StaffCV is Changing the Online Recruitment Business on a Global Scale

What if there was a safe, totally private way for people who are happily employed to always be in the market for a better job offer? And what if this solution promised to reduce the average recruitment cost from $26,000 to less than $40? And, unlike job boards that often result in a flood of unsuitable candidates, what if this online service brought job seekers and employers together only when there was a strong mutual interest in being connected? It would provide huge efficiencies for businesses of all sizes, and a safe place for the in-work job seeker to participate. This is the business of StaffCV, Inc. and its QuietAgent technology, all based on Microsoft® .NET technology.

Billed as providing anonymous career opportunities for employed people, QuietAgent is building a new global community of talented anonymous job seekers, and delivering a platform that promises a better future for job seekers, employers, and recruiting agents.

Since launching the product in October 2005, the company says it is on track to reach four million job seekers; 20,000 to 30,000 employers; and 7,000 to 10,000 recruiting agents by the end of 2007.

The idea for StaffCV’s product, QuietAgent, has its roots in the airline business. The company founders were building airline management software when they discovered that many of their customers had recurring problems recruiting employees. At the same time, they were having difficulty hiring software developers, and paying fees anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 per hire.

Explains Jason Kerr, CEO of StaffCV, “We knew there had to be a better way to get two people together. What’s unique about us is that we’re not an advertising company or a social web site trying to leverage recruitment; we are a software business that has been using Microsoft technology since 1992, and we set out to build a piece of technology that would solve the recruitment problem. There is no job searching, no job postings, no referrals, and no mass-send job alerts. We’ve created a third-generation online technology that we think answers the core problems of online recruiting.”

Radically Changing the Existing Online Recruitment Approach

After researching the global online recruiting market, StaffCV found that this multi-billion dollar industry was being poorly supported by failing technologies and flawed business models. According to Kerr, “The technology was not able to effectively manage volume and quality, and the business model was flawed in that it required employers to ‘pay up-front to participate’ at prices that excluded the vast majority of employers such as small-to-medium-sized businesses.”

Compounding the volume and quality issues for employers were the frustrations job seekers experiences when searching online for jobs, and their increased exposure to the modern dangers of identity theft and fraud.

StaffCV saw an opportunity to radically change the existing online recruiting approach – moving from a ‘paying, posting and praying’ advertising model to a technology that provided recruiters with rich toolsets to search quality, structured data, and get two-way private connections with candidates.

Says Kerr, “The Microsoft .NET development platform has enabled QuietAgent to develop very complex, robust, and scalable technology, and succeed in delivering this complex technology as a set of easy-to-access and easy-to-use business tools.”

It took them six years to develop the product, which has 48,000 different job templates built into it. According to Kerr, “We had two goals in designing the technology: one, regardless of the size of your business, this software should empower you to have the recruiting capacity of a major corporation, and second, if you are a recruitment agency, this software should be powerful enough for you to deliver your clients’ needs as well.”

While there has been an entire new family of tools emerge in the past couple of years (job aggregators, business/referral networks, etc.), that have had some success as online destinations, Kerr says they have fallen well short of actually resolving the larger problems facing online recruiting.

The SaaS Model – Serving Up New Opportunities for the Happily Employed Online

QuietAgent offers a safe and secure means for the ‘happily employed’ to begin managing their careers via the Internet. Unlike traditional job board use, where multiple visits, searches and applications are required, you make one visit, one time with QuietAgent, and can get started in just 45 seconds. It is aimed at the 90 percent of Internet users who are not necessarily looking for a job, but would consider a great offer.

For job seekers, that means a free, quick, safe and anonymous way to ensure they never miss out on a great job offer, with very little effort. They are only found by employers who can give them what they want, and employers cannot see who they are unless they agree to release their private contact details to them.

For employers, it is free to access, free to join (takes under three minutes), and employers pay only if they succeed, which effectively drives unnecessarily costs out of sourcing candidates.

Explains Kerr “With no software to install, no upfront cost or barriers to entry, QuietAgent delivers true on-demand, high impact SaaS technology that scales to all users in the recruitment marketplace. For the first time, the playing field is leveled across small business employers, individual recruiters working for large enterprises, and third-party recruitment and staffing agencies. Because it produces instant shortlists of one-to-one matches only between two highly interested parties, there is no time or money wasted by anyone who uses the technology.

Says Kerr, “Our goal is to drastically change recruitment on a global scale, and to move age-old established processes in a radical new direction. The .NET Framework, especially its ability to support scalable SaaS solutions, is the only technology that can truly support our goal.”

A Microsoft House – End-to-End

QuietAgent runs on the Microsoft SQL Server™ 2003 platform, with web sites running on IIS servers and databases running on multiple SQL 2005 database servers. The company uses Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System (VSTS) extensively for development.

Kerr says that in a recent development, three developers in three different locations worked on the same pages/procedures – a feat Kerr says would never have been possible prior to VSTS. It helped them to reduce development/release time significantly.

The company’s entire database is housed and built on a SQL 2005 platform. Having recently migrated from a SQL 2000 database, they have undertaken code re-writes specifically to use the new SQL 2005 enhancements.

Explains Kerr, “One of the biggest advantages we found under SQL 2005 is the new ‘Try/Catch’ blocks available when writing Stored Procedures. Because of the reduction in code and complexity, this simple new feature has saved significant development and testing resources, which positively impacted testing and release times.”

StaffCV is also using SQL 2005 Log Shipping for its near-real-time reporting database. Says Kerr, “We have been able to implement a Customer Care program that is highly personalized and provides individual users with intelligent and relevant content, which has significantly decreased our member churn.”

Why choose Microsoft?

The company says it has been building products using only Microsoft technologies since the early 90s, and was very comfortable with the technology direction over the years. Explains Kerr, “We were about to embark on a big goal that, if successful, would change a business model globally. The last thing we wanted was to have to worry about the technology platform. We also needed to attract investor funding, and basing our entire platform on Microsoft .NET gave us significant credibility. This is true even more so now, as we talk to potential partners about using QuietAgent as a ‘White Label’ technology.”

StaffCV also wanted an end-to-end solution provider like Microsoft, a single company that developed all the major platforms in use, because it believed that the toolsets were designed to work together, rather than be ‘mashed together’. Explains Kerr, “This common code approach leads to reduced development, testing and deployment issues, and, we get no ‘IT’ arguments from clients.”

As a Microsoft Certified Partner and Microsoft Small Business Specialist, StaffCV has benefited from Microsoft consultations, and is now working with Microsoft on other solutions. Kerr sees the potential to deliver his company’s software as part of Microsoft Office Live, so every small business could have a free recruitment portal as part of that offering. And while 95 percent of the company’s focus is currently on the U.S. market, it did recently implement a new version of its software, QuietAgent Workforce Edition (a version of QuietAgent with added features for managing the underemployed) with the New Zealand Government. The QuietAgent Workforce Edition powers the country’s entire Welfare System Job Matching program. Other governments are also exploring a similar solution.

QuietAgent is also the exclusive career partner for 39 million members of Harris Connect, the leading U.S. high school and college alumni social networking organization. It also powers the Forbes Career Center, serving 15 million unique visitors per month, and a growing number of employer association web sites globally.