Although Rolling Meadows-based PeopleFilter Technology LLC has always helped companies find the best job candidates through its applicant screening and tracking system, lately the software developer has been doing some recruiting of its own
Posted: 5/30/2006
Although Rolling Meadows-based PeopleFilter Technology LLC has always helped companies find the best job candidates through its applicant screening and tracking system, lately the software developer has been doing some recruiting of its own.
The company has increased its number of employees to 21 from nine in the past 90 days and Frank Pirri, CEO and co-founder, thinks that by the end of the year the company could burst to 45 people.
"We are now on our way to growing the company in a very, very aggressive fashion," he said in an interview.
Such growth can be built only on customer satisfaction. "We are banking our talent acquisition strategy on them and they have come through," said Manny Torres, senior director of human resources and enterprise talent acquisition at Chicago-based U.S. Cellular Corp.
In December, a year and a half after its software was first rolled out, PeopleFilter's parent holding company, ProFind Inc., housed in the same offices, secured $4.5 million in additional funding.
Cincinnati-based River Cities Capital Funds LP, which invests in high growth companies in the Midwest, led the recent round of venture capital which has enabled PeopleFilter to grow the company and recently hire Tim Beaumont, an experienced salesman in the industry, as vice president of sales.
Murray Wilson, managing director at River Cities Capital Funds and a director of PeopleFilter, said that the mature management team and a technology with a proven customer base were selling points for investors.
According to Wilson, the company offers a product with more functionality than more expensive applicant tracking systems plus increased flexibility "that is priced effectively for middle market buyers."
Pirri said PeopleFilter, which had sales of $2 million last year, expects to enjoy a 400 percent increase in bookings and more than double its customer base by the end of 2006. According to Wilson, PeopleFilter also is on track to more than double its revenues this year.
The company currently has about 20 clients. U.S. Cellular started using the system in early 2005 when it needed to hire about 400 employees in a short amount of time for a new customer service call center in Bolingbrook.
According to PeopleFilter, its system enabled a single U.S. Cellular recruiter to find the best candidates in the shortest amount of time and schedule interviews automatically through the software. As a result, U.S. Cellular was able to process about 600 applicants in 40 days, said Kevin Harrison, PeopleFilter co-founder and chief operating officer.
Based on its success with the product at the call center, the cellular phone provider adopted PeopleFilter for use in hiring across the company a year ago.
A transformation took place in May when the company changed its name from Talentology LLC to PeopleFilter, the name of the applicant- tracking software that is the foundation of the business.
"What better way than to identify the company by the very service that you provide?" Pirri said. PeopleFilter is "exactly what is happening. It is ideally descriptive of what the company provides."
The software, which is used by recruiters and human resource departments in conjunction with job boards like Monster Worldwide Inc.'s Monster.com, filters job applicants based on information from each applicant about his or her experience that's matched with a set of skills chosen by the recruiter from a library of 13,000 occupations.
This information is then used by the recruiter to rank applicants and interview those who possess the skills that most closely match those of the company's ideal candidate.
"You can start your activity with the highest probability of success," Harrison declared.
Unlike other applicant tracking systems that are really what Torres calls "resume repositories", PeopleFilter's system of ranking applicants based on their skills "is completely different and that is what I like about it," he said.
The PeopleFilter system enables recruiters "to zero in on the ideal candidates that they want to speak to immediately," Pirri said.
The software also has an automatic scheduler and other tracking features which, combined with the skills scoring, allow recruiters to process more applications in less time and make good hires, Harrison said.
"What is unusually attractive, to HR and specifically recruiter groups, is that with our tool they can truly begin to do the job that they were originally hired to do," Pirri stated.
The system also allows customers to pull up previous applicants at later dates, for different jobs with different skill levels, information that is lost with other tracking systems, he said.
PeopleFilter has forged relationships with partners like Cincinnati-based Devine Group Inc., a provider of behavioral assessment platforms. The two systems work together to provide clients with a comprehensive solution, said Scott Fowle, vice president of sales at Devine Group.
The idea for PeopleFilter came directly from experiences with these other applicant tracking systems, which Pirri and Harrison used at the company they previously founded, MyPoints.com Inc., an online direct marketer and portal that rewards its members for shopping online.
The company, which was sold to UAL Corp. for $113 million in 2001, grew very quickly and was hiring people by the hundreds.
Harrisonsaid the company was flooded with resumes from its notices on job boards but the applicants were not the most highly qualified, the resumes were not easily searchable, and wading through all the information to find qualified candidates was laborious.
"The technology was not only not helping us, it was probably hindering us" Harrison said. "We thought there had to be a better, more coherent solution to that."
Using their marketing background and experience, the founders sat around Harrison's kitchen table and developed a new business and a new technology that would become Talentology, which was incorporated in 2001.
BY NANCI BOMPEY
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