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(February 10, 2004) - It's going to take a bounce in the hiring market to keep all of the competitors alive in the Enterprise sector. While we hear rumors of an increase in the hiring of Recruiters, it's still premature to forecast a marked increase in hiring in the Enterprise sector. In this recovery, the staffing firms will become even more productive before the hiring numbers really take off. For now, there is a good bit of quiet (onesies and twosies) job creation in the small biz sector (under 50M in revenues). The bigger firms will have to exhaust their fantasies about cheap overseas labor before the wave picks up momentum.

In alphabetical order, the current significant players are:

• Alexus
• BrassRing
• Deploy
• HodesIQ
• Hire.com
• HireDesk
• HRSmart
• Kenexa
• Oracle
• Peopleclick
• Peoplesoft
• Recruitmax
• Recruitsoft
• Resumix
• SAP
• WebHire
• Workstream
• Virtual Edge

A couple of smaller companies (GreenTreeSystems, for example) occasionally nibble chunks of business from the low end of the segment.

They routinely compete with each other in a market that is currently worth $200M (in a bad year) to $500M (in a good year). That's a ton of companies booking $5 to $10 Million  per year (the overall market is dominated by Peoplesoft's huge slug of customers who don't use the product.) If this year doesn't produce significant differentiation and clear winners and losers, the number of companies should contract for pure financial reasons.

John Sumser