SnapHire Delivers HR Utility

SnapHire, a San Francisco based firm, has this week delivered the latest iteration of its impressive HR software, SnapHire Talent Management.

This stuff, however, comes with a twist. It doesn''t take years to integrate it into your back-office, it doesn''t cost millions of dollars to acquire and, even better, you don''t need a full squad of over-paid consultants to get it up and running. SnapHire is delivering it''s software like a Utility, and it''s doing so to good effect.


SnapHire Talent Management is a suite of HR tools aimed, predominantly, at the recruitment side of human resource management. The theory behind the products is that, since sourcing talent is an increasingly painful and time consuming task for large organisations, it is best to be streamlined. SnapHire does this with considerable aplomb through a range of functions. Everything from internal, external and graduate recruiting, employee referrals, search agency management, internet job board postings. And it caps it all off with a ROI report, giving the customer immediate, fact based returns.

The package goes much further than this in reality, to the point of providing comprehensive contact management, direct marketing and search tools that, the firm claims, enable recruiters to ''aggressively'' target and source candidates. It''s a virtual recruitment supply chain system for the organisation and can be deployed as such, across any range of departments through the SnapHire Hiring Manager desktop. In many ways this is a system that puts recruitment back into the hands of those that need to be involved in the recruitment process.

Headed up by Mike Gilmore, an ex-Oracle employee, SnapHire has tapped into the burgeoning demand for intelligent HR solutions. But it''s brought the whole process up to date before many of the monoliths, SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, have even figured out the name of the game. SnapHire, like Salesforce.com before it, is touting Utilities and as such it is probably ahead of the game in this respect.

That doesn''t mean that the company is going to be a raging success however. The concept of ASPs or utility-like software provision still has an awful lot of convincing to do. Certainly people who understand technology are convinced of its worth but the early, and frankly pitiful, attempts by many ASPs have left the market in something of a ruinous state. Having said that, there has probably never been a better time to start delivering solutions of this ilk. Customers and tech buyers across the globe are looking for value from their tech investments and Utilities, assuming the provision is appropriate, promise just that.