Picking up where we left off on Friday, the Taleo-Vurv merger is a yawner. The Applicant Tracking Systems industry, home to a hundred niche providers, is moribund. The closest thing to innovation in the game are the predominantly ridiculous attempts to jump on the Talent Management bandwagon.
The merger takes two lethargic bundles of functionality and prays that a single, more profitable process will emerge. Vurv supplies its customers with a hundred variations of the same thing. The company grew quickly by accommodating the whims of its customers. Sadly, that’s the single best recipe for losing your shirt in the software industry.
The hope at Taleo is that they will be able to jettison the bad customers. (Oh, you forgot that some customers are bad? They are really spoiled over at Vurv and used to getting vastly more than they pay for.) Once the cost sinkholes have been filled in, they will shepherd in a brand new day of a single software configuration.
It’s the best news the ATS marketplace has had in a decade.
As the result of the merger, lots of big customers will be looking for new providers. Some of them will be from the Vurv base, some of them will be from the Taleo base. You’ll see stepped up advertising and lots of attention to little slips in customer service.
Now, I am decidedly not saying that Taleo is a lethargic company. They have managed to build a near monopoly in the Fortune 500 enterprise software environment. Their idea is to cement that position. Their customer service is strong and disciplined. They’ve provided our industry with needed stability.
But, the raw functionality of their software is nearly unchanged since its first iterations. Lots of attention to managing the customer software configuration problem mentioned above took all of the energy away from meaningful improvement.
A strong focus on customer feedback and benchmarking as a method for building new functionality has left them stranded. You simply can’t follow customers into a leadership position. You have to lead. Great customer service and mediocre product innovation equals vulnerability.
Over the coming weeks, I’m going to take a close look at the real requirements for Recruiting software.
