Middleware

The market has started to grow in the cracks. Since the first of the year, we've talked with 20 vendors who offer products designed to:

• Filter Job Board Flows
• Measure Job Board Results
• Overlay existing tool sets (ERP and ATS)
• Realign Commercial Processes for Third Party Staffing Usage
• Finish the integration work left undone by vendors
• Shield IT from embarrassment

After all these years of a down market, the entrepreneurial energy is focusing on fixing the broken stuff. It's an interesting development with lots of opportunity:

• With hundreds of installations, only 5% of their customers will even turn on the Peoplesoft system. It's unusable.
• Recruitsoft still struggles mightily with online integration.
• BrassRing continues to have major implementation trouble.
• Webhire customers continue to hope.
• Resumix shows promise but will take years to mature.
• Job Boards continue to provide unfiltered fire hoses of data volume.

Although clear long term solutions are available, budgets remain tight. Triage can be acquired when the bleeding is intense. It's harder to organize a full acquisition. Many recruiters are relying on paper processes with the stacks piled on top of the computing tools that were supposed to ease their burdens. So, the middleware is selling. Much of it is crap. 

There are, however, a couple of interesting bright spots. They tend to be built by seasoned veterans with humble aspirations. You won't find a single plan for world dominance or a hint of the holy grail. They simply produce systems that produce results in the surprisingly fractured world in which we live.