Tuesday, October 12, 2004

I'm back.

I've been extremely busy - and many of you have been emailing your frustration - my deepest apologies for not being able to keep up the blog.

While I've been engaged in a number of assignments - getting deeper into so many of the solutions out there - a LOT has happened in our little market. We'll be catching up on all of the developments over the next few weeks, and I'm reformatting the Vendor Report Card, I'll be delivering them in installments. Part of the challenge for me has just been the workload to keep the blog going.

A taste of things to come in the next few weeks...

Learn more about Deploy - riddled with product problems and major issues in implementation, very slow sales, and low employee morale and lack of vision in leadership is wreaking havoc with their future. Does their management team have a clue? Notes from the field and a new report card will fill in some gaps on this vendor.

The latest on Taleo - they have begun to lose customers (Agilent and 2-3 more coming) in the face of an IPO that by all accounts should be postponed for a LONG LONG time. Learn about their continued troubles.

The skinny on Virtual Edge - Good people with a nice little business, but after one or two more larger customers will they have what it takes to scale to support you as a customer? Our experiences in the field will help you figure it out.

Get the latest on BrassRing - Sales are anemic, customer retention is way down, direction confused, narrow insight to the market, and an old school management style that rewards mediocrity. Is the finally the year that we say goodbye to BrassRing?

Is Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) going to be the death of a few of these vendors?

Is it just a matter of time before PeopleSoft takes over the Enterprise market anyhow?

All of this and the latest we've seen and heard on: PeopleClick, Hire.com, HRSmart, Workstream, ICIMS, HireDesk, and others...

Stay Tuned!

Its great to be back!

Talent




Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Vendor Report Card Schedule

This new batch of Vendor Report Cards are under way. We're almost ready to post our first of the year.

Based on your votes the current order follows:

Brassring

Virtual Edge

Deploy Solutions

hire.com


You can impact the order by emailing in your vote.

We're polishing up the report cards - but in the mean time, if you have a few minutes to waste and want a good laugh, you can go get a kick out of Hank Stringer's interview on HR.com here.

Hire.com's incredible lack of success is clearly based on their lack of vision. Its fitting that Hank uses a story about recruiting Unix Kernel Hackers just before the big e-commerce economic bubble, because that is where hire.com is stuck - in the 90s. I read this article and immediately started wondering if I had clicked on some interview from 1997 - the future that Hank is talking about, and that hire.com will sell you, passed us by a long time ago. Hire.com seemingly has nothing new to say - still selling the same old sourcing message - but without a searchable database - the old build up my strength to overcompensate for my HUGE weakness approach. The most depressing part about this is that hire.com has been trying to solve the same problem for the last 7 years and still can't get it right.

Thats all for now......

Talent.