091109 Avature

Topics: HRExaminer, John Sumser, Reviews, by John Sumser

Avature.

The world is changing fast. Technology, smart, cheap coding, seasoned business people and the burning desire to change the game are driving innovation even as the economy sputters. Avature, a new entrant to the Recruiting Market is turning heads with its innovative approaches to enterprise software problems.

“I hear a lot of enterprise software project managers say ‘I could use this tool in any aspect of my business’. The free form workflow design features just blow the minds of people used to the glacial pace of large scale software vendors.” So says Mike Johnson, the Portland based head of sales for Avature.

“Here’s an example. One of our clients was trying to get his enterprise vendor to make a change. He wanted a new country name added to a drop down list. The vendor quoted $1,500 and three weeks. With the Avature tool, you can do that sort of thing on the fly.”

Avature markets itself as “CRM for Recruiters”. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It’s a kind of software popularized by Salesforce.com. Rather than tracking applicants (like an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) does), a CRM is focused on relationship management…the comings and goings of a conversation.

Like most Recruiting tools, the bottom line is workflow, the ability to configure a piece of software to match the way that you do business. That’s where Avature shines. “If you can click your way through email, you can design workflow on Avature.” remarks Johnson.

Unlike recently reviewed players JobScore and Recruiting.com, Avature wants to go head to head with big players like Taleo, SAP, Oracle and Kenexa. “We’re disruptive in price and technology.” claims Johnson “We’re SaaS and really easy to configure. Our clients save huge money on the basic deal and fistfuls of dollars on the maintenance and improvement charges. The tool is remarkably easy to configure. We get rave reviews from enterprise programmers who can’t figure out how we do it. The software is menu driven and designed to accommodate any circumstance in Recruiting.”

They’ve got a number of clients who seem to validate the claims. IBM, Adidas, Kelly. Adecco, Spherion, Conoco, Raytheon and the New York Public Education System are all Avature users. With 85 enterprise clients, they are rapidly moving into the ranks of the big players.

The Avature toolkit includes standard regulatory processing, resume parsing and importable social data. Since the basic mind set is the development of a relationship (rather that the validation of a resume), Avature’s development focuses on bringing the most relevant data to the transaction.

Like Recruiting.com. a primary focus is on the broken-ness of ATS and Enterprise recruiting systems. In the Avature design, data is routed out of the Enterprise tool, through a user designed and back in to the Enterprise stuff.

In an interesting twist, Avature sells to the fact that most HR processes are managed by spreadsheet. (Most HR tool marketing campaigns claim this is a bad thing.) Once a dashboard is built in Avature (an easy to execute process), the data can be easily fed to the department spreadsheets and updated in an automated fashion.

Avature has operations on four continents. Offices in New York, Portland and Buenos Aires plus strong initiatives in Australia and Europe make this little enterprise a real powerhouse.

Johnson and founder Dimitri Boylan are HotJobs veterans. The level of talent that emerged from that shop continues to amaze the rest of the market (you might recall that Dan Arkind, JobScore’s founder came from the staffing firm that seeded HotJobs).

Keep your ear out for Avature disruption stories. They’re shaking up the market.



 
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