As seen on NJBiz
For the longest time — and still today in some cases — when a company decided to do its own job recruiting, it meant that someone was tasked with putting advertisements up on job boards galore.
What came next was impossible to prepare for: the manual filtering of a thousand-email flood.
“There was no rhyme or reason to it,” said Art Pereless, who founded a software firm after seeing what a need there was to streamline that process.
The former software engineer’s namesake company, Pereless Systems, was brought online in 2000 and today offers a full range of applicant tracking and on-boarding software through the cloud.
“What we saw were a lot of different functions that were broken,” Pereless said. “We developed a way to have an interface that brought all that information into a central application.”
The company combines content from third-party job boards such as Monster or Glassdoor with ways of managing the hiring necessaries, such as background checks and skills assessments.
But the Red Bank firm hasn’t entered this niche alone. Although it predates many competitors, the amount of startups marketing similar services — all involving the convergence of recruiting tools onto a tech platform — has ballooned.
The narrative is this: It’s a good sector that has gotten way too crowded.
“In last five years, there has been so many players entering this market,” Pereless said. “The space has gotten very convoluted. I think that’s going to lead to some consolidation, but it’s going to take time.”
The experience Pereless has in the software space tells him that this is not a new phenomenon.
“This happens with a lot of software,” he said. “It goes through a period of getting popular and a lot of people jump in at the same time.”
Regardless of it coming with the territory, the local business owner isn’t at all pleased with the claims of some of the sector’s newcomers.
“You have companies coming online in the past year or two that market the same type of full suite as us, but there’s no way it could be,” Pereless said. “We’ve been building modules based on client needs and adding them into the suite after testing (for years).”
But one thing is for sure — the platforms all of these companies are developing are making an impact on business overall.
Pereless said benefits are particularly felt by companies that experience a lot of employee attrition, such as call centers.
“Systems like ours really benefit those companies because they can have a bench of people who they can plug right in,” he said.
Pereless went as far as to say that unemployment numbers being kept so low today might have a connection, however tangential, to the influx of affordable tools streamlining recruiting.
“It’s all relevant — it’s a reflection of how successful companies are in their recruiting process,” he said.
Written by Brett Johnson