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.

“eQuest is pleased to be working with such a distinguished management team of software and internet entrepreneurs” said John Malone, Chief Executive Officer at eQuest. “Avature customers will now be able reach a worldwide audience of talent with the global connection that eQuest provides for their SaaS recruiting solution”

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.avaturecrm.com.

About eQuest

eQuest provides international job posting delivery, job board management and analytics services. Thousands of job boards are supported in the eQuest network, reaching over 180 countries and territories worldwide. eQuest provides the most complete candidate sourcing and tracking analysis for evaluating job board performance. eQuest is one of the most recognized and admired brands in the human resource industry. eQuest can be reached at www.equest.com.

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.

Thursday February 25th, 2010

4pm EST, 1pm PST

REGISTER HERE: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/669845403

Interactive Strategies for Breakthrough Recruitment Marketing

Excite, engage and deliver Talent…like never before.

Are your marketing campaigns reaching the high quality passive candidates you want to hire? When you do reach the right people,

do you deliver the right experience? Is your advertising optimized based on real recruiting information, or are you still counting clicks?

All webinar registrants will be entered to win a FREE pass to the ERE Spring Expo in San Diego, CA March 15-17, 2010.

Join us for an intense webinar discussion on how to get above the noise, not be part of it:

• The fundamentals of breakthrough recruitment marketing.
• New Opportunities for Creative Advertising and dynamic placement.
• Leveraging a multi-portal framework to maintain a consistent high quality user experience – on message and on brand.
• Extending process workflow into the portal – automated screening’s relationship to personalization.

Deep feedback driven optimization – going beyond traditional metrics to deliver breakthrough value.

We’ll take you on a candidate journey through live systems – from Ad to Portal to hiring workflow and investigate the real operational issues of implementing high quality large scale programs.

Join Dimitri Boylan, CEO of Avature, and Joshua Westover, Co-Founder and Director of Strategic Alliances of Entice Labs. Mike Johnson, VP of Sales at Avature, will be your discussion moderator.

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.