"What you’ll see this year is, for the most part, evolutionary," says Kevin Marasco, vice president of marketing with Recruitmax. Applicant tracking systems will be enhanced to make recruiters more efficient, extend sourcing into the global market, improve record keeping to comply with new federal regulations and provide better analytical tools to help senior managers track the impact that good hiring has on the company’s bottom line.

    The two most important developments in recruiting technology this year, Marasco predicts, will be compliance with the record-keeping requirements and integration with enterprise human capital systems.

    "There will be more and more innovations in integration," Marasco says. "Our goal as a tech vendor is to provide a technical platform that can work with all the other systems out there to deliver the performance analytics that companies need to manage the business."

    His predictions are echoed by Kathy Barton, senior vice president of marketing and product management at Peopleclick. She has declared integration to be the "single greatest trend this year."

    A major factor driving that is a new rule issued February 6 by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. The rule defines an Internet applicant for the purpose of compliance with equal employment opportunity rules, and while the regulations apply only to federal contractors, many HR professionals expect them to be extended to all employers before the end of the year.

    "We think this is going to drive a specialization among recruiters," Barton says. She believes it will create a corps of candidate-sourcing experts who are highly trained in both the federal regulations and in building candidate pools. "This is going to mean better candidate management and better integration with performance management tools," she says.

    "For every job you hire, there are always two or three people almost as good," Barton says. "You’ll want them."

    Top people help improve corporate performance, and how a company sources and hires makes a difference. That’s why Taleo is hearing the call for more analytical data to improve the quality of hires and to prepare for workforce changes.

    "Performance evaluation is a matter of bringing in data from throughout the enterprise," says David Michaud, vice president of product marketing. For now, Taleo is enhancing its ability to link into other corporate systems, but in time, performance evaluation is "a business we are going to want to get into," Michaud says.

    iCIMS, meanwhile, is automating the onboarding process and electronically managing what used to be called paperwork, says Adam Feingenbaum, director of marketing and sales. He says all the re­cruitment technology companies are striving to make clients more efficient "so they can spend more time working on what’s going to be the harder and harder job of finding and keeping talent."

Workforce Management, February 27, 2006, p. 32 -- Subscribe Now!