The Blog

Jobscience Earns Best of ’11 Award

Here’s a quick shout out to Jobscience, one of my clients, for winning a Salesforce.com AppExchange Best of ’11 Award for Human Resources and Recruiting.  What’s especially sweet about this award is that it is crowd sourced form Salesforce customers.  That’s right.  The people who buy and use the stuff said this is the best on the AppExchange.

As you know there’s been a goodly amount of M&A activity in HR lately with Oracle buying Taleo and SAP buying Success Factors.  That’s because HR is an important new frontier for companies who are often competing on the talent they attract as much as they are competing with other forms of capital like VC money and IP.

At least out in the Valley, there are more job openings than there are people to fill them.  The talent drought has made recruiting and holding on to people a more serious thing.  And with this comes the realization that old style HR systems that are attached to the ERP side of the house have a distinct disadvantage.

In his biography, Steve Jobs talked about the importance of hiring the right people and it has made a strong impression on me.  He said,

“…I realized that A players like to work with A players, they just didn’t like working with C players.  At Pixar, it was a whole company of A players.  When I got back to Apple, that’s what I decided to try to do.  You need to have a collaborative hiring process [my emphasis added].  When we hire someone, even if they’re going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers.

In this environment, with a plethora of unqualified applicants trying for advanced jobs and a regulatory environment that sees to it that everyone gets a fair shot, the pressure on companies to conduct those collaborative hiring processes quickly so that they can put out offers ahead of the competition is intense.  Jobscience takes a front office approach to the HR challenge and the people who know best, have said that it’s got the right stuff.

Equally important, Salesforce didn’t have to spend a billion bucks to get Jobscience.  This is just another example of the power of real cloud computing.