Jobs boards generally aren’t delivering the results. Recruitment agents are too expensive. The main sources of success are the company’s website, employee referrals, and increasing post outs on LinkedIn, twitter and facebook.

We think there’s a need for a service that allows a company to easily post out job ads to various channels, including their web site, free jobs boards like CareerJet and Indeed, and social media channels like facebook, twitter and LinkedIn. Perhaps most importantly, there’s huge potential if employees could be encouraged to unlock the potential of their networks, publishing a vacancy to all of their contacts, and some of their contacts contacts.

Think about the numbers. An average employee will have about 150 connections on LinkedIn, twitter and facebook. If a 50 person company could get employees to opt in and publish vacancies to their networks that’s an audience of 7,500 people seeing the ad. But, it’s a pool of people that are first degree connections of your employees, or in plain old fashioned HR speak – referrals. The potential connections of  of those 7,500 at an average of 150 connections is 1,125,000 people (I know many will have shared connections but it’s still a very big number).

We’ve looked hard for a tool that’s priced around the same range as Basecamp, freshbooks, xero, and pivotaltracker. We couldn’t find one. So we’re building it. There are a couple of players doing something similar in the enterprise space but we think there’s a very big need in small and medium sized businesses.

If you’re interested in social media recruiting software we’re looking for beta customers. Take a look at zartis.com and let us know what you think.

The take home points I got are:

• Cloud based systems are where the growth is
• Consolidation will be intense in the performance and talent management sector
• Management dashboards are now de rigueur
• Employee self service is the way forward
• New entrants are going to disrupt a relatively steady industry

All of this ties in with my personal experience of selling into HR departments over the past year.  Many HR departments have had budgets squeezed for the past three years.  Demand for overdue solutions has built up. It’s amazing how many large companies still use Excel for tracking core HR data like annual leave/PTO. Startups with point solutions are feeding off this and winning across the enterprise and SMB sectors.

Two other key factors that are changing the industry. The first is that there are lot more companies going global early. This means more mini multinationals. The price of software that works internationally has up to now been seriously prohibitive. This creates a lot of opportunity for lower cost cloud based systems. In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve a completely vested interest in saying that. But it is true.

Secondly, the purchasing process is changing dramatically. Despite resistance from many of the incumbent players, HR managers now search, sign up and trial HR software without any salesman in a suit knocking on their door. IT is typically involved at a much later stage. Often to confirm that the service is kosher. The beauty of a good SaaS service for the IT manager is that it doesn’t add to his workload.

Overall, it looks like there’s good reason to be optimistic.

The solution was to create a set of permissions that could be applied to any manager to allow them to effectively become an Admin for their office, or for their direct reports.

To set this up you’ll need to log in from an Admin account, select View Profile for the relevant manager and go to Permissions. You’ll see the option: “Provide this Manager with Admin right for specified sections”. Select Yes and then use the drop down menus underneath to customise it as you wish.

You’ll see the following info:

Provide this manager with Admin level access for the following functions: Yes/No
On yes then:
Select which functions from the list below you want to enable Admin level access for this manager.

For entire office – covers employees in the same office as the manager and the managers direct reports irrespective of their office
For subordinates only – covers only employees that report directly into the manager

TimeOn  – Allows this manager to approve or reject timesheets from relevant employees even if that employee has their timesheets set to be approved by a different manager

TimeOff  – Allows this manager to approve or reject all TimeOff requests and make manual adjustments even if the employee has their TimeOff approved by a different manager

Reports  – Allows this manager to create and view reports for all of the relevant employees

HR Docs  – Allows this manager to add, edit, archive, delete and publish documents to all relevant employees

Directory  – Allows this manager to add, edit, delete and view ALL information about relevant employees. Please note that this will allow the manager to potentially see sensitive HR data.

Settings  – Allows this manager to edit Settings related to their own office. This includes the ability to modify TimeOff, TimeOn and contact details for the office.

This is probably one of the more complex customisations we’ve implemented. We’d love to hear what you think of it.

After a pretty major overhaul we’ve now released the ability to restrict employees visibility to only see employees in their own office. To enable this go to Settings – Edit Office and select “Prevent employees from seeing outside this office.” Simple.

It prevents employees from seeing out of their office into other offices but doesn’t prevent inward view so you can have a head office with admins or a HR department that can still see all employees globally.

We’ve created an exception in the case where a manager has a direct report in a different office they will both be able to see each other. This ensures that sign offs of annual leave etc can still go ahead. Admins can still see everything.

We have another feature release related to admin permissions for a particular office coming up shortly.

At HR Locker we store all of our data in Microsoft’s $500m data centre outside of Dublin. If there’s a power cut there’s battery power and generators that keep the place running for at least 7 days. All data is backed up and replicated in three different instances. There’s full biometric access and entry control to the data center. When a hard drive needs to be thrashed it’s forensically destroyed. Like I said, I’m going to post more on this to give further information.

On balance, I would have no hesitation in going with Microsoft’s half a billion dollar data centre.

Good news for the small companies is that it forecasts growth of an additional 2,000 new SMEs outside of the IT sector.

We’re obviously delighted that HR Locker was selected as one of four case studies for the report. You can read it here.

Standpoint Media did a superb job in creating a video about HR Locker for the award. You can see it here.

The other two finalists were Brook Catering and the Swansea to Cork Ferry run by Fastnet Line.

I wouldn’t have thought that the Chamber of Commerce was a natural fit for a new Internet company but we’ve had a fantastic experience with the Cork Chamber. They even signed up as one of our early customers!

The Cork Chamber of Commerce were one of the very users of HR Locker.

You can read the article in this PDF.

John

HR managers are our target market. Like most people, they don’t particularly like being cold called. In fact, they really don’t like it. Cold calling is often demeaning for both sides. We’ve all wanted to hang up on somebody pestering us. On the other side, doing the cold calling is an experience everybody should do once in their life. It’s very humbling.

The traditional method is to purchase a long list of qualified names and numbers. Next create a script and start dialling. Many people have done this but few do it more than once.

One of the benefits of Linkedin is that it allows you to access this previously expensive list for free (almost). With a premium account on Linkedin I was easily able to search for “hr manager london” and get over twenty three thousand results back. That’s a pretty good starting point for a focused sales and marketing campaign.

To start emailing or contacting these people randomly would likely annoy a lot of them and result in a breach of Linkedin’s User Agreement and Privacy Policy.

So I tried a more discreet approach. Each day for five days we clicked on 100 profiles of HR managers. If they are experienced Linkedin users they will use the “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” function which is now quite prominent on the home page.

My Linkedin profile is set to show that it’s me who viewed a profile, as opposed to an “Anonymous LinkedIn User or “Someone in the something industry”.

Each of the profiles we visited would show my profile as one of the people who recently visited theirs. I figured that many of them would then visit my profile which would open the door for me to send them a message.

It was an interesting experiment but the results were not too encouraging. Of the 500 that I visited  only 11 visited my profile. Maybe I need to change my profile picture, or maybe HR managers just don’t view people who viewed their profiles.

Some, no doubt, will see this as the Web equivalent of dropping leaflets in a letterbox. At least it’s a soft touch approach where etiquette dictates that you don’t contact anybody until they’ve expressed some interest in you by visiting your profile. And, no trees get pulped in the process.

There are now 80 million people on LinkedIn. If you’re reading this you’re almost certainly one of them. What you can be sure of is that your profile is already in the sights of marketing managers and not just future employers or clients.