WHEELING & DEALING
The People Google
By Jean-Marc Levy

First published in HRO Today (September 2004)
 

New proprietary technologies provide recruiters with sourcing and hiring tools.
 

With the economic recovery well under way and a strengthening of the labor market apparent as well, staffing-related investments are continuing to attract renewed interest from various investors. Companies that apply new technology solutions to inefficient staffing processes are particularly attractive to these investors.

Three recent transactions, over the course of the summer illustrate this trend.

Eliyon Technologies

Eliyon, the developer of a sophisticated automated content creation search technology, raised $7 million in July from Venrock Associates in a first round of venture funding. Other notable shareholders in Eliyon (which was spun-off from VC-backed Corex Technologies) include Flagship Ventures, Ascent Venture Partners and Commonwealth Capital.

Eliyon’s automated tools continually extract updated information from million of web sites, not unlike search engines Google or Yahoo. The twist in this case is that through the application of artificial intelligence and natural language processing to the millions of records it processes every day, Eliyon extracts current and historical career and employment information on business people, and integrates this information to create comprehensive profiles of companies and their employees.

According to Eliyon, more than 21 million business people profiles have been collected in the Eliyon database so far, covering virtually all executives in close to 1.5 million American companies, as well as millions of middle managers and professionals in corporate America. This information is available through a subscription service and can be tremendously helpful to executive recruiters in identifying hidden candidates and complementing their internal candidate databases.

BidShift

San-Diego based BidShift, secured a $3.5 million Series B round of venture financing led by Himalaya Capital, bringing the total capital raised by BidShift to $6 million.

BidShift is the creator of a software solution that allows hospitals to create an internal registry system through which qualified nurses and other clinical staff can view and “bid” for all available open shifts over a Web-enabled interface.

In the midst of the current healthcare worker shortage, the auction-based system has been much welcome by hospitals and healthcare workers alike, allowing the former to optimize their payroll costs while providing the latter with competitive auction-based pay-rates.

Hire.com

In other recent staffing deal news, earlier this summer, Hire.com raised $10 million in venture capital funding.

Citing the introduction of a new and improved product offering, the installation of a new CEO and executive leadership team, and the current improvement in economic conditions, Austin Ventures and Adams Street Partners both contributed to this fifth round of funding for the developer of HireEnterprise, a suite of software applications that help large organizations automate their employee sourcing, screening, and hiring processes.

One of the premises of Hire.com that is particularly useful in a tightening labor market is that it allows employers to build relationships with a broad network of potential qualified candidates before specific job openings actually exist, allowing these companies to hire better employees faster when the job openings do materialize.

Send Me Your Horror Stories

I received a lot of feedback on my recent “Anatomy Of A Deal” column. Many readers felt that raising private capital was still very much an uphill battle, even for promising companies, and that the process was one fraught with obstacles and disappointments. If you’ve recently raised or attempted to raise capital from VC or private equity investors, email me your war and horror stories about the experience, and I will showcase them in an upcoming column.