NEW YORK, May 4 /PRNewswire/ — Avature, a provider of innovative Web 2.0 Human Capital Management software, announced today that it has been included in the list of “Cool Vendors” in the “Cool Vendors in Human Capital 2010″(1) report by Gartner, Inc.

“We consider our inclusion in the Cool Vendor report by Gartner confirmation that our effort to provide recruiters with game changing Web 2.0 technology is getting recognized,” said Dimitri Boylan, CEO of Avature.  ”We continue to focus on the development of an adaptive enterprise level CRM capable of supporting a variety of creative recruiting initiatives on a global scale.”

Avature CRM combines Journaling, Tagging, On-line Surveys, Web Portals, Dashboards, SMS Communication and other Web 2.0 features with a workflow engine and resume management system for recruiters focused on networking and sourcing from the Internet.

Avature also announces the opening of its London office, located at Centre Point, 103 New Oxford Street, Westminster, WC1A 1DD.  The office will be managed by Julian Boylan, who will be relocating from the New York office of Avature.

For more information, please email info@avature.net.

About Avature

Founded in 2004 by Dimitri Boylan, the co-founder and former CEO of HotJobs.com, Avature is a fast growing provider of cloud computing human capital management software solutions.  Its flagship product, Avature CRM, is provided as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).  Headquartered in New York, Avature has offices in the US, Europe and Latin America.  Information on Avature can be found at www.avature.net.

Cool Vendor Disclaimer

About Gartner’s Cool Vendors Selection Process

Gartner’s listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose.

Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

(1) Gartner “Cool Vendors in Human Capital Management and Employee Performance Management, 2010″ by Thomas Otter, James Holincheck, Jeff Freyermuth, 21 April 2010.

SOURCE Avature

Now in recruiting, unlike marketing and sales, quality of the conversion matters.  Most would agree that 1,000 quality applicants Trumps 10,000 poor or mediocre applicants.  And for that, enter the online pre-screen.  That’s a brilliant idea from a decade ago; use online pre-screening questions so only the best applicants “pass” and recruiters don’t get bogged down dispositioning gobs of applicants.  But now you have a new problem.  Only the most motivated (or desperate) of applicants are willing to invest that kind of time on your site (not to mention how frustrated they are to never hear from anyone again…and what does that do to our employer brand!).  Something else to consider; the online attention span of Gen Y is a lot shorter than ours.  Think of all that external stimuli they grew up with – downloading music, chatting, blogging, cell phones, gaming, texting, email, video, etc.  Numerous neurological studies back this up.

Talent Communities

Many of our customers are embedding registration boxes on their careers site so that on any page at any time the prospective applicant can simply register with their contact information, area of interest, location of interest, etc.  If they apply to a job the application still goes to their ATS.  However, if they complete the registration form the candidate record and form information gets created in their Avature CRM.  We have one customer recruiting for nurses that gets 70% of their CRM leads from this simple online form that’s linked on their careers site.  That equates to tens of thousands of nurse leads.  In a world of nursing shortages I’d say that’s pretty impressive.  I’ve often heard this methodology referred to as Talent Communities.  I’m not sure why, but I guess it sounds “social” which makes it cool so that’s fine with me.  And it’s created a new relationship manager role in recruiting which I think is a good thing.  But really at the end of the day, technically speaking, it’s a simple registration form that takes a web developer with the right tools very little time to create.

What Do We Do With All The Online Leads?

What’s interesting about the leads that come through to your CRM is that the information is already segmented. Segmentation is an economic and marketing term for bundling people into buckets based on similar attributes – geographic, demographic, behavioral, etc.  And it happens to be at the core of any go to market strategy.

In Avature you can build segmented lists of people based on the attributes you collected online.  For example, I can create a list of people that a) registered online b) did that in the month of March, 2010 c) chose San Francisco as their ‘location of interest’ and d) selected software engineering as their ‘area of interest’.

Now let’s just say that list was 100 people.  Most people would say we have two choices – 1) call them individually and recruit them or 2) send them all an email (likely asking them to visit the career site to look for a job).  Option 1 isn’t exactly efficient.  That’s 100 calls we need to make to a bunch of people that we don’t know very much about (i.e. if they’re qualified).  Option 2 is a run-around.  You’re sending them right back to the place they started.

Option 3

In the Avature CRM you can build screening forms/surveys using our very simple forms builder.  Once I’ve created the form, I can email a form completion link to multiple recipients so they can answer my questions on a webpage (you can also wrap a design template around the form webpage to brand it).  But what’s interesting about the forms is that the information is fielded in the CRM database, meaning that we can further segment our list of people based on the answers to the questions.  Continuing with our example from above, we sent 100 emails thanking the San Francisco software engineers for their initial online inquiry (or “thank you for joining our talent community…”) and asked them if they’d take a minute to answer a few more questions so we can be sure to discuss the right opportunities with them.  They click the form completion link in the email and land on the form completion page where they have 5 questions to answer (or 7, 10, 20, etc.).  It’s probably not realistic to think that all 100 will answer the questions (and a big part of that will depend on how many questions you ask) so let’s say 75 complete the questions.  So now I go back and modify my list, or create a new one, where I use my original attributes – San Francisco, software engineering – and add to my list attributes java OR python (two potential answers to the question “what are your core experience categories?”) , 5+ years experience, prefer full-time employee status, eligible to work in the US, and graduate level degree (and so on).  Let’s say that of the 75 who complete the form the number of people that meet these 5 additional attributes is now 7.  With 7 leads Option 1 – calling them – becomes realistic and efficient.  Option 2 – email them a specific job or jobs that I want them to consider.

Less is More

Under Option 3 think about how different the candidate experience is.  I came to your site and it took me 15 seconds to register.  I then got a thank you email asking me to answer some questions that were RELEVANT to what I told you I was interested in.  You then sent me an email thanking me again for completing the questions and asked me to consider a specific job or a few highly relevant jobs (or told me you don’t have anything right now but you’ll let me know asap when something opens up and in the meantime you’ll stay in touch and would like to include me in the monthly newsletter, external mentoring programs, or other high touch points you might deploy as part of your CRM strategy).  I’d be a lot more likely now to complete your online application because of the way you engaged me, not requiring a lot of my time upfront, and then how you delivered timely and relevant information as a follow up.

The goal is the same; get someone qualified to apply to a job.  The subtle difference is that the start of the conversation is about the person, not the requisition.  And in a recruiting universe where we’re beginning to think of candidates like customers this is certainly a step in the right direction.

I have spent days with clients who are struggling to find a balance between the demand being placed on them and the resources they have. While this is a very old story, it is being written in a new way. Prior to this recession, most organizations were willing to add people — whether contractors or regular — without much issue. The focus was on time to fill and perceived quality, not on cost or sustainability.

Today is a different time and the focus for many CEOs is building a sustainable organization that can avoid the layoffs and bad branding that accompanies them. They are at least hoping for a workforce that is balanced between regular employees and those who work part-time or as contractors or consultants. Every recruiting vice-president, director, and manager should have a similar objective.

Having a lean workforce means having the right team and working seamlessly with RPOs, third-party recruiting agencies, and contract recruiters. It means redefining what an internal recruiter does and what skills they need to have. And all of this depends on the soundness of your recruiting processes and technology backbone.

In the scramble to get competitive over the past few years, many recruiting functions accumulated technology and threw together recruiting ideas and processes with little coordination or deep thought. When you are in the midst of a war for talent it becomes very difficult to approach things in an orderly or careful way. You think, someday I’ll take the time to integrate, evaluate, and eliminate. Well, the time has come.

One of the good things arising out of this recession is the time to look over everything you are doing and make changes that streamline and integrate for sustainability. Whether the next six months brings us out of this economic slowdown or not, we do know one thing: eventually the slowdown will end and we will be asked to suddenly start recruiting again with few or no addition resources.

Here are some things to consider over the next few weeks:
How is Your Recruiting Process?

The first step in getting the function organized is to outline or map out your current recruiting processes. Start with the hiring managers’ need to recruit someone and work your way through each step in the process. What does the manager have to do, when, to whom, and so on? How does a recruiter get the requisition? When? What is the first thing she does? The second and the third? How do you source candidates? Are there alternative ways that might be faster or cheaper or better? Take each step and follow the chain right through the candidates coming on board as an employee.

If not a pro at this (and few are), it would be very wise to attend a seminar on business process improvement or business process mapping, which are frequently offered at local colleges and from many independent seminar firms. As I have written before, two good books on this topic are Business Process Mapping: Improving Customer Satisfaction by J. Mike Jacka and Paulette J. Keller, and a simple one by Dianne Galloway called Mapping Work Processes. Also, if you work in a technology or an engineering-type firm, I am sure someone already now show to knows how to do this.

A small team can be assembled to map the current processes and recommend how to improve the process by eliminating redundancies, integrating steps, or simplifying the administrivia. After this first step, you can look at whether you have the right structure or the right tools, and you can base your decisions on how things really work.

Of course, to save time and gain expertise, you can also hire a consultant to help you (hint, hint!).
Look at Your Team

While you may have a very small team at this point, you still need to ask yourself if you have the right quality and mix of people. My suggestion is that you have a core of experienced recruiters who are jacks-of-all-trades. You want people who can move where they are needed, when needed. Maybe this week it’s focusing on sourcing and next week on persuading a hiring manager or a candidate to be flexible. Versatility and agility are the most prized skills of all, in my mind. You can hire specialists as contractors or consultants as needed, but you need people who can flex all the time.

Decide which functions can be given to a trusted partner outside your organization. Many activities including such things as maintaining your recruiting website, developing a branding strategy, sourcing candidates, and even initial candidate assessment can be done by contractors or an agency.

If you are doing volume recruiting for similar positions, an RPO that specializes in that might be more sensible a choice than ramping up your internal function. Most likely building and maintaining an internal team will take away resources and time from productive work.

Your ultimate goal should be to deliver a quality service at the lowest price and faster speed possible. Whatever mix makes that happen is the best one.
Look at Your Technology

Are you using the right mix of tools? An applicant tracking system is basic to success, and almost everyone is using one these days. Perhaps more important is how you are using social media and building relationships with candidates. True relationships only happen when there is an exchange of meaningful information and when a level of trust is established. While email is a part of that, providing candidates with feedback on their skills, helping steer them to the right position within the company for those skills, and being honest about opportunities (or the lack of them), is also essential. You should have access to a candidate relationship management tool like those available from Salesforce.com and Avature.net.

Social media is a critical part of an overall recruiting process these days and you need to have a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. But, you will also need to still use traditional Internet search as well as job boards for some positions, so having people with broad-based expertise is a plus when deciding on your team.

Putting together an integrated, but as simple as possible, technology platform will give you the capability to do more with fewer resources.

This can be a wonderful time to reassess and transform your recruiting function into a much leaner and more effective machine than it probably has been. Hiring lots of recruiters is almost for sure not the way to go and if you have immediate needs, use third parties and RPOs to fill the gap. To thrive over the next decade will require putting together a collaborative, highly versatile team that loves to find new ways to use technology effectively. Focus your time on process efficiencies and sustainable models.

When responding to an open job req, how many Recruiters have ever said to a hiring leader: “Let me develop a sourcing strategy” or “Let’s see what comes in after we post it”? How about changing that with this response: “Here’s what we have in our portfolio of talent” and/or “Here’s who I’ve been connecting with in the industry”

Adding value as a Recruiter is no new concept, and neither is a great recruiting CRM. Both have been around for years. Many think of and consider CRM’s a Sourcer’s tool. For Recruiters that find themselves wasting time on managing prospects on spreadsheets, network drives, Outlook folders, or in an ATS… Think Avature.

Avature CRM is a Web 2.0 CRM system. It’s adaptable – and it’s a powerful recruiting tool. I recently caught up with Michael Johnson from Avature to learn more about what they are focusing on, and the impacts on recruiting organizations that are using the service.

One of the key differentiators that stood out immediately compared to other CRM’s on the market is that Avature built their own (very robust) talent sourcing tools into the system, and there is a strong focus on process integration, user experience, and collaboration.
The ability to easily see everything that has happened with a prospective candidate in the system – job history, notes, tags, emails sent and received, text messages sent and received – is all included in one record for any recruiter to see and add to based on their communications with the person.

And speaking of communications, Avature has integrated email, SMS, and VoIP for those that want it so users can leverage a single communications platform. That’s great for record history but also helps recruiters stay in the zone of high productivity.
Are clients having success? Absolutely, it’s become part of their value prop. A global RPO provider now fills 80% of the job req’s that are sent to the sourcing team by leveraging the CRM capabilities, resulting in significant savings. Another client, a large healthcare provider, has embedded registration forms on their website to capture nursing leads. The result: 70% of their nursing leads in their CRM come from this short “interest form”. They have taken advantage of the CRM capabilities and are creating a true talent and networking community.

What does the future hold? Over the coming months, Avature plans on expanding the functionality for email marketing, expansion of their portals functionality – specifically employee referrals. They are also working through several key integrations with ATS, HRIS, job distribution, and some other complimentary software providers.

If you are interested in experiencing or exploring Avature, you can contact Michael Johnson or go to Avature.net.  You can also follow Avature on twitter.

Function 1: The Generalists

This is the recruiting function that relies on the HR coordinator/generalist whose partial responsibility it is to assist in the recruiting process (typically coordinating interviews, new hire processing, etc.). No doubt, most of the hiring managers in this type of business are using third party agencies. This type of recruiting function seems to be most prevalent in small companies that haven’t yet made the investment to build out a talent function. It’s not “bad” by definition but simply a choice that may or may not be the right fit for some companies.

Function 2: The Strategists

This type of recruiting function is one that sits down with the hiring manager and, when presented with an open role, responds with “here is our sourcing strategy”. What follows is an in-depth list of sourcing channels where they plan to look for possible leads. For many this is a significant improvement if you upgraded from something that resembles Function 1 or 1 1/2.  Many companies fall into this category and it’s safe to assume that at least some of your sourcing process will always be this way. However, the risk here is that it’s reactive; you start each assignment from the beginning every time – you’re rolling the rock up the hill starting from the bottom more than you need to. Many hiring managers will be impressed with your strategic approach to the service but you need to remember that it’s relative. So don’t let that fool you. You’re good but not great and, most importantly, you’re not likely to be more competitive than most by now.

Function 3: The Game Changers

This type of recruiting function is one that sits down with the hiring manager and, when presented with an open role, can confidently respond with “here’s what we’ve got”.  What follows is an in-depth list of people – internal and external – that have already been identified with the needed skill set, comp range, experience, target employers, and other important profile data. They might not even need to post the job since they’ve worked hard at identifying and engaging key talent in the market using a CRM. This function might even bring the talent – due to it’s availability – to the hiring manager before she has an open req.  Your hiring cycle time compresses significantly, advertising costs go down, customer satisfaction goes way up, and the list of benefits goes on.

Quick and simple synopses, when posted in a public forum like this, can result in backlash.  Anyone can come up with a thousand reasons why Function 3 isn’t practical or relevant – it all depends on the roles, we don’t know what to look for until the roles open up, we’re too busy to get out of hit-and-run recruiting, we don’t have the headcount…. I get that.  But you can’t ignore the point. If your recruiters sit down with a hiring manager to discuss an open role can they respond with, “Here’s what I’ve got”? Many components need to fall into place to get there – the people, systems, workforce plan, headcount, change management – but along the way you can always ask yourself that question to gauge your progress.  That in and of itself is very simple and very powerful.

When recruiting went online in the late 90’s and corporate career sites popped up like Vegas sprawl circa 2006 recruiting departments threw up multi-step processes to filter applicants in the hopes that machines might filter, disqualify, or match applicants. You can chalk that method up to dot com era 1.0 along with the iconic Pets.com. There are some things people do better than machines.

The Shift with Web 2.0

Target the right audience and let prospective candidates provide as much or as little information as they want at the point of capture. Point is, you want the lead whether they’re ready to apply or not. Everyone in recruiting likes to talk about how many applications they received but no one seems to talk about how many they didn’t get. Progressive, early adopters are pushing jobs to social networks and using Search Engine Marketing. Certainly that’s a good thing. But what if that person on Facebook or Google has the attention span of a flee like most Internet surfers do these days? Now you just re-directed them to a job portal on your website that takes 15 clicks and 10 minutes to apply to a job. Guess what? You likely lost them. And that’s especially true with the younger generations and will only get worse.

Just to be clear, you should still post your jobs online, but it’s critical that you understand the user experience and adjust to the times. That’s where a CRM system can add value. It’s better equipped to efficiently handle higher volumes of candidates through segmentation, mass email, survey tools, etc. We have several customers who’ve built portals (landing pages, micro-sites, registration pages, etc.) that allow prospective candidates to show interest by registering without applying to a job. Case in point – a health care customer adds a registration box on their website that says “If you’re interested in speaking with a recruiter about nursing opportunities click here”. That directs the person, presumably a nurse or future nurse, to a quick and easy registration page where they fill in their basic contact information and general area of interest. Within 10 seconds the recruiters have another lead in their CRM database. 70% of the leads in their CRM come from this simple box on their career site. Now they can pull a list of all nurses within a market that have a particular specialty and apply CRM tactics to them – continuing education classes, newsletters, invites to events, mentoring programs, etc. So while everyone in health care is stressed out about a nursing shortage, and rightly so, this health system has tens of thousands of potential nurse hires in their CRM that they can tap on-demand when the business comes calling. Or when the Nurse Manager comes to the recruiting department and says “tell me what you’ve got, I just lost three NICU nurses” they can confidently respond with details of their NICU nurse talent pool and it’s state of hire readiness. Believe it or not, they might not even need to post the job.

Landing pages, micro-sites, portals, and registration boxes are easy and cheap and can be embedded on social networks, blogs, and other destinations where you might find your desired talent hanging out. Most importantly, they make it simple for people to show some level of interest in working for your company (or joining your talent community) without entering the often times laborious process of applying to a job. And when managed with a CRM on the back-end you’ve made a step change in the way you recruit.