With all the coverage of SuccessFactors being bought by SAP, some people may have missed the news that SuccessFactors bought Jobs2Web.  Spending $110 million for a company that did about $10 million in revenue in 2010, SuccessFactors was making a pretty big bet on analytics.

I think this is good news for HR.

Described as the Marketo of recruiting by Brian Sommers ^[1], Jobs2Web is a jobs distribution platform that pushes jobs to dozens or hundreds of job boards and other sites, and helps recruiters build “talent communities.”  But a lot of companies do that.  When I saw Jobs2Web at HRTech last year, the thing that impressed me most was their analytics: the ability to show exactly where candidates are coming from, how much they cost and how many get hired.

Recruiting analytics is a critical function that many companies skip altogether, or do so poorly that they might as well skip it. The challenge is getting good data into the platform, and then knowing how to turn that data into real insight.  The fact that Lars saw recruiting analytics as an investment worth $110 million shows something we at Evolv see as well: there is an increasing awareness from HR leaders that data driven HR is the goal they need to be moving towards.  I believe data driven workforce selection is the most important aspect of that because quality of hire drives pretty much everything else a company does over the long term.

Evolv’s customers are already seeing the benefits of deep recruiting analytics. By tying analytics not just to the advertising spend, but the assessment, hiring process, and post hire performance, we’re giving them outsized returns on their entire recruiting process.  We’re also showing them, in real time, how the quality of their workforce selectivity ties directly to the productivity of their workforce.