Serial entrepreneurs Denis O’Brien (pictured) and Leslie Buckley are understood to have taken a significant shareholding in recruitment software company Candidate Manager, a separate spin-off company from Irishjobs.ie.
The company, which hosts CV management software for HR departments, has beaten off competition from Oracle and PeopleSoft locally in pitched battles for bluechip clients like AIB Capital Markets and Hibernian.
Candidate Manager, headed by Irishjobs.ie co-founder Ken Fitzpatrick, makes software that enables HR departments to manage the recruitment process in terms of receiving CVs and coordinating interviews and selecting candidates for available positions.
The company is understood to have already signed up a number of bluechip organisations in Ireland including AIB Capital Markets, the Defence Forces, Hibernian Insurance, Statoil, Anglo Irish Bank, Trinity Biotech, McDonalds, Dublin Institute of Technology and pharmaceutical giant Takeda. The company is also targeting the UK software market and has established a number of distribution alliances.
Candidate Manager’s technology is hosted on an ASP (application service provider) basis whereby companys that use the technology pay for a subscription to use the technology in a similar manner to that of CRM giant Salesforce.com. According to a spokesperson for the company, it has beaten off competition locally from established ERP (enterprise resource planning) players like Oracle and PeopleSoft for deals with bluechip customers.
The company was spun out of recruitment portal Irishjobs.ie last year when the company’s founders recognised that CV management technology it developed in-house could enjoy widespread commercial success in the business.
Fitzpatrick told siliconrepublic.com: “The whole area of recruitment software is beginning to take hold amongst businesses. Up until now the amount of work involved in recruitment has been underestimated and the process of getting back to people and letting them know how their application faired is quite time consuming. Candidate Manager can automate that process.
“Our idea is about how companies save money, by reducing time to hire and helps them build up a talent pool. If they are reducing costs they increase the bottom line.
“The software is delivered on an ASP basis via the web and the way we operate it is that people pay a fee use it and don’t have to invest in servers,” Fitzpatrick said.
Fitzpatrick’s colleague, Maria Mahon, managing director of Irishjobs.ie, told siliconrepublic.com: “The whole area of recruitment has become electronic and Candidate Manager’s software automates the process and manages tasks, automatically issuing emails to acknowledge the receipt of a job application, for example, and ranks candidates according to various criteria.”
She told siliconrepublic.com that while Candidate Manager is an entirely separate company to Irishjobs.ie, it has the same shareholder base, with O’Brien and Buckley taking a significant stake in the company.
Irishjobs.ie , which was established in 1999, is now Ireland’s foremost recruitment portal, having last year bought the assets of Topjobs.ie as well as acquiring NIjobs.com in 2000. Irishjobs.ie advertises 22,000 jobs at any one time and has an audience of 250,000 users a month. Last month, the company took a 75pc stake in Scottishappointments.com, which is ranked at number two in the online recruitment sector in Scotland, and plans to invest £1m sterling to develop the company.
By John Kennedy
