QuietAgent, a pioneer of anonymous recruitment invitation networks, will exhibit at the Onrec.com Online Recruitment Conference & Expo 2008, to be held at the Donald E Stephens Convention Center, in Chicago, on September 9 & 10, 2008. Onrec.com EXPO 2008 is widely regarded as the “must attend” online recruitment event of 2008.

Onrec.com is the world’s leading information resource for Human Resource professionals and recruiters using the Internet to recruit. Onrec.com EXPO 2008 is the only global gathering of online recruiting leaders and game-changing technologies. For more information about Onrec.com EXPO 2008 visit: www.onrec.com/expo2008

Onrec.com EXPO 2008 will bring together delegates and exhibitors involved in online recruitment from around the world to share their common interests, provide a business driven networking environment and stimulate discussion, debate, and beneficial partnerships.

QuietAgent is used around the world to introduce anonymous people to local and international potential employers via private invitation, which will provide a great opportunity for those who attend Onrec EXPO 2008 which they will be among over 2 dozen exhibitors & sponsors in attendance. For more information on all of the exhibitors presenting at this event click here

QuietAgent is a product of privately held technology company QuietAgent, Inc., founded in 1999 by Jason Kerr, and headquartered in Chicago, with offices in New York, London, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. It is the culmination of five years of extensive research and development into the problems of online recruitment and the wants and needs of job seekers, employers and third party recruiters globally.

QuietAgent is a continuous recruitment exchange, and the pioneer of anonymous mutual matching for jobs. QuietAgent’s recruitment model considers every candidate for every job, every day and instantly pinpoints the qualified and mutually interested anonymous candidates from a large pool provided by an alliance of large corporations, recruitment providers and other organizations.

http://www.onrec.com/newsstories/22505.asp

CHICAGO, IL (July 9, 2008) – A group of industry-leading Fortune 500 companies today launched AllianceQ, an organization created to build a free, exclusive and perpetually growing pool of job candidates to drive down its members’ cost of recruiting. Founding members include Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP), Baxter, Best Buy Co., Inc., Entergy Corporation, FPL Group (Florida Power & Light Company, FPL Energy), Starbucks, and Wachovia Corporation.

The technology behind AllianceQ continually matches job candidates to employment vacancies across all
Alliance member organizations. The result is that participating companies now have a free way to source
new job candidates, and can offer those job candidates they cannot hire, opportunities with other
AllianceQ members. The Alliance’s goal is to provide its members with a zero cost recruitment solution for
three out of every five jobs.

U.S. employers spend billions of dollars every year in their attempts to reach relevant and qualified
candidates. According to Borrell Associates, total recruitment spending is expected to increase from $58
billion in 2008 to $73 billion in 2012. The average cost to obtain an entry-level hire ranges from $3,000 to $6,000 (source: “Making Sense of Recruiting ROI,” Experience.com 2008). For the most part, these
investments are not fully utilized and the expenditures to attract job candidates are repeated every year.

AllianceQ was conceived, formed and implemented by QuietAgent (www.quietagent.com) – a third
generation recruitment solution – in response to the increasing time, energy and cost corporations often
waste while recruiting qualified job seekers.

Jason Kerr, co-chairman of AllianceQ and CEO of QuietAgent, explains, “Collectively, the Fortune 500 is
the world’s largest job board. They have all the jobs, they attract the most job candidates, so it just makes sense for them to collaborate resources and help each other save money.”

The founding members of AllianceQ agree.

“Best Buy cares about people and wants them to be excited about bringing their interests and unique
talents to work,” said Kristina Parker, director of selection, Best Buy. “Working with AllianceQ ensures that our candidates can be connected to opportunities – inside or outside of Best Buy – that can put their
strengths to work.”

“AllianceQ allows us to collaborate with other large corporations to help solve recruiting challenges while
offering our candidates a higher level of customer service,” said Janet Manzullo, senior vice president for
recruiting, Wachovia Corporation.

“The ‘race-to-talent’ is an issue for corporations of all sizes,” said Peggy Jude, vice president, HR Shared Services, ADP, Inc. “ADP is a worldwide leader in the HR industry and we believe that AllianceQ offers us a unique way to get access to the best candidates in the market today,”

Information about joining AllianceQ is available at: www.allianceq.com.

http://www.onrec.com/newsstories/22102.asp 

CHICAGO, IL (June 4, 2008) – QuietAgent today announced the launch of a new ‘Tools and Technology’ feature that gives job seekers the ability to enhance their résumé with a comprehensive listing of tools and technologies they have used.

The 15,000-strong QuietAgent Tools and Technologies database is provided by the Department of Labor’s O*NET Data Collection Program, and includes both generalist and specialist toolsets required to perform over 1400 types of jobs.

QuietAgent CEO Jason Kerr explains, “QuietAgent now gives job seekers the chance to be found for jobs because they have used particular equipment, devices, machinery or software.”

QuietAgent’s intelligent search and suggestion functions assist job seekers to find and pick from the 15,000 items, and easily set their level of proficiency. Job seekers and employers can also add their own specialized items to the database, further growing the tools and technologies list through community use.

Kerr continues, “Tool and technology experience is important to employers and recruiters, and now, for the first time, they can search for this valuable information in candidate résumés. For example, a health recruiter can narrow their candidate search to include experience in using specialized items like cardiac transducers or ultrasound devices.”

The Tools and Technology list is also mapped to the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC) global standard, so now employers can be alerted when a person with the skills and experience they require joins QuietAgent anywhere in the world.

QuietAgent’s candidate matching tools have been used since 2004 by employers, recruiters, governments and workforce and community organizations to pinpoint the best qualified and mutually interested anonymous candidates.

CHICAGO, IL (March 31, 2008) – QuietAgent today announced it has entered into a strategic
partnership with the National Urban League. The partnership will introduce QuietAgent’s
‘continuous recruitment exchange’ model of fairness, equality and diversity in recruiting, to
members and partners of the National Urban League.

QuietAgent’s candidate matching tools have been used since 2004 by employers, recruiters,
governments and workforce and community organizations to pinpoint the best qualified and
mutually interested anonymous candidates.

“The National Urban League is committed to empowering people to attain good jobs,” said
National Urban League President and CEO Marc H. Morial. “We chose to work with QuietAgent
because its technology gives every person a chance to be considered, for every single job.”

QuietAgent CEO Jason Kerr explains, “QuietAgent eliminates recruiting bias by keeping
candidate details private and reviewing every person on a level playing field. Every time an
employer or recruiting agent searches for talent, QuietAgent makes sure that no résumé in the
community is ever overlooked.”

More than two million people will be invited to participate in the program through 100+ local
affiliates of the National Urban League. The League is working closely with QuietAgent and
leading American corporations to promote equality in recruiting and maximize opportunities for
diverse professionals and job seekers. A unique collaborative program of which the League is a
founding member will be announced shortly.

In the next release we will be adding a key component to the software: core competencies for every job in the database.

Over 100,000 core competencies will be added to QuietAgent for company recruiters to search and filter on to identify qualified candidates.

Based on user feedback provided by our employer and recruiting agent users worldwide, we are beginning a complete re-write of QuietAgent. To further build on the strong Microsoft .Net framework, QuietAgent is moving to a full Microsoft Visual Studio Framework.

The new QuietAgent will be launched in early 2008.

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.

CHICAGO, IL (June 21, 2007) – QuietAgent, the anonymous online headhunter, believes it could effect a significant change in the value proposition of online advertising campaigns, with the release of its new rich-media tool, coined the ‘gadvert’ (a ‘gadget that thinks it’s an advert’).

The QuietAgent gadvert is an online banner advertisement that upon a click turns into a mini-application or ‘gadget’, allowing people to actually join the QuietAgent service while remaining on the website of an advertising provider or partner.

‘Gadgets’ or ‘widgets’ are growing in popularity for functions such as real-time viewing of stocks, news and weather reports, and for incorporating simple tools within websites. Up until now, most advertising gadgets have been tools that merely host summarized information from another source (for instance, lists of cities or airports) and link users out to other websites for more information.

QuietAgent is the first true application gadget, allowing users to actually interact with its job seeker website in real-time. They can search the database for a job they would consider doing, enter their desired salary, relevant work history and education details, and request QuietAgent keeps an eye out for any job that meets their minimum criteria.

Jason Kerr, CEO of QuietAgent explains that the gadvert came about because the company needed a quick and non-intrusive way to engage the busy professionals QuietAgent was designed for. “We target the 90 percent of working people who don’t use job boards and aren’t interested in time-consuming signup processes, so we needed to offer a simple registration experience - one that didn’t divert people away from what they were doing for very long.”

The gadvert can be hosted on any website and looks like any other rich-media advertisement. Users click on the gadvert to display the application, which guides them through completing an anonymous registration in a matter of seconds.

Kerr believes that the gadvert concept has the potential to deliver two-fold benefits to website owners. Firstly, the technology gives them the advantage of running traditional advertising while retaining visitors on their websites. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, gadverts provide an easy way for them to monetize their website audience with a gadvert partner, without losing visitor traffic.

QuietAgent partner websites include the Forbes Career Center, alumni social networking organization Harris Connect, and a growing number of employer association websites globally. An education campaign to job seekers begins this month via advertising channels such as ABCnews, MarketWatch and the Wall Street Journal.

With the gadvert in place, QuietAgent is now focused on reaching its critical mass of 4 million job seekers by the end of 2007.