is an absolutely necessary tool in your job search arsenal, but it’s not your only tool,” Ms. Dikel said. “Use Monster and professional associations and local and state job boards and other things that target what you want. But if you’re spending more than 15 minutes on the Internet, you’re lost.”

A proliferation of new sites – many capitalizing on search engine technology to provide job offerings from across the Internet – are giving job seekers some new alternatives to explore.

Among them are JobCentral.com, a site developed for major corporations that carries their listings as well as direct links to the companies’ Web sites to apply for jobs. The
board was created after executives from corporations like I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Intel began exploring ways to deal with the ever-escalating fees charged by the largest job boards.

Initially, 18 companies put in $60,000 each to finance the board. Now companies pay $12,500 a year to post all their jobs, or $25 a job (compared with as much as $400 a job on a major board), said Bill Warren, executive director of the DirectEmployers Association, the corporate group behind JobCentral. It now has 182 member companies. The site also acts as a search engine, scavenging job listings from about 1,400 nonmember companies.

Taking a slightly different tack are sites like Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com, which rely on search engines to aggregate a vast array of listings from newspaper classified ads, job boards, corporate sites and trade associations.

The field will expand again tomorrow, when JobCentral, Indeed, SimplyHired and Google Base, a database recently introduced by the search engine company, are to announce that they are teaming up to create a national labor exchange at JobCentral.com. The site, which has about 340,000 jobs posted, will incorporate jobs found by its partners and provide the technology to let those sites link to its information. Mr. Warren, creator of the job site that later became Monster, said the alliance would result in the amassing of information on about 4.5 million jobs.

“The benefit to the job applicant is that they can go to one place and basically see all the jobs on the Internet,” Mr. Warren said.

How that will affect the three major job boards – and the state of finding jobs on the Internet – remains to be seen.

Mark Mehler, a co-founder of CareerXroads, a New Jersey company that advises companies on using technology in recruiting, said the traditional job boards might find themselves at a disadvantage. It has become expensive for companies to post employment ads on the major boards, and the number of résumés posted can be overwhelming.

At the same time, he said, it remains to be seen how useful and reliable the sites that pull job listings from across the Web will be.

“They key is freshness and where the job is being taken from,” he said. Despite such problems, studies indicate that an increasing number of people are being hired through Web postings and employee referrals, rather than through traditional methods like printed want ads.

In 2004, a study by CareerXroads found that 61 percent of hires by the companies surveyed came from referrals or the Internet, up from 50 percent two years earlier. According to the study findings, Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs accounted for 22.8 percent of the hires attributed to the Internet; corporations also reported that a high percentages of employees were hired after filing applications on corporate sites.

Eric Muller, a recruiting manager with the Southern Company, an energy company based in Atlanta, says his company initially began using  JobCentral because it allowed the company to post all its jobs at a lower cost and because it provided a direct link to the company’s site. While the company still uses big boards like Monster and CareerBuilder, he said, they do so more strategically – if, for instance, a job needs to be filled immediately. “We have to have a mix,” he said. “I can’t have all my eggs in one basket.”

The same holds true for job seekers, although there are increasing questions about the wisdom of posting résumés on the Internet.

“Putting a résumé on an online job site is not the smartest way to go about getting a job,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit group that educates consumers about technology and privacy.

The forum put hundreds of résumés on job sites and tracked them for a year. Ms. Dixon said many were stolen by either criminals or unethical recruiters.

One common ruse preys on midcareer professionals whose résumé history can be combined with a Social Security number, resulting in identity theft.

“The more detailed your résumé, the easier it is to do,” Ms. Dixon said.

Job seekers who posted online said they had also had problems with employment consultants seeking to solicit business. After arranging an interview, the consultants begin making a pitch for their services, which can cost as much as $10,000.

Ultimately, Ms. Christiansen found exactly what she was looking for – a human resources job near Chicago – using JobCentral. She said the site helped her narrow her search, and after that she found a job quickly. “It can work,” she said, “if you know exactly what you’re looking for and you can find a place that will have it.”

Source:

Listing Top Jobs but Charging Candidates to Seek Them

By BOB TEDESCHI

RECRUITERS with six-figure jobs to fill know better than to post them online and start a stampede of marginally qualified job seekers. But they also know that the Web is the easiest way to find applicants.

The Web’s surprising answer to the problem? Charge them to look.

A growing number of niche sites devoted to high-end jobs are finding that applicants are willing to shell out a few dollars — or a few hundred, in some cases — for the chance to get access to job ads. The strategy will not help the big online job boards find more applicants for entry-level positions, but analysts say it is ideal for sites like TheLadders.com, ExecuNet and others seeking the senior executive crowd.

“It turns out that having the job candidates pay is a great screener, and employers love it,” said Charlene Li, an Internet analyst with Forrester Research.

Ms. Li said that the online employment category, which is dominated by Monster, CareerBuilder and Yahoo’s HotJobs, is expected to generate about $1.9 billion in revenue this year, up from about $1.6 billion last year. But she said that the category in recent years has undergone an explosion in the number of job boards that serve specific niches. (Industry executives say that there are roughly 40,000 job boards online.)

The upper-level jobs niche has been slower to develop, though, because companies typically hand off such jobs to corporate recruiting firms. Those firms, like DHR International and Korn/Ferry International, set up their own Web sites, but those sites are used mainly to market the firms’ offline services instead of connecting applicants with companies online.

To fill that void, several former HotJobs executives introduced TheLadders.com in 2003, with the mission of posting only those jobs with annual salaries of $100,000 or more. At the time, the company made an odd bet — that it could attract more applicants if it charged them a monthly entry fee of $30.

That is precisely the opposite of the approach used by mass-market employment sites, which charge applicants nothing but charge companies varying fees to post job openings.

In its early years, TheLadders.com was slow to grow, partly because it did not attract enough job postings to justify the site’s cost. But as employers and corporate recruiters learned that they could find qualified applicants for nothing, the number of job postings jumped.

Now, according to Marc Cenedella, the chief executive of TheLadders.com, the site listed 70,000 jobs last week and is on pace to exceed $30 million in sales this year from about 1.4 million subscribers. And the site now counts Microsoft and the EMC Corporation as clients.

“We’re doing the same thing that’s done in national parks: put a price on it so you get the right number of people,” Mr. Cenedella said.

Mr. Cenedella said that the company is not yet profitable, but is “cash flow positive.” The number of subscribers who hear about the site from word of mouth, he said, has nearly doubled, to 34 percent, in the last three years.

Mr. Cenedella, who was a senior vice president at HotJobs when the company was acquired by Yahoo, said TheLadders would expand in the coming months to include jobs with annual salaries of $75,000 or more. (Only about 10 percent of the roughly 150 million workers in the country earn $100,000 or more, he said, while 20 million earn from $75,000 to $100,000.) Even that lower salary threshold, however, is high enough to attract job candidates who will pay to see the listings.

Ms. Li, of Forrester, said that TheLadders and other fee-based online job boards could face difficult times as baby boomers retire and the job market opens up.

“Companies say they’re going to lose 30 percent of their forces over the next five years, and those will all be upper-echelon jobs,” she said. “So if you’re paying to look for jobs, in some ways it’s signaling that you’re not a very good candidate.”

Heather Hamilton, a staffing manager at Microsoft who uses the site to fill marketing positions, disagreed. “If you’re not serious, you’re not going to pay the money,” she said. “That’s a big part of why we’ve found TheLadders to be more fruitful than other job boards.”

Some of the big online job boards have also tried to aim at the highest-paying jobs. In 2000, Monster started ChiefMonster.com, which screened prospective job seekers to ensure that they were worthy of the best jobs, but the service failed to attract a following and Monster shut it down.

Other sites devoted to six-figure salaries and senior executives say that they, too, are thriving. ExecuNet, a service based in Norwalk, Conn., charges about $400 annually, or $39 monthly, for its online networking, industry data and job listings, among other things.

According to David B. Opton, the company’s chief executive, the business has about 25,000 subscribers, but their average income is $221,000 and the average age is 48. Job postings have increased about 30 percent over the last year, he said, and, perhaps as a result, ExecuNet’s membership has risen 15 percent.

Networking sites have become an increasingly important tool for companies looking to fill senior positions. LinkedIn, in particular, has emerged as a favorite trolling ground for corporate recruiters across the spectrum of job levels.

The online market for high-priced talent extends beyond full-time workers. Take HotGigs, for example. The company, which is based in Minneapolis, provides job listings for contract workers. In the three years since its debut, its customer base has grown to nearly 70,000 consultants who pay $100 yearly for the right to answer job listings
from about 19,000 companies and recruiters.

Doug Berg, the company’s chief executive, says the idea of paying to apply for a job is foreign to some people.

“We get a lot of people who e-mail us and say they shouldn’t have to pay for a job,” he said. “Our thing is, if you’re a professional consultant, you have to learn how to market yourself. Besides, if I didn’t charge, every wannabe in the world would come in.”

Source:

Computer says: ‘You’re hired’

By JESSICA TWENTYMAN

Edgars Consolidated Stores (Edcon) is something of a national institution in South Africa. Since 1929, the chain of department stores has supplied generations of South Africans with clothing and footwear, from school shoes to funeral suits.

Naturally, keeping a network of more than 1,000 stores in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Lesotho fully staffed is a big challenge for the company’s human resources department, which oversees a workforce of 20,000 people – especially in the busy run-up to Christmas, when its headcount doubles.

Widespread unemployment in South Africa, meanwhile, means that for every position the company advertises, it receives approximately 100 applications, according to executive HR manager, Andrea Wiehahin.

“We’re very aware of the need to handle those applications sensitively,” she says. “Our job applicants are our customers as well, and even unsuccessful candidates need to be treated with respect, so that they go away from the experience with a positive feeling about the Edcon brand.”

To compound the issue, she adds, economic and political transformation in South Africa means that the company needs to demonstrate compliance with a complex web of government-mandated employment equity policies.

That is a big challenge, but Edcon is evidently handling it well. In a 2005 survey conducted by management consultancy Deloitte, it was named one of the 15 best companies to work for in South Africa and the best company to work for in the retail market.

Edcon makes sure it has the internet on its side. When a store manager has a vacancy to fill, they enter the details of the position on the company’s new Softscape Apex HR system. It is automatically forwarded to the relevant senior manager for approval, and from there, it is posted on the career section of the company’s website ( www.edcon.co.za  ), as well as online job boards, such as Career Junction (  www.careerjunction.co.za  ).

The e-recruitment process does not end there. Job seekers submit their applications over the internet via the website, and those applications are subsequently held and managed in the Softscape system.Around three-quarters of all applications Edcon receives are now made over the internet, says Leon Vermaak, Edcon’s business integration manager.

The system’s talent acquisition tools, meanwhile, enable managers to search applications, retrieve details for prospective employees, contact them and organise interviews, explains Alex Bart-feld, Softscape’s director for the EMEA region.

Not only that, the system also holds a wealth of information about the company’s recruitment processes, adds Ms Wiehahin, enabling the HR team to report on metrics relating to ethnic diversity in the workforce, as well as calculating the time and cost involved in bringing new hires on board.

Like Edcon, organisations around the world are finding that the internet provides the perfect platform for attracting recruits and streamlining their applications. In fact, it is critical in a world where the job of finding, attracting, selecting and securing top talent
has never been more important, according to Peter Cheese, managing partner of management consultancy firm Accenture’s 3,500-strong Human Performance practice.

“The thing that’s driving attention on recruitment is a general shortfall of skills,” he says. “The demographics of developed countries are against us, and that’s put a great deal of pressure on how companies attract and retain talent,” he says.

Certainly, things have come a long way from the days when job seekers would frequently find that the careers section of a company’s website offered no more information than a generic e-mail address for the HR department. “A whole host of developments are fuelling e-recruitment right now: internet-enabled HR systems, e-mail, online job boards, social networking sites, virtual worlds, and so on. As a term, e-recruitment covers a huge array of tools, but they have one thing in common: the internet,” says Mr Cheese.

Take KPMG, the management consultancy, for example, or the Royal Bank of Scotland, or data storage giant EMC – all three have held careers fairs in Second Life, the online “virtual world”. And in a recent survey of IT recruiters by the Association of Technology
Staffing Companies (ATSCo), 58 per cent said that social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace are more useful for recruitment than print advertisements. Eighty-three per cent, meanwhile, said they used those sites to trawl for potential job candidates.

“Sites such as LinkedIn are an incredibly powerful form of recruitment, as it puts the power in both parties’ hands – the recruiter in identifying the right candidate and the individual in deciding whether or not to engage in an offer,” says Dan Nye, CEO of LinkedIn.

“Some people are connected to hundreds of professionals across industries and borders, which in turn are connected to thousands more. This immediately places a well-connected recruiter in touch with a large number of possible candidates.”

But it is those organizations that have tightly integrated their e-recruitment tools with their back-end HR systems that have achieved the most notable successes – and that is true whether those back-end systems are hosted in-house or by a third party specialist, under the software-as-a-service (Saas) model, according to Colin Tenwick, chief executive of hosted talent management software specialist Stepstone, a company that offers both options.

“An all-encompassing e-recruitment tool won’t just post vacancies to a website and capture applications,” he says. “It will provide a robust framework for all the processes that surround bringing new recruits on board, and then managing their performance for as long as they work for you,” he says.

Such systems need to be capable of doing some pretty heavy lifting. Mobile services operator Orange, for example, uses Stepstone’s i-Grasp system to process about 80 per cent of the 5,000 applications it receives each year and currently holds 50,000 CVs, says David Roberts, Orange’s employer brand manager.

I-Grasp enables Orange’s 200-strong HR team to promote the company culture to applicants from the first contact, he says, primarily the company’s careers portal, www.orange.co.uk/jobs  , as well as a number of retail recruitment microsites.

It also helps to ensure that applicants are kept informed of the progress of their application, via e-mail and text message – and that was certainly welcome to Elly Hallwood, who joined Orange’s in-house legal team as senior counsel in August this year, after applying for the job via the portal.

“I was kept informed all the way down the line,” she says. “Moving from a law firm to an in-house legal department can be quite a transition, but the amount of information that I received from Orange regarding my application made the whole process much less stressful.”

The biggest benefits of effective e-recruitment, however, are encapsulated in two key metrics: time to hire and cost to hire. At Hyatt Hotels, for example, a hosted talent management system from Taleo has cut the process of hiring a front desk employee from four weeks to five days, according to Randy Goldberg, Hyatt’s executive director of
recruiting. And hotels that have moved both managerial and hourly  positions online have reported a 50 per cent reduction in recruitment advertising spending.

But above all, it is quality of candidates that really counts, says Michael Gregoire, CEO of Taleo. “If e-recruitment means you get people on board quickly and at a lower cost, then that’s great, but what companies really need to know is whether they’re hiring the kinds of people that have a material positive impact on their organisation,” he says.

That kind of insight, he adds, can only be achieved with a robust set of HR tools that enable companies to manage their ongoing performance in attracting and retaining talent.

Or as Mr Bartfeld of Softscape puts it: “The story doesn’t end when you click on the ‘hire’ button.”

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Tools help staff see the effects of effort

By SAM HISER

Securing the services of the best available candidates is at the heart of e-recruitment systems. But once the new recruits are on board, technology now plays a big part in helping to monitor, incentivise and manage them.

Performance management software tools are maturing, taking advantage of the internet and replacing custom-grown solutions to help managers more effectively monitor and offer incentives to staff.

Also known as business intelligence (BI) or business performance management (BPM), e-performance management is a growing field.

Oracle, through its Peoplesoft and Hyperion acquisitions, SAP, Cognos and Business Objects are some of the big software providers helping managers collect, organise and massage data coming in from across finance, back office, manufacturing, production, sales and compensation business processes.

A growing list of smaller players, too, provides targeted services in a variety of niches. In the sales performance management (SPM) arena, for example, sales personnel and managers need a clear view of objectives and sales plan rules. They also need real-time visibility on their compensation statements and incentive goal sheets as well as
performance comparisons versus prior periods.

A dashboard screen on a desktop, laptop or smartphone allows them to absorb this information by showing up-to-the minute sales and compensation statistics and integrates incentive plan information.

In any sales organisation where the compensation plan drives the business, there is a need for everybody to be connected to central goals and respond quickly.

“You want to turn the business rules into compensation. With a centralized book, you can cascade strategic changes in the call plan,” says Leslie Stretch, senior vice-president of global sales, marketing and on-demand business at Callidus Software. The implications penetrate to the bottom line.

Mr Stretch says integrated software permits incentive compensation to be awarded faster and targeted with precision, while slowness and inaccuracy can demoralise a sales force.

Callidus, for example, is establishing a de facto standard for sales performance it calls the “true performance index”, that a professional can use to monitor the effects of their efforts. They can take this statistic with them – possibly to different employers. For heavily unionised customers, such as telecoms companies, Mr Stretch reports
fewer disputes, due partly, he claims, to trust in the Callidus data.

E-performance management tools are making a difference in operations management, too. A UK software and consulting group, eg Solutions, offers straightforward technology and advice which seeks to identify processes and tasks, assign roles, groups, teams and skills, and match desired outcomes with human activity. The business-intelligence
gathering mechanism is embedded in the process, which means data input is not segregated from the work itself.

Elizabeth Gooch, eg’s chief executive, says: “It’s like driving a car, first in manual and then in automatic.” The key is to make people autonomous optimisers by showing them the results of what they do.

Employees are said to appreciate sharper e-performance management tools and thrive because they feel a greater sense of accomplishment when their efforts are connected with results.

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Dispelling the myths of the internet job search

By RAY SCHREYER

Online job searching has evolved from a novelty into an essential career tool in the 10 years since I co-wrote one of the earliest guide books to using the new technology.

At first, internet job searching may seem quick and easy; however, having a strategy for navigating through millions of postings on thousands of sites helps increase the odds of landing a job, or even an interview. It helps to separate the myths that have evolved along withthis multi-million dollar business from the realities that can help both job seekers and recruiters get better results from internet job search tools.

Myth 1: The big boards post the lion’s share of openings.

Reality: Only about 30 per cent of the jobs at major corporations are listed on the big job boards, according to research firm iLogos. Fewer than 25 per cent of internet users worldwide regularly use job boards. There are many more options to include in job research.

Corporate websites and niche sites, such as professional and industry associations, have grown in size and importance. For example, employers use their own sites to avoid the rising cost of job board advertising; they find the high volume of resumes produced by the big  boards does not necessarily translate into actual hires. More often, they rely on industry and professional association sites and job aggregators to get the word out about new positions.

Employment search engines, which aggregate jobs from corporate sites, are invaluable to any job hunt, especially now that jobs are global. Top sites include JobRapido in Europe, Recruit.net in Asia and Jobcentral.org in the US.

To get specific vacancies in front of candidates with the required skills, corporations will also opt in the future for targeted search services, such as Yahoo Network’s Behavioral Targeting and Google Adword.

Myth 2: Internet technology makes landing a job easier.

Reality: A job search requires persistent, hard work. Seasoned job seekers understand that the internet is a 24/7 research tool, better used to identify pockets of opportunity than as a vehicle to apply for a job.

Employee referrals remain the number one source of new hires for corporations. To find a new job, seekers need to use every strategy at their disposal, including talking with friends and colleagues, tapping into professional networks, and pinpointing specific companies in their industry.

Internet searches are just one of many tactics to use in an overall strategy. Job aggregators can identify companies that are hiring in an appropriate geographic location and career categories – but that information should be used to initiate networking with the aim of securing an interview. Technology does not eliminate the competition for the best jobs, but it can help seekers stay ahead of the pack.

Myth 3: Placing a resume online reaches recruiters.

Reality: Maybe. Just as likely, job-hunters are helping marketers sell their products and services. For example, with 40m US seekers regularly visiting job boards, the temptation to view this huge audience as a marketing bonanza is too great for many vendors. In some countries there is little regulation monitoring the business conduct of the online recruiting industry.

Job seekers need to be cautious about sharing their personal histories with any site that purports to offer interesting opportunities. Research by the DirectEmployers Association shows that nearly 50 per cent of job seekers have privacy concerns with general boards.

Over the next few years, we are likely to see an emergence of recruiting industry standards as a way to assure job seekers that ads genuinely represent job openings, and that information will remain confidential.

Myth 4: Social networks are distinct from professional networks and play only a marginal role in job searches.

Reality: Social and professional networks are more connected than ever thanks to the internet and using all networks effectively is essential in getting a job. Job seekers worldwide are using Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, and MySpace to build contacts, learn about job opportunities and find out what it is like to work at a specific company.

Social networking sites are new tools to help get credentials in front of people who can help with landing a job. A key advantage is that these sites give some control over who is part of the network. By contrast, when someone posts their resume on a job site, they have little control over who sees it, or whether it reaches the people who do the hiring.

Job searches require research and networking in multiple ways. Avoid getting trapped in front of a computer screen. Individuals may one day be able to identify a dream job by going online. Until then, understanding the realities of internet job search help seekers become more successful.

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