Mobile tipping point for recruitment industry?
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Elliott: Tipping point for talent software
Jobscience is launching a suite of talent management mobile apps built on the Salesforce Force.com platform.
Jobscience Mobile includes an app that makes it easy for recruiters to electronically gather CVs via their mobile phones, while another makes use of crowd-sourcing techniques to gather feedback from hiring managers following an interview. A third app uses the built-in camera in hand-held or tablet devices to help HR departments capture and securely store documentation required for onboarding employees.
The purpose-built apps are designed to solve specific problems in the recruiting process and are part of the organisation’s strategy to make it easier to get data into systems. Ted Elliott, Jobscience chief executive, told Recruiter that the company wants to meet the consumer and user’s expectation that everything should be “instantaneous and everything should be mobile”. “We determined this was a tipping point for talent software but not everyone in the software industry has got the memo yet,” he said.
The CV app allows a recruiter to request a CV from a candidate via mobile phone for example, while at a career fair or networking event and Jobscience has built a parsing engine that allows them to import the data into a customer relationship management system (CRM). “Recruiters told us they would collect stacks of CVs at events but never have time to put them into a system,” said Elliott. “The app also addresses a second and larger issue: we don’t believe data should just go into a system and die. It should be something you actively use to market future candidates.”
The launch of the apps also looks certain to raise both the profile and presence of the cloud computing giant Salesforce.com in the recruitment sector. Elliott explained that Jobscience runs on an OEM bundled version of Salesforce.com. Users can buy a licence that runs Jobscience’s recruitment products for a monthly subscription of £50 per user. He stressed this does not include Salesforce CRM functionality but uses the contacts and accounts functions, and the collaborative tool Chatter. “It is talent relationship management (TRM) not CRM,” he said.
An early adopter of Jobscience’s cloud-based recruitment software is CPL Group, which offers recruitment, outsourcing and HR solutions in a number of European countries. Director Paul Bacon told Recruiter it had developed its own mobile app for live job listings and believed the recruitment industry needs more apps to go forward. “Mobile certainly has a big future in recruitment and recruitment technology because it’s where the candidates and clients are,” he said. “And apps must be at the forefront of things.”
