Software Solutions for the Human Capital Industry

Silicon Republic reports that last Thursday, the Irish job board Jobs.ie was hacked, resulting in the illegal theft of a number of resumes. It has become increasingly common for job boards to find themselves targeted by hackers due to the wealth of personal information and contact details, combined with below par security on many of these sites.

“The fact that this information was illegally gathered increases the possibility of it being illegally used. This would include seeking personal loans and credit cards, identity theft, seeking false ID such as a driving licence or birth certificate, and identity cloning.”

Jobs.ie were quick to contact affected users and inform them of the security breach and outlined how to avoid becoming a victim of phishing or email scams that might follow as a result. BH Consulting commends Jobs.ie on their quick response and acknowledgement of the issue in a country where there are mandatory breach disclosure law.

On an international scale, Jobs.ie is a small site. What about the thousands of other job boards out there that don’t have this level of concern for their users? What about the biggest of all - Monster.com? How often does a leak ten times as large as the Jobs.ie breach go undisclosed?

Glandore Systems is working on a solution to eliminate the risk to job-seekers who distribute their resumes online. Anyone who has been affected by a security breach on a job board, or who wants to find out more about how to protect their personal information and guard against identity theft, contact us to learn more.

Recently there have been a number of attempts by job boards at tapping into the Long Tail potential of blogs and widget-enabled social network sites through distributed job advertising. While millions of blogs, forums, social networks, and other websites have been living off the revenue sharing from Google Adsense, so far nobody has come up with a good solution for distributing job postings. SnapTalent launched today, looking smarter than other efforts made in this area (including Monster’s Career Ad Network).

Promising to help you reach higher quality hand-picked candidates that would never have discovered your company otherwise, SnapTalent ultimately consists of little more than small preview of a job advertisement in a web page, expanding to a larger version with more information that supports images and embedded video (from YouTube, Google Video, and Vimeo). The value of the service depends on where the ad is shown, so if a lot of website owners sign up and participate then it will open up new opportunities for recruiters who understand their target market.

In 2007, it became common for popular bloggers and news sites to launch a job board. For example, Joel Spolsky, has a niche job board affiliated with his software blog which sees regular postings at a cost of $350 per job and gives you access to the highly targeted demographic that frequents his site. SnapTalent goes a step further by integrating the job advertising into the page itself. Consider that the tech news site TechCrunch is currently the most requested advertising destination on SnapTalent, despite already having a traditional job board attached. It reflects the fact that many of the really good quality candidates (both active and passive) never take the time to visit a job board.

Other advantages for advertisers include the ability to pre-pay for clicks rather than per posting. A cost $250 for every 500 clicks sounds like good value, although I prefer to see more intelligent billing system (e.g., based on salary or competitiveness like Adsense). A portion of the money goes to the website owner, and there should be no shortage of site owners participating as long as this pays better than AdSense.

I did encounter some bugs and JavaScript errors while using the site itself, but I’m sure these will be ironed out soon. Critically, the ads look good. They are customizable, with unobtrusive popups. SnapTalent’s main selling point could end up being the ability to analyze and improve targeting of the jobs, ultimately leading to higher quality candidates and better efficiency overall. SnapTalent does not revolutionize internet recruiting, but it is another step in the right direction and is worth keeping an eye on.

I attended Staffing Industry’s Executive Forum in Las Vegas this past week. The SI Exec Forum is particularly successful in bringing together public company staffing executives and owners of fast growing private staffing firms. This year, the SI planners chose to locate the event 20 miles from the Las Vegas strip ($50 cab ride each way) which therefore resulted in record attendance of all the events, an unusual occurrence for a Las Vegas conference. Not sure if that was strategic on their part, or whether they simply went for the cheaper resort, but either way it probably saved me considerable gambling losses due to the inconvenience of the location relative to the strip. Kudos to you Staffing Industry, Inc.

A big buzz at the conference was the relatively new concept of the offshore RPO and I had the opportunity to meet some of the industry leaders in that field. Christopher Even, Director of Global Marketing from RPO Worldwide and Aaron Green, President of PSG, both provided an informative and compelling discussion of opportunities and challenges that exist with offshore RPO. The opportunities as one would expect is the ability to leverage a low cost workforce and the bulk of the challenges centered around communication and integrating the offshore component to one’s onshore team as seamlessly as possible.

I asked the panel how they go about measuring the service’s effectiveness and potential ROI for their customers and was extremely encouraged by their response. Ok, clearly it was a loaded question as one of Glandore Systems’ flag ship products does exactly this in real time. Instead, I was told that one needs to give the offshore partnership time to evaluate it (30 day hypothetical scenario I gave was dismissed as being much too short a time to be able to measure it’s ROI). The panel’s response indicated to me that one of Glandore Systems’ technology solutions for offshore RPO’s represents an eminently large market opportunity. The offshore RPO industry is clearly is in its infancy and congrats to Chris and Aaron for forging the way with the services and infrastructure.

Today we launched our new website and company blog (proudly powered by Wordpress - the “state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform”).

These are exciting times for the industry. Over the past few years, the increasingly central role of the internet in the hiring process has been supported by advancements in technology that paved the way for innovation and better practices across the board. On this blog, we’ll be keeping an eye on how the industry evolves to make the most of the tools available, and keeping you up to date on what we’re working on at Glandore Systems.

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