Jobscience & Direct2Dell

TechKnowledge: A Conversation with Ted Elliott, CEO of Jobscience
By Bob Pearson, VP Communities, Dell

When we talk about jobs, the conversation is often about how and where you go to get one. Much less time is spent talking about how employers can more effectively link their needs with the right people in a more efficient manner. And yet, if asked off the record, I bet quite a few human resources professionals would be eager to hear about new ways to automate this work, so they can spend more time on the actual recruitment of a candidate.

Recently, I caught up with Ted Elliott, CEO of Jobscience, who is figuring this out in the cloud. Here is what Ted had to say.


Q: Ted, what led you to start Jobscience?

A: We wanted to connect employers with jobseekers, our hypothesis was that if we could make the application process easier then more people could find the right job.


Q: What was the opening you saw in the marketplace?
A: A hospital we worked with asked us to transform our job board technology into an application system for their facility and then told us after a quarter they made more hires than the entire year before we setup the system for them. This let us know that automation of the recruitment process was "mission critical."

---Read on

Visit us at Dreamforce 2008 - Booth 304

Jobscience featured in bMighty

Read it HERE

Running Your Business In The Cloud

September 29, 2008
By Mathew Schwartz

The lure of cloud computing is obvious: freedom from managing applications, platforms, and infrastructure -- abstracting IT complexity to the point where it just works and, often, at a much lower price than running or hosting it yourself. That appeal has spawned a growing, vocal contingent of cloud computing "completists" who are more than happy to surrender their IT concerns to the cloud.

Software developer Jobscience has a robust technology infrastructure covering everything from software development to HR. But look at what the company lacks: an IT department, servers, and virtually any business software running on-premises. Instead, the 20-employee, San Francisco-based outfit, which develops talent management applications for the health care industry, runs almost entirely "in the cloud."

"We are running the whole business from the cloud, with the exception of ledger," says Jobscience CEO Ted Elliott. That means "development, marketing support, sales, expense, HR, paid time off, and more," and he's even testing CODA and Intacct to run ledger from the cloud.

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Recruit Like a Rockstar!

E-Sourcing Methods

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Integration with Google

We announced today that our talent management products now integrate with Google Apps™ productivity applications. TalentCentral and TalentStaffing are integrated with GMail™, Google Talk™, Google Calendar™ and Google Docs™ allowing effective communication and collaboration to thrive.

By quickly and easily responding to applicants and hiring managers, and accessing the shared, up-to-date recruiting metrics, day-to-day operations are dramatically improved, Getting started with our on-demand solutions is even easier now, with our integration of these popular Google applications.

Here is a quick video that lays out the value proposition and shows what is going on with the integration:

Google Jobscience Integration Video

Tom Furtney loves Genius for Salesforce

"SalesGenius delivers critical functionality that makes our Salesforce deployment even more powerful," said Tom Furtney, Sales Director of JobScience. "The ability to instantly track our prospects' behavior, its seamless integration with Salesforce, and its incredible ease of use make SalesGenius an invaluable sales tool which has helped us generate revenue from day one."

Goto: http://crm.tmcnet.com/topics/saas/articles/25810-salesforcecom-geniuscom-customers-increase-sales-results-with-salesgenius.htm

MAC & SAAS as Quoted in MacWorld

The rise of Web-based computing

Another trend facilitating Mac use in business is the increased enterprise dependecy on SaaS, wherein a diverse array of applications—from sales-force automation through supply-chain coordination—is delivered through the browser. Most SaaS applications have not relied on ActiveX, given SaaS’ inherent goal of making apps available to anyone, anywhere. This push toward platform agnosticism translates to the use of standards, letting the Mac right in. Ted Elliott, CEO of recruiting software provider Jobscience, says he has noted a rise in Mac customers now that Jobscience has moved to the SaaS model—customers his Salesforce.com-based platform supports out of the box.

Beyond Firefox and SaaS, many enterprise app developers have adopted the Web as a portal to their apps, following the strong Web-portal drive of the late 1990s.

Goto: http://www.macworld.com/article/133090/2008/04/mac_it.html?t=234

My Support Team is telling me that no one is sure where the economy is headed

One of my team members summarized a meeting he just sat on as follows: Nobody is really sure which direction the economy is going to take and data is indicating that employers are not taking drastic steps to reduce or increase the workforce. In fact, planned cuts to the workforce have been scaled back. According to the MonsterTRACK survey 59% of employees still intend to hire recent college grads, entry level pay is up 9.7% over last year. The “retirement” boom may reduce hiring in the immediate future as many boomers have lost value in their house and retirement portfolios. Average time of unemployment remains in the 3 month range, with a full 90% of workers finding an equivalent or better position. In particular, professional service talent tends to job +industry hop (i.e: Healthcare administrators, accounts tend to JOB HOP – making it even more important to have a pipeline of talent for these kinds of positions (and I would guess that these are the types of candidates that are always passively looking). The difference in this recession compared to last is the root of the problem: in the early part of the decade the .com bubble burst, this time sectors related to mortgage back securities are feeling the pinch: some financials, construction, and related retail. Sectors that are GROWING or RECESSION RESISTANT: Energy (traditional, green, and new), security in general, Security information technology, hospitals, other healthcare: Home health aids, medical assistants. Agility is increasingly important to business. Vurv hosted this event, and in their two minute commercial the pitch was for software that can help mergers, acquisitions, and restructuring.

This sounds to me like the agility offered by software as a service may be a real plus in a slowing economy. What do you think?

Google and Salesforce

Google and salesforce together is what we have all been waiting for to be done with the microsoft monster. Instand sharing of documents and project collaboration, now we can combine all our key business applications out of the microsoft world. We are really excited about what this means for the business web.

Talent Staffing

Staffing companies are match makers who have to treat both the employer and the candidate like customers. How can they do there job effectively with one system for candidate tracking and another for customer relationship management? What if you could take the features of leading recruitment technology and combine them with the best sales and market tools available today? This webinar capsule tackles the issue of combining CRM and TRM into a single process. Take a look at our webinar capsule and see if it makes sense.

Sourcing for Applicants Web 2.0 style

This is a webinar video recap that discusses how to source candidates using web 2.0 technology such as Linked In, Google Resume Searching, Craigslist, DataFrenzy and getting all the information back into the Salesforce CRM (candidate relationship management) system. Taking multiple sources of data and leading them back to CRM with very little data entry is a winning sourcing strategy. Take a look at the video.

Getting the Most out of the Force

This is a recent webinar we hosted on getting the most out of salesforce, it is really an overview of how to approach the force.com platform as a tool for managing anything your organization can manage.

Marketing Intelligence

One of the most successful digital marketing solutions we have implemented is aptly named Genius. When I use it, my sales team thinks I am the genius- but it is in fact the very smart Web 2.0 software that integrates with our salesforce.com contact database. On the surface, Genius is a mass email marketing tool- but when the core functionality is tapped into, it can really help your sales team be more efficient and productive. Here’s a few of my favorite features:

1. The Genius Tracker. Not only does the tracker pop up to tell me an email recipient has just opened my email, or is visiting my web site, but the more important intelligence this gives me is that this prospect is is online and engaged with our solution. If a sales rep can call 40 people in a day, and a blast to 5000 prospects shows me that 40 of those prospects are online and engaged, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who to call. That rep’s going to have a much more productive day calling people who they know are in the office. Less voicemails, less brushoffs, less calls to people who don’t work there anymore.

2. Smartgroups. Unlike other email marketing automation software, Genius maintains a constant connection to my salesforce.com database, refreshing the data to reflect changes in our system. This means I don’t have to maintain a spreadsheet or campaign of my target email recipients. I can use a handy report called a “Smartgroup” which functions similarly to a report in salesforce. If a record is changed and no longer meets the criteria of the Smartgroup, then it won’t be included in the email blast. I can spend less time micro-managing subscribers, and more time sending targeted email campaigns to the right people.

3. Visit Replay. Most email systems can only tell me that an email recipient “clicked through” or maybe which link they clicked on. Genius creates a time-stamped slideshow of the prospect’s visit to your website, whether they viewed one page or twenty. This is where the real intelligence can come into play. Before I call a prospect, I can see they briefly visited our Customers page, our Solutions, and then finally navigated to our Test Drive signup page and hung there for five and a half minutes. I look in our salesforce.com and see that they didn’t actually sign up for the test drive. Now I’m ready to call; and my pitch should reflect their activity. “Good morning Mr. X, thanks for taking some time to open my email. Jobscience has a very satisfied customer base because we stand by our solutions. Our most important asset is our customer. If you’d like to get a feel for the Jobscience experience, maybe I could sign you up for a test drive. Do you have any questions or concerns about that?”

Some slick technology and amateur psychology can go a long way towards making an effective email-based sales campaign!

NonProfitForce

We are increasingly being contact by non profits who are taking advantage of salesforce. At first I did not get the impact of exposing non profits to CRM, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Non Profits have highly motivated staff who want to make a difference and when they start using the CRM platform they can really have an impact on their organizations. We have decided to start offering configuration and consulting services to Non Profits at a discount to what we offer our other clients. The particular areas of focus we have with non-profits are taking advantage of not just using the force to manage donations and fundraising but the actual business operations liek recruiting, expense reporting, events, clients ( the homeless, students, etc ) with the force.

It is exciting to be able to help people and learn from them the best ways to utilize the force.com platform. We have spent some time with http://www.hireheroesusa.org they target assisting veterans returning from Iraq and Afganistan. I highly encourage users to think of ways they can use their knowledge of the force to help others.

You have to see this Video

This video really lays out the upside of sales automation, plus it is very funny, visit Wallstrip on YouTube for a laugh regarding CRM

New Webinar Series

We are starting a webinar series to highlight how to get the most out of the Force.com platform. This series will highlight how you can run your entire business on the platform. We are being approached daily by folks who have purchased salesforce and want to figure out how to get more out of the product.

Webinar 1 - Candidate Relationship Management - Best Practices for Recruitment in Web 2.0

InsideView for Salesforce

We started using the AppExchange to get free ideas that would help us set up our business processes in salesforce, this followed 24 months of trying and failing to deploy a CRM from a large software vendor in Seattle. When we first started using AppExchange we were hesitant to pay for marketing add on programs.

We started using InsideView about three months ago and it has fed us a healthy set of leads and information that helps us trigger news stories about target clients. Our sales group has easily adopted the product, I think the best piece of the technology is the slick mash up in salesforce's account record. It took us very little time to implement.