Organization: Advantage Human Resourcing www.hirethinking.com

Vendor or Solution Provider of Choice:  InsideView, Inc. www.insideview.com

Practicing ‘Hire Thinking’

For the modern human resources firm, keeping a solid grasp on a wide and deep swath of information is everything; it is essential to know who is hiring and who possesses the traits to fill the necessary spaces. However, the magnitude of the information available has increased so dramatically that one global recruitment firm, Advantage Human Resourcing, saw the need to overhaul its lead-generation process. Advantage, an integrated talent services firm, matches qualified talent with employers ranging from mid-market firms to Fortune 50 enterprises. Advantage cultivates a deep understanding of each candidate’s skills, experience, and motivation—this information allows Advantage’s executives to place candidates where they are most likely to succeed.

Advantage delivers integrated talent services, including temporary staffing, direct hire search, and outsourcing for firms from Kaiser Permanente and Citigroup to Allied Domecq Wine and Spirits (North America). Advantage has an impressive placement ratio, which it maintains by scoping out a wide range of fields, then finding the best-fitting opportunities for its people—naturally, it relies on access to the best information. Advantage has clients in the information industry and, thus, always has one eye to what is going on. The company began to sense a fundamental change in the way information functioned and, in order to maintain its industry leadership, Advantage resolved to adapt.

Leads Buried in the Information Overload

Advantage’s core philosophy is "where there’s change, there’s opportunity."Pin-pointing change— and reacting fluidly—is a hall­mark of Advantage’s intricate matchmaking process between clients and qualified employers. This process requires constant and thoughtful attention to many channels of industry buzz all over the world. Advantage needed to keep abreast of world news for its clients in law, finance, administration, marketing, creative services, infor­mation technology, and customer service. It was vital to Advantage to know who was growing, who was down­sizing, who was moving, and to be aware of the general mood of each industry. Keeping tabs on this broad range of industries yields a nearly unmanageable flood of information. Yet Advantage had to not only look through all this data, but understand it, analyze it, and derive from it real-time market intelligence and actionable leads.

The information overload problem was compounded by the many mediums of information created by the Web 2.0 phenomenon. In order to get the most recently updated industry information, Advantage wanted access to the ubiquitous information sources across the social web: online job boards, industry news,forums, blogs, social networks, and more. "There has been an enormous increase in the number of sites on the Web that can provide valuable information to our sales teams. We knew that there was new content coming on the Web every day, if not every hour, that we could benefit from, but at the same time we wanted to find an efficient way web without getting bogged down. Moreover, Advantage required a business search and intelligence application that was highly customizable and could quickly aggregate a variety of content yet was easily accessible in a single, easy-to-use interface. Advantage wanted to mine opportunities from the social web, but it couldn’t have its team spending the whole day clicking through LinkedIn, Jigsaw, ZoomInfo, and Hoover’s.

Take A Look at SalesView

To address its social web needs, Advantage chose to install and deploy SalesView, the flagship product of InsideView, a business search and intelligence firm headquartered in San Francisco. Umberto Milletti founded InsideView in 2005 to help businesses take full advantage of the new capabilities of the socialweb, especially in lead-generation and relationship analysis. Another factor in Advantage’s choice, in addition to func­tionality, was ease of adoption: SalesView operates as a mashup seamlessly integrated with CRM partners such as Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, and SugarCRM. Advantage already used Salesforce.com to manage its day-to-day selling process, so adding the SalesView mashup to the Salesforce.com dashboard was a natural move for the Advantage team. These insights and relationship analysis are now delivered within the familiar context of its CRM lead, account, and opportunity views.

InsideView understood Advantage’s need to gather data from all corners of the ever-expanding web. InsideView coined the term "socialprise" in March 2008 as a framework for understanding the way in which the rich, unstructured data of social networks and media are beginning to transform the enterprise. Socialprise applications are delivered as a mashup of both the information and the user experience from the previously separate worlds of social media and enterprise data. These applications capitalize on the convergence of social media and enterprise applications, a key differentiator for SalesView’s intelligence gathering capabilities.

SalesView aggregates more than 20,000 sources of information from both the social web (Facebook, LindkedIn, ZoomInfo) and the more traditional business intelligence sources (Reuters, Hoover’s, etc.). The software’s Smart Agents identify key events that indicate sales readiness. In Advantage’s case, events such as contract awards, expansions, and specific business initiatives are subtle indicators of increased hiring needs, but not blatant "We’re hiring" signs. The Advantage team members were quickly able to set up these highly customizable SmartAgents (a key feature of SalesView) to identify opportunities specific to its market and offerings.

Not only does SalesView produce more leads for Advantage, but the company reports that they are higher quality leads; Advantage found about half of the SalesView-provided ideas to be actionable business opportunities. "The sales opportunity alerts that SalesView generated were consistently relevant, intelligent leads that our sales teams could quickly act on," says Zagelmeyer. This new abundance of intelligence improved Advantage’s ability to sell to mid-market clients, an important target sector. The Advantage team quickly began to rely on the leads that SalesView’s Smart Agents provided to its dashboards, reducing the need for time-consuming research and prequalification. The volume and accuracy of SalesView’s leads, as well as the intu­itive nature of the software, resulted in record adoption of the tool by Advantage’s team. "Due to the quality of the leads they receive from SalesView, every one of our salespeople is excited to use this application—we’ve never had 100% user adoption of a new solution in our company before SalesView." Ultimately, the adoption of SalesView led to an increase in Advantage’sconversion rate from 10% to 5 0%.

Shaping the Socialprise

Through implementing SalesView, Advantage experi­enced an increase in conversion rate and significant top-line revenue growth—impressive results, to be sure, considering the short length of time in which they were achieved. As Advantage develops its synergistic relationship with SalesView, fine-tuning its use of SalesView’s Smart Agents, the company anticipates even larger gains.

The wealth of information on the web is growing constantly and shows no signs of slowing down. It is more important than ever before for organizations to cull the insights they need in order to have better insights into their businesses. With its implementation of SalesView, Advantage can concentrate on cultivating a thorough understanding of every member of its talent pool, which is the backbone of its industry leadership.

About the Author

MARC PERRAMOND (marc.perramond@insideview.com) is the director of product management for InsideView, a pioneer in on-demand business search and intelligence. He is responsible for InsideView’s product strategy, evangelism, and execution.

ISYS Search Software, a global supplier of information access and discovery solutions for mining intelligence and corporate knowledge, announced the arrival of ISYS:sdk 9, the company’s enterprise search integration kit for original equipment manufacturers (OEM), independent software vendors (ISV), and systems integrators. ISYS has expanded its core engine’s content mining capabilities. Through its Intelligent Content Analysis, ISYS notes key characteristics about a content collection, such as metadata patterns and entities. ISYS:sdk now handles most search requests concurrently and offers increased index capacity, allowing for 2TB to 4TB of content per single index. ISYS automatically identifies identical documents and either removes them from the results or visually marks them. ISYS now provides administrators with the ability to adjust the relevance weighting on entire or sub-collections of documents.
 
(www.isys-search.com)

First quarter federal reports show Google lobbied on the electronic medical records provisions of the federal economic stimulus act, contradicting earlier claims that Consumer Watchdog's report of its effort was "100 percent false." Google's report shows a total expenditure of $880,000 on lobbying during the period including on "online health-related initiatives; issues relating to online personal health records, including in connection with H.R. 1: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009." Google also contracted with an outside firm, the Podesta Group, which independently reported lobbying for Google on "health information technology" and "online privacy." King and Spalding LLP also independently reported lobbying for Google on "online health-related initiatives, including health information technology provisions in H.R. 1, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act." After the nonprofit, nonpartisan Consumer Watchdog reported the "rumored" lobbying in January, Google contacted a charitable foundation about withdrawing Consumer Watchdog's funding.

(www.consumerwatchdog.org)

Intelius, an information commerce company, purchased people search engine Spock. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Spock has raised $8 million in two rounds of venture financing. Intelius provides people search results and background checks based on data from public records, while Spock pulls its results from social networking sites and blog posts. Spock also finds information like websites, photos, videos, and blogs about people.

(www.intelious.com, www.spock.com)

Sherpa Software, a provider of e-discovery and archiving software company, announced the release of version 4.5 of Sherpa Software’s Mail Attender, a scalable content management tool that addresses mailbox, Outlook PST file, and public folder management for Microsoft Exchange users. A new feature of the latest version of Mail Attender is new Transfer Rules that allow the secure transfer of data from one email store to another without the need to directly connect the two. Sherpa Software Mail Attender provides Microsoft Exchange users with mail management and transfer functionality. The new version of Mail Attender allows customers to automate common policies and also offers statistical reporting capabilities that provide access to unlimited and comprehensive statistics on the content of your entire email system. Mail Attender is designed to be non-invasive and can be installed on any network-enabled machine.

(www.sherpasoftware.com)

Access Innovations, a provider of document processing, database construction, and project management, and Perfect Search Corporation, a provider of thesaurus construction and database management tools, announced a joint presentation for search technology. Perfect Search already hosts databases of more than 1.4 billion records with sub-second search response time. The search can be faceted, full text, or a combination. Adding the presentation layer from Access Innovations’ Data Harmony software suite gives the user the ability to improve search results through taxonomy-enhanced methods such as automatic completion based on the synonyms and taxonomy terms, related terms to broaden the search, narrower terms to refine the search, browsing of taxonomies associated with document sets, spell check, and recursive sets.

(www.accessinn.com, www.dataharmony.com, www.perfectsearchcorp.com)

Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest, has added University of Calgary as a beta development partner for the Summon unified discovery service. A variety of new content providers, including BMJ, an international peer-reviewed medical journal and subsidiary of the British Medical Association have also signed onto the Summon service. The Summon service is a Google-like search. In the case of University of Calgary, library archives and museum collections will be integrated too, enabling users to find books and videos, e-resources at the article level, as well as manuscripts and artifacts, all from one starting point. University of Calgary librarians, archivists, and curators will initially test and use the Summon service. Then, they will move it to an open beta in May, getting feedback from faculty and student users. Other partners who are already testing include Dartmouth College, Oklahoma State University, University of Sydney, University of Liverpool and Western Michigan University.
 
(www.serialssolutions.com/summon)

Integreon, a provider of Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) in the legal industry, announced it has completed its acquisition of the e-discovery assets of ONSITE3, a provider of electronic evidence solutions for law firms and corporations. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The merger increases the scale of Integreon's litigation support business, has added in-house forensics and data analytics capabilities, and given the firm eView a proprietary document review platform.
 
(www.integreon.com)

Just announced, Coveo Enterprise Search 6.0 has been engineered to provide enterprise-grade scalability, deep connectivity and security to data repositories, as well as significant performance improvements.

Coveo says that through its customer-driven approach, the significantly enhanced new version delivers solutions that are easy to deploy and cost effective with a rapid payback. As proof, the company offers a unique, risk-free proof-of-concept to customers.

Coveo highlights 6.0’s key features:

• improved scalability with up to 50 million documents per server--faster query performance and contextual faceted search, which enable companies to use less hardware than any other vendor to index the same amount of corporate content;

• unified view--out-of-the-box ability to create unlimited unified interfaces, providing users with a tabbed-search interface for optimized access to information;

• deep connectivity--enabling companies to leverage existing and legacy IT assets;

• new and improved connectors and interfaces--Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Salesforce.com, Open Text LiveLink, Confluence, Quest Archive Manager, SiteCore, Symantec Enterprise Vault, etc.;

• a highly customizable super-user mode—can be integrated in the search interface for enterprisewide content discovery across all employee data; and

• extended capabilities for mobile phones—contextual faceted search & filtering, added support for intranet (SharePoint, etc.) and CRM (Salesforce.com), document quick view (for device friendly, low-bandwidth access to documents), conversation tracking and people search.

It’s inappropriate to call Open Text, by far the largest enterprise content management vendor, the last of the big-time spenders. But it is tempting, after its announcement of a definitive agreement to acquire Texas-based premiere Web content management provider Vignette for an estimated $310 million.

Reportedly, Vignette shareholders will receive $8 in cash plus 0.1447 of an Open Text common share for every Vignette common share, which equates to approximately U.S. $12.70 at close of market on May 5. This represents a premium of approximately 74 percent above the 30-trading-day average closing price of Vignette’s shares and approximately 41 percent above the most recent closing price.

In the formal announcement, John Shackleton, president and CEO of Open Text, said, "The combination of Vignette with Open Text will extend the breadth of our offerings and further Open Text’s positioning as the leading independent ECM vendor in the marketplace. Vignette’s customers represent some of the world's most powerful online brands, and we are excited about the opportunity to expand the relationship with these customers and partners."

Mike Aviles, Vignette president and CEO, said, "After a thorough evaluation of strategic and financial alternatives, the Vignette Board of Directors believes that today’s announcement provides attractive value for our shareholders. Our shareholders, customers, partners and employees will all benefit as Vignette combines with Open Text."

He continued, "Joining Open Text builds on our commitment to deliver the most innovative solutions for our customers and partners. Vignette has an enviable customer base, deep expertise in Web Content Management (WCM) and global distribution capabilities. Vignette customers will benefit from Open Text’s expanded ECM solutions portfolio as well as their Vignette products being supported by the world’s largest independent ECM solutions provider." Vignette has approximately 700 employees. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2009 and is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval by Vignette’s shareholders, Hart-Scott-Rodino anti-trust clearance, Securities and Exchange Commission clearance and stock exchange approvals.

Composite Software, Inc., a provider of data virtualization, and Motio, Inc., a provider of advanced software for IBM-Cognos BI deployments, announced the new Composite BI Accelerator. Jointly developed by Composite and Motio, the Composite BI Accelerator automates tasks in the BI lifecycle. The initial release, a self-contained appliance, has been optimized for IBM-Cognos environments. Features include: data and hidden data relationship discovery; auto-generation of data models; requirements validation; version control models and reports; data lineage tracking; and automatic regression and stress testing.

(www.compositesw.com, www.inMotio.com)

Google announced new features at the Searchology event. Google announced its new set of features called Search Options, which are a collection of tools that let users generate different views to find what they need. The Search Options panel also gives the ability to view results in new ways. One view gives users more information about each result, including images as well as text. Google also announced a new tool called Google Squared. Google Squared automatically finds and organizes facts from across the internet. Google will be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs. In addition, Google announced the "Wonder Wheel," a graphical way to explore topics by clicking on related searches that go deeper into the subject of the main query.

(www.google.com)

Vivisimo, a provider of enterprise search, announced a strategic OEM agreement with LexisNexis, a global provider of content-enabled workflow solutions. Through this partnership, Vivisimo’s Velocity Search platform will be integrated into LexisNexis’ Concordance Enterprise. LexisNexis will integrate Velocity for OEM, which leverages Velocity’s architecture in a modular design for deployment in a variety of markets and applications.

(www.Vivisimo.com, www.lexisnexis.com)