What’s Next: The Monster Dilemma

By David H. Freedman

For business owners plagued by a dearth of candidates for key job openings, the Web was supposed to provide an ideal solution. Job-search sites like Monster.com (NASDAQ:MNST) can put postings in front of millions of applicants instantly. And newer business-oriented social networking sites like LinkedIn provide similarly fertile recruiting territory, supplying access to the contacts of thousands of people. On the other hand, anyone who’s actually tried to hire someone through the Web knows the truth: You post an ad and are immediately flooded with hundreds of resumés, many from people whose backgrounds are wildly inappropriate. So much for the Web making things easier. It’s enough to make you long for the days of print newspaper ads and snail mail.

But just as technology created the problem, newer technology aims to solve it. A new generation of hiring tools promises to screen out inappropriate applicants, allow the suitable ones to put their best foot forward, and even hunt down good candidates who haven’t applied. As these new services get better at these tasks, they may well change the balance of power in the job-recruiting industry and could even redefine the way we think about jobs.

A shot at diverting a river of weak applicants is the chief advantage offered to employers by Protuo, a Woodstock, Georgia-based start-up that launched its service in January. Protuo isn’t only a job-listing site; it also forwards its clients’ listings to some 270 established job-listing sites, including Monster. But applicants can’t respond to a Protuo posting unless they spend seven minutes or so filling out a survey that asks about experience, skills, workstyles, and job preferences. Employers can customize the survey by choosing from a wide field of prepared questions or by adding their own, and they specify which responses get a candidate’s resumé past the screen. Has the candidate managed a technical project? Is he or she willing to move? The approach is modeled, to some extent, on the sort of compatibility gauging one encounters on a matchmaking site like eHarmony, notes Jennifer Gerlach, Protuo’s co-founder and vice president of marketing. Gerlach went through the dating process on eHarmony just to research the technique. “I learned a lot,” she says. “And I met some very, very nice people.”

With online job postings sometimes pulling in more than a thousand applicants, the ability to winnow the flood could mean the difference between being able to retain control of the hiring process and having to bring in a professional recruiter–at a typical cost of $30,000 for a midlevel hire. The time and expense of dealing with a huge influx of resumés is all the more frustrating because much of the flow comes from online applicants who indiscriminately bombard hirers with resumés. You can try a keyword search on the resumés to narrow things down, but applicants have learned to load their resumés with them, often by pasting in phrases from the job posting. Even LinkedIn has suffered from inflation, as many users aggressively build networks of people they don’t really know in order to make themselves appear better connected. “There’s no value in a lot of these contacts,” says LinkedIn user Chris Knudsen, who heads business development for podcasting company Podango in Salt Lake City. “It can just be someone whose card you got at a trade show.” (A LinkedIn spokesperson commented via e-mail: “Anyone can join the LinkedIn network; however, the quality of your own personal LinkedIn network is the responsibility of each individual.”) But a well-designed survey, contends Gerlach, allows users to skim the cream.

Fred Donovan, who runs Donovan Networks, a seven-employee computer network security firm, has been flooded with applicants responding to previous postings to Monster.com and other online job boards. He is currently conducting a Protuo search and likes what he’s seen so far. “I can specify that I want to see only resumés from people who say they have 10 years’ experience in negotiating sales and are familiar with the software development process,” he says. “I’m seeing a small, better-qualified subset of the applicants.” There must be something to the idea. Other hiring sites, including Market10, Jobster, and Taleo (NASDAQ:TLEO), are introducing their own approaches to automated candidate screening. And Monster is doing the same, making available–for a fee that adds about 20 percent to the cost of posting a job–the ability to direct applicants to a questionnaire designed to rank the suitability of candidates.

Sure, candidates can try to game these surveys by being less than truthful. But Gerlach insists that surveys can be designed to stymie such people by asking questions that don’t have an obviously right answer–such as whether the person prefers to work independently or in groups–and by warning candidates that they can be rated as overqualified. Protuo, which costs hirers $44 to $295 a month depending on the number of jobs they’re posting and is currently free to job seekers, also offers applicants a chance to do more than post a resumé. The firm invites users to create online portfolios that can include whatever documents, photos, videos, or other material that best represents that person’s career to date. (Monster is currently testing a similar capability.)

ZoomInfo, in Waltham, Massachusetts, takes a different approach. It assembles profiles of potential job candidates from all available online data, whether or not they’re looking for jobs. Starting with the same techniques that Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) uses to gather Web data associated with a person’s name, ZoomInfo adds the significant additional step of crunching the results to pull out the most relevant information, weed out data referring to other people of the same name, and assemble a professional profile. ZoomInfo has an R&D team of 35 working on the technology. So far, the company has assembled some 34 million profiles, and as far as I can tell, most of them are fairly informative and accurate. (Check out your own name to put it to the test.)

But somebody has to pay for all those scientists, and that somebody is you. The company charges $5,000 a user per year for the ability to dig up personnel profiles by company or industry. It sounds like a lot, but ZoomInfo’s COO, Bryan Burdick, notes that if you get the right candidate for a single vacancy, the price is one-sixth that of using a recruiting firm. The company also offers less expensive, more limited searching capabilities aimed at smaller companies, as well as free access to searches on individuals. Many major executive search firms, along with some 500 other corporations, already use ZoomInfo, claims Burdick. “I can find personal information, professional backgrounds–and, sometimes, damning evidence–on tens of millions of people without having to go through 1.5 million Google hits on each one,” says John Boehmer, managing partner at executive search firm Barlow Group in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Boehmer is quick to point out that as ZoomInfo-like services get better, and more companies get comfortable using them, corporate hirers won’t need professional recruiting firms like his to turn up candidates. “It’s commoditizing the front end of what we do,” he says. “Eventually, everyone will know where everyone is and how to get hold of them, so we won’t be able to charge for identifying and contacting candidates.” Search firms will still be valuable for assessing candidates, he contends, though he acknowledges that new e-hiring systems could eventually eat into that end of the business as they get smarter and have more online data to work with.

For that matter, it’s easy to imagine the not-all-that-distant day when online tools make it so easy to find people to fill a specific slot that the notion of permanent jobs becomes irrelevant for many positions. Why hire a manager for years when you can find a new one with exactly the skill set needed for the precise tasks at hand? That’s not necessarily bad for employees: Think of an economy where top employees are constantly being sought out and bid over by companies that recognize them from their Web trails as the perfect short-term solution. And talented employees would be just as smart about whom they choose to work for–using similar services to weed out companies that aren’t good matches for them. You’ll want to treat those people well. If you don’t, and they post that fact online, it could haunt you for a long, long time.

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Five Favorite Facebook Widgets for Business Users

By C.G. Lynch, CIO.com

Most Facebook developers will tell you that they create two different kinds of widgets. There are widgets of expression, geared towards harnessing the viral aspect of Facebook by getting users to share the app with other users.

These “expression” widgets often don’t have much of a goal beyond entertainment. One, for instance, lets users share movie ratings. Another helps users build “virtual scrapbooks.” The second kind is the utilitarian widget, which include clocks, weather reports and other helpful accessories.

Five Favorites

We scoured the widget libraries and came up with five of our favorites for business users based on their utility for getting the job done. Feel free to add suggestions in the comment space below for widgets that we might have missed.

1) Wikimono

Face it. E-mail has become so passi for document authoring that writing this sentence explaining that to you even seems a bit trite. The exhausting task of opening, renaming, saving and then sending a file (then repeat) leads to no version of the truth. So why not a wiki instead? The principle behind Wikimono is as simple as their website, which says, “We love Facebook, we love wikis.” You might love how discreetly you can bookmark the wikis on your Facebook profile and the decent set of editing tools that comes with it. And when we say decent, we don’t just mean bold, italics and underline. As you can see from this spec list, you can add video, math formulas, maps and all kinds of pictures. Use Wikimono to plan the agenda for your next meeting or take food requests for your holiday party.

2) MyLinkedIn Profile

Booooo-ring, yes, but necessary for the business user since Facebook still gears its site towards the consumer experience. Though you can list your professional experience under the built in “Information” app of Facebook, it still doesn’t match the depth and breadth of the curriculum vitae that you can build on your LinkedIn profile and then share with other professionals. Some Facebook Apps help you upload your LinkedIn profile to your actual Facebook profile, but this simple badge seems to do the trick just fine.

3) Sticky Notes

The first response you might get if you add this helpful widget will be “but what about the wall? Can’t you just use that?” They’re referring to the built-in Facebook app that allows friends (or people who have access to your Facebook page) to leave a messages for you publicly. The problem? Most walls tend to be a laundry list of social comments and inside jokes that eventually blur together, especially if you get a ton of them. If someone added “meet with team at 3 p.m.” to your own wall, for instance, there’s a good chance you’d miss it. Sticky Notes are big and come in a variety of colors (we prefer the standard yellow). Created by J-Squared Media, a small widget company that sprung up in large part because of Sticky Notes’ success, the app already has around 200,000 active users. You can leave notes for yourself on your own page, or you can leave them for colleagues (provided they have the app as well).

4) Blog RSS Feed Reader

Another way to keep project management away from your e-mail inbox (where it doesn’t belong) is to have internal blogs. If you’ve made that leap, why not feed them to your Facebook page? We picked this reader over several other RSS widgets on the Facebook App list because it can pull from enterprise-worthy blogging apps such as Movable Type. As updates to a project occur, the blog entries feed through the Reader and onto your Facebook page.

5) Marco Polo

If you work for one of the Big Corporations, odds are your workforce is spread across the country or maybe even the world. By utilizing this Facebook news feed with mapping technology, you can track the location of your friends and colleagues. Need to plan a business meeting? Just get a view of where everyone is currently located and find the most convenient location. If you want to let you’re friends know you’re on the road on business, check out Marco Polo‘s notification tool.

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Online marketplace for people renting items and those who need to rent them

 

by Errol Pierre-Louis

Zilok is an online marketplace for people renting items and those who need to rent them. The simple, intuitive interface helps visitors connect and facilitates the transactions. It’s a nifty site that’ll get more useful as the community grows.

Provides an easy-to-use platform where you’ll find items you typically wouldn’t see for rent and can make money renting out items you use only occasionally. Facilitates the transactions. Provides PayPal deposits to insure your items. A calendar shows when items are available.

Too small a community to be useful right now. The service will stop being free come 2008.

We all have a ton of stuff we barely use that’s just gathering dust in the garage or closet. You could justify your purchase of that cordless drill or ski set by inventing new ways to use them between uses, but why not put them to work making money for you? Zilok.com gives you an online place where you can easily do just that and also easily find items you’ll only need for a short time. The creators hope to make their site the one-stop online shop for locating anything you need on a temporary basis.

The site is like a Craigslist for rentals, showing available items in your area, but it also assists in the rental process, giving you the tools needed to set up terms and facilitate the transaction online. For instance, using Zilok search I found someone in the New York City area offering a Nikon D80 Digital-SLR camera and a 2GB memory card at a daily rate of $12 for 1 to 15 days. If that met my needs and budget, I’d send in a rent request, wait for an acceptance from the lender, and then set up a time and place to meet and pay for the item. It’s that simple.

You can sign up for the service as a business (if you’re a professional rental service) or an individual. As a lender, you can give potential customers peace of mind by becoming a verified member. To do so, you supply Zilok with your cell phone number, and in return, you’ll receive a text message confirming your information. Verification links an account to something concrete, giving potential renters more reason to trust you. Member profiles include ratings and customer feedback, which give you a good feel for who it is you’re renting from.

The stipulations you place on items you’re willing to loan out—the per-day price and length of rental—display online on that item’s page. A Zilok-provided rental agreement template for users to sign covers everything that happens in case of damage or lost of rented items. You can also set up a PayPal deposit as insurance on your goods.

To find items for rent, you search by keyword or category, then look at Zilok’s Google Maps mashup, which shows what’s available in your area. You can click on the image of the item to view the terms of rental and the lender’s profile. The item’s specs, supplied by the lender, appear below the map and the rental terms. A helpful calendar on the items page shows when the item is available. When you find something you like, clicking on the rent item button sends you to the booking page where you propose a start and end date for your rental and how long you’re willing to wait for an acceptance reply from the lender.

Once the rental request is accepted things move from the virtual to the actual. The lender and renter set up a meeting location by e-mail, where they meet and hash out the final details, such as payment method, and complete the transaction. After that, Zilok is no longer part of the process. The site doesn’t handle the actual exchange of the item and payment. The rental agreement, which according to Zilok ensures that “the consequences of an incident are governed by this contract and of course by any legislation that is in effect,” confirms the deal and conditions, helping to safeguard both sides.

As of this writing, the service is free, but that may change in less than two months. Starting January 2008, you might have to pay to put items up for rent. Site reps told me they’ll evaluate the site density, and if there are enough users to support it they’ll implement a charging scheme similar to what newspapers charge for classified ads. If there aren’t enough users, the site will remain free until later in 2008.

You can already find places to rent specific items, like cars, tuxedos, power tools—whatever—on- and off-line. But Zilok will create a marketplace where you’ll find not only those items, but others you don’t typically see—all in one place. The site is still too small to be tremendously useful right now. As of this writing there are only about 180 items up for rent in the U.S. I’m also not sure that imposing fees is the best way to promote growth. I doubt craigslist would’ve achieve such massive popularity if it charged a fee, no matter how minimal, to post ads. Regardless, Zilok sounds like a fantastic idea, and I’ll be interested to see if it will work.

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Business intelligence now a given for SMBs

By Linda Tucci.

Central Maine Medical Family is small by big-city standards, with some $280 million in revenue and 2,000 employees. But the aim is to get bigger by operating smarter. In order to meet that initiative, the medical center’s financial staff looked to business intelligence

“We want our finance department to be strategic, not transaction-oriented,” said Wayne Bennett, vice president of finance at the three-hospital system. “Instead of adding value to our managers, however, we were spending all our time moving data around, creating reports and emailing them to people.”

Central Maine Medical Family operates hospitals in Lewiston, Rumford and Bridgton, Maine. Much of its region is rural, stretching from northeastern New Hampshire to the Rangeley Lakes area and just south of Augusta, the state capital. Some 400,000 people turn to the Central Maine Medical Center for medical treatment, Bennett said, but many more “are driving by us,” to Portland and farther, for medical care. The center’s big push is to convince more central Mainers to seek “care closer to home” — its new slogan — by highlighting new offerings, such as its cardiac program.

Documenting how many people come into a Central Maine Medical Family emergency room for chest pain and from where, and then acting on that information, requires merging many data sources, Bennett said. Excel spreadsheets were proving labor intensive and difficult, besides.

Bennett started looking for a tool that could integrate financial, clinical and patient population data to produce the much-vaunted single version of the truth. “We needed performance dashboards that aligned with our strategies.” he said. And employees needed to easily access reports online, so the 30-person financial department did not have to spend its days pushing paper. Business Objects Crystal Decisions, a midmarket product from San Jose, Calif.-based Business Objects SA, proved to be the answer.

A growth market

Bennett is not alone in turning to BI. According to a recent report from consultancy Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., companies are spending more on BI and using it for more things, from complying with regulatory reporting requirements to measuring system performance. Use of the technology has spread from the confines of upper management to operations people, managers and even customers, pushing what Gartner predicts is a solid 9.5% annual growth through 2010.

“It’s very much a growing market for SMBs,” said Michael Speyer, who covers the SMB market for Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. The push is coming from both small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and vendors eager to exploit a promising software niche.”Companies now realize they can get more out of the data assets they have collected. The growth is also a reflection of the fact that IT systems in the midmarket are quite mature,” Speyer said. “BI is relatively less well adopted, compared to other types of applications.”

No question the big guys have taken notice. Microsoft, Oracle and SAP AG have set their sights on the BI platform market, muscling in on pure-play BI vendors. Indeed, the variety of choices can overwhelm, said Michael Schiff, principal of MAS Strategies, a BI and data warehousing consulting firm in Reston, Va.

The first step is an IT assessment, Schiff and others said. BI buyers need to identify the various data sources their organizations draw on to do business. And, if the company uses a bunch of technologies from different vendors, a vendor-agnostic specialist, such as Business Objects, may well be the way to go, Schiff said.

Simple, but not dumb

Business Objects’ marketing vice president, Todd Rowe, pegs the growth of BI in the midmarket as five times faster than at large companies. “Smaller companies are producing massive amounts of information, but what they don’t have is line of sight into their business, so they can make real-time decisions,” Rowe said.

@37577 Business Objects rejected the route taken by many vendors to the midmarket, Rowe claimed — that is, dumbing down the enterprise version and slapping a discount on it. He said Business Objects’ midmarket line is simplified for easy use, but it isn’t simple in terms of functionality. A new edition announced Tuesday, Business Objects Crystal Decisions Professional, provides data integration functionalities as well as intelligent reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, and dashboards capabilities.

The finance department at Central Maine hired a global consulting firm and Business Objects partner, SDG Group, to help configure the software, Bennett said. “They really understand the concept of business intelligence,” he said, and, more important, were able and willing to meet with users and identify “what the pains were” and fix it. “They didn’t just install the technology; they spent a lot of time understanding our business needs,” Bennett said.

A few months in, the system is getting rave reviews from users. Finance staffers are a tad more hesitant about the change.

“You get comfortable sitting in your cube, moving data around all day and producing reports,” he said. “It is a little less comfortable thinking of yourself as going out into the hospital and working with people side by side and teaching them the skills they need to build their financial acumen.”

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Google For IT?

By Andrew Conry-Murray

These days, if people have a question they turn to Google for an answer. Startup Paglo wants to become Google for IT administrators.

The company, which launched today, is developing a search engine that lets IT professionals query their own network infrastructure and software.

Interested users can sign up for a private beta, which is expected to launch at the end of November.

Here’s how it works. Customers download Paglo’s crawler to a server or PC. The crawler gathers information about each machine on the network, including device type, name, IP address, installed software, and so on. The crawler communicates the information to Paglo’s data center, where it’s indexed and stored.

Customers then access their accounts to run searches on the information gathered by the crawler. In the demo that CEO Brian de Haaff showed me, he imagine an admin that wanted to know if he had enough Office 2003 licenses for all the copies of the software running in the organization. He queried the search engine for all the instances of Office on the network. The search engine kicked back the answer, which could be displayed as text, or in charts or tables.

Of course, any half-baked network software tool should be able cough up basic information like this. De Haaff says the value of the search engine is that it pulls this information out of its respective tool-based silos and makes it available with a simple query.

However, the tool has limitations. In the demo, de Haaff couldn’t ask “How many licenses for Office 2003 do I have?” because the system can’t yet discover that information. Instead, he assumed the administrator would know how many licenses he had, and then match it to the number of instances of Office actually on the network.

It would be great to see the crawler and indexer develop enough sophistication to query data stores, such as those held by an asset management tool, and include that information in its search.

Also, the results of a search will be influenced by the initial search request. A poorly worded query will generate poor results. Paglo provides two search options: standard keyword search, and the Paglo Query Language. The query language is intended for sophisticated searches, but also imposes a learning curve on would-be searchers.

Please note that the company itself is only five months old, so these critiques should be taken in context.

DID I MENTION IT’S FREE?
Paglo takes a page from the Web 2.0 playbook by offering the crawler and search service for free. “When we have a lot of users, then we’ll think about monetization,” says de Haaff. I’m sure his investors have given it some thought, especially considering that Paglo is absorbing all the costs for storing and processing each user’s network data.

Advertising or subscription fees are the most likely business models. But de Haaff says that for the foreseeable future, Paglo won’t charge for the service.

That’s not the only Web 2.0 play. De Haaff also hopes to build a community of users that will share useful queries with one another and add features to the crawler (which is open source).

For those worried about data privacy (and that should be everybody), Paglo partitions each customer’s data to prevent the information from being seen by others.

Pedigree is always a consideration with startups. Paglo’s got a solid one. Co-founders de Haaff and Dr. Chris Waters come from Network Chemistry, a network management and wireless security vendor. They recently sold Network Chemistry’s wireless security business to Aruba. They are using the proceeds, which are undisclosed, to finance Paglo. Paglo was formerly known as Project Wishbone.

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Is the Web 2.0 Bubble Set to Burst?

By Jim Rapoza

In recent months, an increasing number of technology analysts and pundits have started to sound the alarm that we are on the cusp of another technology bubble burst—in this case, the Web 2.0 bubble. If you expect me to disagree with these pundits, guess again. Of course another bubble burst is coming.

All of this talk about bubbles got me thinking about the classic cycles of busts. Because when you analyze past technology bubbles, you’ll always see the same progression from pure technology to pure marketing. By paying attention to this progression, you might even be able to tell when a bubble is getting too big for its own good and is likely to burst.

So how does one begin to build a technology bubble? At the beginning of a bubble, it’s all technology. This is the point of entry of the inventers. These are the people who have the idea of a new groundbreaking technology, such as e-commerce, social networking, PC software, whatever. At this end of the spectrum, the participants are brilliant technologically but have no marketing skills whatsoever. The only people who are paying attention to their breakthroughs are those with similar technological inclinations.

The next phase is where the innovative entrepreneurs come in. These players understand the technology but also have enough marketing skills and salesmanship to build products that people actually want, and they are able to start real buzz around a new technology.

This leads to the equilibrium point for technology and marketing. This is also the stage in a technology bubble where the biggest, best and most enduring solutions are created—whether it’s Microsoft, Amazon, Google or eBay.

Unfortunately, this is also the stage in which the people who are all marketing and no technology decide that it’s time to get in on the action. You know who these “entrepreneurs” are. These are the snake oil salesmen. The people who talk a good game and can convince anyone from venture capitalists to the press to the general public that they have the biggest, coolest, most important new thing out there.

So what if their product doesn’t do anything, or has no way to actually make money, or is a bad version of another product that’s already out there? These players are so good at marketing themselves and their products that they are able to generate irrational exuberance.

But all these people are really supplying is a bunch of hot air. And you know what happens to bubbles when they get too full of hot air.

Pop.

And so the bubble bursts, taking down the shameful hucksters who caused the burst (though also typically taking down a few legitimate companies that deserved better).

But the bubble burst isn’t always a bad thing. For the technologies involved, it can be a cleansing experience. With all the hype and hot air removed, the technology can settle down to doing its intended job. After all, despite the damage of the .com bust, e-commerce is doing just fine.

So keep an eye on your bubble cycles and know when to avoid the hot air. And, remember: Somewhere out there right now is a technology-savvy and marketing-weak inventor who is starting the first puffs for a whole new technology bubble.

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