The Dot Com Beginnings
Many of Avature’s senior management worked together in a previous endeavor at HotJobs.com.
Dimitri Boylan co-founded HotJobs.com in 1997, served as COO and later CEO and took the company public on the NASDAQ in August 1999. Yahoo! purchased HotJobs.com in 2002 in an unsolicited bid.
The HotJobs.com story was one of early web 1.0 innovation, rapid sales growth, aggressive brand building, including four Super Bowl commercials, and strong customer support.
In addition to becoming the second-largest online recruiting system in the United States, HotJobs.com introduced the world to the first fully web-based enterprise recruiting system in 1998 (later referred to as SaaS) and acquired and restructured the largest client-server ATS software company in the world in 2000.
In February of 2002, when Yahoo! purchased HotJobs.com for $433MM, it was the 49th most visited website on the Internet, had over 6,000 customers, and was ranked #14 in the Bloomberg Tech 100.
Our Enterprise Software Journey
In 2004, Dimitri brought together some of his former colleagues from Hotjobs.com & Yahoo and began the Avature story.
Convinced that leading recruiting software companies were not helping their customers leverage technology to gain a competitive advantage, we set out to define the next generation of software based on Web 2.0 and the changing role of the Internet in people’s lives.
The result was the development of a powerful federated search technology called WebSources, which quickly became popular with a new breed of recruiting professional – the sourcing specialist.
Next, we turned our attention to candidate engagement.
Recognizing that leading CRM products were unsuitable for modern recruiting, we designed branded email marketing features for passive candidate engagement, developed advanced segmentation based on candidate pipeline progress and talent pool attributes, and pioneered personalized multi-channel communication.
Along the way, we realized that we could get hiring managers to participate in recruiting if we gave them a modern web portal with real-time information on recruiting projects. As it turned out, this added transparency and helped hiring managers gain new respect for the efforts that went into building good talent pipelines and recruiting passive candidates.
Finally, realizing that every company has a different way to go to market and attract and retain great talent, we delivered a flexible data model and configurable workflow engine to support the creation of referral management, agency management, internal mobility and fully bespoke recruiting solutions for any region of the world.
Building for the Future
Today, Avature continues to find new ways to deliver innovative software so that our customers can continue to define pioneering business practices and gain a competitive advantage. Our “internet company” software development life cycle – based on agile design, micro-scoping and high frequency/low-risk releases – allows us to respond quickly to our customer’s needs.
Our customers, from our early CRM adopters, to the talent leaders that are radically repositioning HR for the future, will continue to shape the Avature platform as they apply people-centric automation to their talent acquisition and talent management endeavors and look to take on the complex HR challenges of today. It is this collaboration that has led our multi-application platform model to quickly become the data hub and platform of choice for talent acquisition and talent management in large enterprises.
Together with our customers, we like to think the best is yet to come.