The news means Kronos, which already offers software designed to help organizations hire hourly workers, will compete more directly with recruiting software specialists such as Taleo, Vurv Technology and Kenexa. The titans of the HR software world, Oracle and SAP, also sell recruiting products.

Recruiting software helps organizations with tasks such as posting job openings, searching résumés and tracking applicants.

The field is expected to grow quickly, partly because of concerns around replacing aging baby boomer employees. Revenue from talent acquisition and recruiting applications will grow 19 percent annually between 2006 and 2011, to $1.7 billion, according to AMR Research. That’s almost twice as fast as the expected growth rate during this time for the overall field of “human capital management” applications, which AMR pegs at 11 percent.

Kronos’ new Workforce Acquisition for Corporate Hiring product involves reselling software from MrTed, a London-based software company. The software Kronos will be offering from MrTed already is used by organizations in more than 100 countries, is available in 25 languages and processes 10 million corporate applications each year, Kronos said.

Kronos for years focused on “workforce management” software, which is technology for scheduling employees and keeping track of time and attendance. Its acquisition of hourly hiring specialist Unicru in 2006 effectively transformed it into a vendor of “talent management” software, which is generally defined as applications for key tasks such as recruiting, performance management, compensation management and employee learning.

“Through the fusion of workforce acquisition and workforce management, Kronos offers an integrated approach to hiring the highest-quality people and then deploying and managing them most effectively,” Kronos CEO Aron Ain said in a statement. “With availability of our corporate hiring solution, we now offer a much broader talent management solution to help employers find the best-fit employees.”