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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.

Employment Engineering, a Santa Clara firm, offers a number of modular solutions for enterprise and ATS customers who wish their systems performed as advertised. Led by Jeff Hunter and Tom Bahlo, two long term industry veterans, the company is focused on results delivery. With a number of large clients under its belt, the company makes its living by making the unworkable work.

Behavior Description Technologies focuses on getting very essential interviewing techniques embedded into the flow of data from job boards. The key here has always been minimizing the time investment required from candidates and recruiters alike. Tom Janz, the Industrial Psychology community's wiliest entrepreneur is on to something simple and useful here. Check out their essessor.

A quick look at McFrank Advertising would lead you to believe that they'd fail quickly on the web (they're our current candidate for worst ever agency web design). But, the company provides a job-by-job process that integrates advertising and selection. We think of it as a job ad turbocharger. The results are powerful.

As far as the others go, there are a number of folks who purchased failed software from dot com ventures who are trying to repackage it. A number of the usual suspects are making the same old claims. In all, it's the usual quality mix...20% of the stuff is where the value is. Take a look at the three we mentioned today.

- John Sumser, © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.