HRMDirect COO Colin Kingsbury writes on the latest in recruiting and technology.

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The official press release is here. We first met Django in early December when we started looking for a senior-level developer to add to our technical team here in Boston.

When we learned that Django was the original founder of HireAbility, one of the more innovative recruitment echnology companies in the space, we realized we had found someone a lot more valuable. The past month had seen some of our most rapid growth to date, and a continued steady increase in the size of the average new client. Django offered a unique combination of industry experience, deep technical knowledge, and a large helping of enthusiasm for the culture and lifestyle that goes along with a rapid-growth technology business.

One of the great strengths smaller companies have is their ability to match capability with opportunity in recruiting. Large companies flush with cash *should* be able to do this better, but only a special few actually do. When you're trying to fill a square hole, it's can be hard to build a case for an extraordinary round peg, and it's often impossible to do it quickly.

Fortunately, this was one of those times when we were able to bring the stars into necessary alignment, and the result is a mutually exciting opportunity. We have always known that 2008 would be a big year for HRMDirect, but now we look forward to it being truly extraordinary.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 402 ) A friend asked the other day why I haven't been blogging much and the simple answer is that we've just been too busy growing here. Last week we signed our 104th client, Quality Bicycle Products in Minneapolis, and we've been busy as all get-up with implementations from a scorching Q3, including a number of clients switching to us from name-brand competitors. Rapid growth can be painful at the best of times, but it's the kind of pain that makes you stronger.

We Hired!
Last week we added another member to the Client Service team here. Stephen Bass, a 2004 BU graduate with a CS degree and a solid support background, applied to a job we had posted on Craigslist, and within 5 days he was hired. Stephen impressed us as someone who could grow with the business and we're very happy to have him. It's a great market but Stephen quickly realized that the opportunity to be part of an organization like ours was special, and we salute his good judgment!

As the hiring manager and recruiter for the position, I have to say that I have no idea how people fill positions without an ATS. Well, I do have an idea, but it's got to be incredibly annoying to have to sit there and manually sort candidates into piles, send individual emails to everybody, and go digging through Outlook or a spreadsheet to look up a phone number. There's a saying that you should eat your own dogfood, and I though it tasted like filet mignon.

This was the second position we filled through Craigslist, and once again the results were great. I've defended Monster against charges of irrelevance more than once (I can see how many jobs our clients fill through them) but in this case I don't know what the extra $400 would have gotten us.

That was fun, let's do it again!
Now we're hiring for a Web Application Architect, and we're really looking for someone who is super-jazzed about the idea of joining a small and very dynamic company like HRMDirect. This is another great opportunity which has every potential to scale with the business.

As an experiment, I decided to post this position on TechCrunch's CrunchBoard. TechCrunch is probably one of the best sites for keeping up on the latest hot and wild startups, and attracts an audience of enthusiastic nerds with a business orientation. I've always been impressed by the level of intelligence in the comments on posts. At $200 it's not cheap, but TC has a very specific audience, and I'm interested to see if it delivers.

With close to three years and over a hundred clients under our belt, we're a long way from the stab-in-the-dark nature of many of the startups featured on TechCrunch, but we're still young, vibrant, and full of spots on the org chart marked TBD. At some point, even working in a sexy consumer-facing company is going to involve its share of ditch-digging, and the more heavily-funded a startup is, the more likely that working there is going to be just like working at a large established company, minus the job security. For a great egghead with entrepreneurial aspirations, this place is like an MBA in Real World Business, with a full-ride scholarship and a great stipend.


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permalink  |   ( 3 / 480 ) Over the weekend we released Resume Direct 2.1 as a way of celebrating two years (to the day) since launching the beta. We've added over 70 clients since then (60 of them in 2006 alone) and the functionality we offer has grown far and wide with them.

Aside from some great new features like custom fields, the largest part of this release was dedicated to an "Extreme Makeover" of the requisition UI screens. The requisition pages have probably undergone more changes in the past two years than any other single part of the system. In 2005 it was little more than title, department, and location. Now there are roughly two dozen standard options, and with custom fields, clients can take that number as high as they want it.

Starting around six months ago we began noticing that in both demos and new client training sessions, an inordinate amount of time was being spent on screens that represented less than a quarter of the overall functionality we offered. No one (either prospects or clients) was complaining that it was too complicated, but the internal feedback loop between our support and training staff and the product development team kept coming back and saying "we need to do better."

Design-centric thinking may be newly in vogue in the software industry but for me personally it is old hat. Both of my parents were working artists, my father the head of creative services for nearly thirty years at the fragrance company Coty. Along the way he got to work with Sophia Lauren (who once baked him banana bread in her hotel suite) and threw away a bunch of original sketches by Andy Warhol, then just another mediocre freelancer looking to make a few extra bucks.

One of his greatest successes was the launch of Exclamation! in the late 80s. Perhaps his proudest achievement was to see the bottle exhibited at the MoMA, which had been his favorite museum since he was in art school. It's not an exaggeration to say that bottle helped put me through college. What is perhaps the most fascinating thing is that when I mention it to people, the first thing they remember isn't what the fragrance smelled like, but what it looked like.

For HRMDirect, the benefits of good design are no less acute:

- Reduced training cost
- Reduced support cost
- Increased adoption by end-users (especially hiring managers)

Most software vendors only care peripherally about these issues because:

a) they make money charging extra for training
b) they make money charging extra for enhanced support
c) the licenses were sold up front, so it's out of their hands

Why does HRMDirect care? As a software-as-a-service provider we are set up entirely differently.

1. We include training in our base prices, so the less training clients require to become effective, the better we do

2. We include full support in our base prices, so the more support clients require, the less money we make

3. Our licenses are sold annually, so we need clients to renew and hopefully increase the number of licenses each year to succeed.

In a SaaS world, we succeed the more closely we align with client needs, and good design, an afterthought in virtually every system out there, takes pride of place for us. While I don't know that I'll ever see screenshots of our new requisition UIs in a museum, and I'm quite sure that Scarlett Johanssen will never bake me banana bread, good design sensibility is in my genes and permeates everything we do here at HRM.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 610 ) We're growing fast here at HRMDirect and that means we need more people to help us take our renowned loving care of existing clients and assist in bringning new customers on board. This is an exciting position and would provide a great growth opportunity for a recent graduate or for a junior recruiting/HR staff member who'd like to make the switch to the software industry. This is a multi-functional role which will be shaped in large part by the skill set and interests you bring into it.

You can view a full description of the opening at:

http://jobs.hrmdirect.com/employment/view.php?req=1711

This is a work-from-home position, so candidates from around the US are welcome, though we would especially like to meet people in the greater Boston metro area.

Also, we are pleased to offer a $500 referral bonus for this role. If you know a great person, you can send their resume to this address:

1711-CS-563@jobs.hrmdirect.com

All applications are confidential and will be reviewed personally by yours truly. If you have questions, please feel free to call me at 617-938-3801 or send an email to the address above.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 584 ) I'm happy to introduce you to Pat Williams, who writes the Guerilla HR blog and is director of global talent management for Factiva, a Dow Jones/Reuters company based in New Jersey. He's also a client and in a recent post talked about how HRMDirect applicant trackinghelps Factiva improve their recruiting results. Hint: it's not just about reducing compliance costs.

The best sales calls we have are the ones with people like Pat, because they aren't really sales calls: they're conversations between managers who share a vision of how to solve a problem. Pat had worked with and implemented a variety of applicant tracking systems in previous lives, and learned what every veteran knows: they're too complicated to deliver on their most audacious promises, and too expensive for what they actually do provide.

A key part of our philosophy here at HRMDirect is what we call Focus On What Matters Most. Trying to solve every problem in one fell swoop leads to indecision and delay. This is reflected in Pat's post on achieving work-life balance:

Take a little time to assess just how much time and energy you are expending each day and examine if or how this exertion is helping you meet your goals. If it's not... it's time to make a course correction to a pure focus on YOUR GOALS! I'll bet keeping this focus will help you find the time you need for your family and your sanity.

There's also a great podcast at the Cranky Middle Manager where Pat talks about the real nitty-gritty of talent management for the next decade. It's a great riposte to anyone who says the smart choice for companies is to outsource it to the experts. It may be cheap but it won't help you be great.

Pat says good things about us because we help to make him look good. He rolled out an ATS in a matter of weeks for a great price without the huge process change and user adoption problems all the other vendors force on you. We've given him plenty of follow-up service too, but not any different than what every HRMDirect client gets with their standard subscription. So if you're on the fence about getting an ATS or which one to choose, let us know and we'll show you why one client stopped looking around the minute he saw us.

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