http://www.hrmdirect.com/hrm2/newscycle/index.php Copyright 2010, HRMDirect HRMDirect en-US SPHPBLOG 0.4.6.1 http://www.hrmdirect.com/hrm2/newscycle/index.php?entry=entry080128-150457 Veteran industry technologist to spearhead next phase of company's growth

Boston, Mass.—January 28, 2008—HRMDirect Inc., a Boston-based provider of talent management software based on a 100% Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform on an industry-leading low-cost model, today announced the appointment of Django Bliss as Chief Technical Officer. Bliss was the founder of resume parsing and applicant tracking firm HireAbility, and served as its chief technical officer from 1997 prior to joining HRMDirect. “Django built one of the largest and most robust on-demand infrastructures in our industry,” said HRMDirect president and co-founder Colin Kingsbury. “With surging demand for 100% SaaS talent management solutions, it was time for us to ramp up our senior talent to be ready for the market.”

HRMDirect chairman AG Lavoie added that the current economic climate strongly favors low-cost SaaS providers like HRMDirect. “Companies keep hiring. Turnover happens. The difference is that companies are no longer willing to pour champagne over mediocre applications and are starting to look for real value from their applicant tracking provider. As a price leader, we benefit from that.” Sales to larger clients have been increasing steadily over the past two quarters, Lavoie said, with a major hotel operator and a leading global security firm signing annual service agreements in the past 30 days.

“I’m tremendously excited to be joining the HRMDirect team,” Bliss said. “I saw a culture of innovation closely aligned with client needs here that was unique.” With one of the industry’s only ground-up 100% SaaS strategies, Bliss felt that HRMDirect was uniquely positioned to deliver rapid product advancement while maintaining its position as an aggressive cost leader. “Changing times demand new approaches. HRMDirect’s focus on delivering maximum out-of-the-box integrated services is a real game-changer.”

About HRMDirect
Founded in Boston in 2004, HRMDirect currently serves thousands of recruiters and over 120 companies from household names including Publishers Clearing House, Blackwater Worldwide, and the American Hospital Association, to fast-growing startups like Zillow and ZoomInfo, in a variety of industries from manufacturing to retail, hospitality, healthcare, and high technology. With no setup fees, typical deployments completed in 30 days or less, and a fanatical focus on ease-of-use, HRMDirect is dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of implementing an applicant tracking system, which many companies require for state and federal compliance including EEOC and OFCCP affecting most FDIC-insured banks and federal contractors.

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Media Contact
Jeremy Hoffman
Media Relations, North America
jhoffman@hrmdirect.com
(402) 805-9273]]> http://www.hrmdirect.com/hrm2/newscycle/?entry=entry080128-150457 HRMDirect Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:04:57 GMT http://www.hrmdirect.com/hrm2/newscycle/index.php?entry=entry070211-184754 Resume Direct 2.1 upgrade has been compeleted on schedule. Recruiter access was restored by approximately 5pm ET on Sunday and all queued applications have completed processing. Client career websites remained online throughout the upgrade so as to prevent the loss of critical hours of candidate attention during the prime weekend hours.

This upgrade comes two years to the day since the launch of Resume Direct in 2005. In this time we have rolled out eight major releases and at least a dozen smaller ones, every one of which was deployed seamlessly with limited or no downtime to all clients. With these we have added over 20 major new features and hundreds of little tweaks and enhancements to maintain our category-leading ease of use.

We want to thank all of you, our valued clients, for your continuing support and constructive feedback. With over 60 clients added in the past twelve months, HRMDirect is rapidly on its way to joining the top tier of applicant tracking providers. While we don't ever want to forget our startup roots, growth provides access to additional resources which we look forward to putting to good use to continue enhancing the HRMDirect client experience.]]> http://www.hrmdirect.com/hrm2/newscycle/?entry=entry070211-184754 HRMDirect Sun, 11 Feb 2007 23:47:54 GMT http://www.hrmdirect.com/hrm2/newscycle/index.php?entry=entry070206-225442
We will be talking more about the results over the coming months, but first, a few of the things which stuck out:

- 74% of you use Resume Direct at least once a day.
- 59% had never used an ATS before, while 22% considered themselves "ATS veterans"
- 84% consider our unique apply-by-email a "Must-Have Feature." Wow!
- 95% would recommend Resume Direct

What You Told Us
Above all you told us you want more documentation. We'll write it if you promise to read it! Second, you want more speed and power! No surprise there, and we are gearing up to deliver some big performance upgrades. People now expect web applications to be as responsive as desktop programs and we aim to satisfy.

In terms of major new features, custom fields and enhanced application forms functionality were high scorers. Custom fields are coming out very soon, and we're working hard on some new enhancements for application forms. A sleeper surprise was options for additional email auto-responders, which are now on our radar screen.

Task and process management is something we've been drilling into since the start, and we've always approached this a little differently than everyone else. This was also a very popular area which we were already working on before the survey went out, and we were happily surprised to see something so abstract be recognized so widely.

Last, we were a little surprised to see integrated background checks and assessment tests score at 16 out of 18 possible new features. This remains a messy process and we expected it to be more popular, but that's what keeps elections interesting.

Still, even the lowest scoring ideas had multiple clients voting for them as critical/must-have features. This illustrated very well why most ATS vendors have becomes jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none. There is an audience for every feature you can imagine and it is not easy to resist the temptation to implement check-the-box features which only work in scripted demos.

We'll be writing more about our plans for 2007 and beyond but we wanted to once again thank everyone for taking the time to respond in such great detail. The feedback was eagerly anticipated and has already played a key part in many key decisions here. ]]> http://www.hrmdirect.com/hrm2/newscycle/?entry=entry070206-225442 HRMDirect Wed, 07 Feb 2007 03:54:42 GMT http://www.hrmdirect.com/hrm2/newscycle/index.php?entry=entry070206-222111 A note from Colin Kingsbury

I wanted to take a brief moment to introduce everyone to Justin Gallucci, who recently joined our Account Management team. In the coming weeks many of you will begin to get to know Justin as one of the new faces of HRMDirect's client service team.

Justin arrives as he's finishing up his degree in MIS having paid his way through school running his own IT consulting firm. This experience has given Justin an unusually advanced sense of the importance of providing great client service. In his interview he told me that while clients might initially buy you for your product, competitors would always copy it, but that customer service was something you could always choose to do better than everyone else.

No one could have possibly summarized our feelings better and we're greatly looking forward to seeing Justin grow with us. Our client list continues to grow rapidly and with Justin on board we are looking forward to continuing our tradition of dedicated, expert-level support for all clients. ]]> http://www.hrmdirect.com/hrm2/newscycle/?entry=entry070206-222111 HRMDirect Wed, 07 Feb 2007 03:21:11 GMT http://www.hrmdirect.com/hrm2/newscycle/index.php?entry=entry070206-205135 Resume Direct, scheduled to begin this coming weekend, Feburary 10th-11th.

Custom Fields
This eagerly-awaited feature was originally scheduled for a late Q1/early Q2 release but some key additions to our technology team helped us complete this ahead of schedule. As a result we decided to hold back the 2.1 release a little longer in order to get custom fields out ASAP.

Custom fields will be supported at the candidate and requisition level and can be added by clients using the setup tools. Those of you who have used screening questions will find the process to be very similar, and everyone is of course welcome to contact the support team for help setting up and using this great new feature.

Attachment Handling
The email processing pipeline has been upgraded to support extraction and capture of all email attachments in addition to resumes and cover letters. The system will still identify the resumes and cover letters for special treatment, while all other attachments will also be captured and linked as attachments on the candidate tearsheet. Please note that the 8MB/file limit for uploads still applies.

All-New Requisition UI
The requisition entry/viewing/editing screens have been completely redesigned to radically enhance the ease of use and reduce training requirements. While no one has been outwardly complaining about these, we realized that a tremendous amount of training and support time was being spent on these screens. The underlying functionality is identical, but the look and feel is all-new and beta testers have raved about it so we're very excited to get this one out the door.

We believe the new design will make the whole req management process far more transparent and easy, not to mention a whole lot easier on the eyes. Please let us know what you think.

Preview the 2.1 Release Now!
Clients can preview the 2.1 system on our staging site by logging in with your current username and password via the link below.

Please note that this is a testing site only and any work you do here will not be saved. Note also that this is running on a testing database so it will not be 100% in synch with your current live data.

Login: http://resume2.hrmdirect.com/resumedirect/login.aspx

If your current username and password do not work, please contact support@hrmdirect.com and we will set an account up for you. We invite everyone to log in and familiarize themselves with the new layout and also help us swat any remaining bugs prior to the production release.

Release Schedule
This release requires several major database updates which will require significant downtime for the recruiting application. Career websites and inbound applications will be up and running without interruption, but you should plan on limited access to the ATS this coming weekend (2/10-2/11).

We will post a more detailed schedule as we finalize the release plans, but we appreciate your understanding as we stay flexible to get this release out as soon as possible. We will do our best to keep the downtime to the off-hours so as to limit the inconvenience.]]> http://www.hrmdirect.com/hrm2/newscycle/?entry=entry070206-205135 HRMDirect Wed, 07 Feb 2007 01:51:35 GMT http://www.hrmdirect.com/hrm2/newscycle/index.php?entry=entry061213-222632 Recruiting.com Blog of the Year awards. For more on the awards and to cast your vote, visit Recruiting.com and click the "Vote for your favorite blog" link at the top of the article. Voting closes in just over a week, so don't delay!

Started in the last 4 days of 2005, the HRMDirect Blog written by chief evangelist Colin Kingsbury rose rapidly to become one of the top destinations in the HR technology "blogosphere," with Colin named one of the "real stars of the new recruiting media" by none less than John Sumser, publisher of the Electronic Recruiting News since 1994. The HRMDirect Blog is also one of the top 20 blogs in Technorati's HR category, and is consistently among the higest-ranked vendor blogs on HR technology topics on Google.

For those that have not been regular readers, here are some of Colin's top articles from his blog in 2006:

A Tale of Two Cows
Getting Source Tracking Right
What the Customer Wants?
ATS Platform Posturing
Online Recruiting vs. Online Dating
When Bad Features Feel Good

Thanks again to all clients and friends new and old for helping us to make 2006 a banner year. We have some great stuff coming up for release shortly and will be putting an additional newsletter out as soon as the release notes are ready.]]> http://www.hrmdirect.com/hrm2/newscycle/?entry=entry061213-222632 HRMDirect Thu, 14 Dec 2006 03:26:32 GMT