Enticing Entice Labs

Entice Labs

(Jan 30, 2009) This week, I had the good fortune to spend time with a number of CEOs in the Human Capital Industry. Deb McGrath, who runs HR.com, hosted a simultaneous event for the community that invests in the Human Capital Marketplace.

More about the conference tomorrow.

I spent about an hour with Ryan Caldwell who is the CEO of Entice Labs, a Provo, Utah (home of Brigham Young University and a deeply technical city) company who are liable to turn our industry upside down. The company is founded and financed by the people behind Omniture, the high end, must have web analytics company. It is the deepest technology play in our industry since the dot com wave.

Omniture pioneered neural network technology that monitors, assesses and improves web page performance on the fly. The software learns to adjust line weight, image placement, site maps and link structures in order to optimize results with little human intervention. The resulting analytics are presented in astonishing clarity. Steve Jobs is said to have two monitors on his desktop devoted exclusively to Omniture’s real time analysis of Apple’s web operations.

The basic tools are able to monitor the details of user behavior, imputed from the subtleties of cursor movement, decision time and click choice. The entire package is a sort of black magic that small time operators invest huge amounts of labor trying to replicate. There is no website owner who couldn’t benefit from Omniture style anqalytics. In these early days, however, the capacity is restricted to large accounts (by pricing).

Entice Labs is an attempt to bring that technology to smaller markets.

The idea is powerful enough to talk about. Ryan is setting up a demo so that I can validate the claims. If the product does half of what the company claims, it’s a game changer.

Today, internet sourcing is a cumbersome process. You can manually execute the cybersleuthing approach. You can broadcast your jobs to thousands of job boards. You can get targeting tighter. You can’t, however, get real time feedback and improvement in your work.

The Entice Labs approach is to constantly monitor the performance of your career site, your job ads and your talent pool. It tests and retests the underlying sourcing hypothesis and makes changes and adjustments on the fly.

Let’s say you are trying to find a data management analyst in Fargo. You post the job to Monster, the Fargo Times and DataManagementAnalysts.com. The EnticeLabs product monitors response rates in real time, compares them to your objectives and then recommends and executes changes in posting strategy. Finally, the promise of micro targeting and job distribution is coming to fruition.

This is no small project and no small deal. The underlying technology is incredibly expensive. The pure technology investment to date is in the millions. The company is committed to further investment to make our industry their success story.

If I had a job board or an employment website, I’d get on the phone and figure out how to become a customer or client. The team is new and their Recruiting Industry expertise is less than perfect. Early involvement with the project will give you a sustained long term technical advantage.

Expect to hear more as I learn and discover more.