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News In Review
November 9, 1998


Hiring Helper

Icarian Workforce helps companies maintain staffing levels, recruit workers

By Jeff Sweat

Afledgling enterprise applications vendor last week unveiled software aimed at what it calls "enterprise workforce planning"--similar to a manufacturing resource planning system, but for people.

Icarian Inc. will produce Icarian Workforce, designed to automate the process of making workforce plans and finding and retaining employees. The year-old company says the product fills a hole in the enterprise applications market, which has procurement tools for buying products but none for hiring skilled people.

"It's much harder to get a body on board than a computer on board," says Doug Merritt, Icarion's CEO. It's especially difficult to plan for new employees and to bring them on at the right time, he adds.

Netscape is about to implement a beta version of the product for internal use. It's adopting it in part because automating the process should produce savings in cost and time throughout the organization. "Recruiting is emerging as a labor-intensive process," says Lamont Monroe, Netscape's director of staffing. "A lot of it is chasing paper."

Icarian says the average cost of a hire is $10,300--and that its product would drop that to $7,200 by eliminating manual data entry and streamlining the process. Savings can also come from the product's workforce forecasting features, which can help a company avoid over- or underhiring.

Icarian Workforce helps line managers project future head-count demands, create hiring requisitions, seek approvals from human resources and finance departments, identify strong candidates, and process offers. The product is intended to sit in between standard enterprise resource planning applications such as budgeting, purchasing, and HR, using workflow to link them into the hiring process.

For instance, the product might check the hiring budget in a financial application to see what a line manager can offer an employee, or put in a request to the HR application for hiring approval. Merritt says connecting hiring information to financial data is especially important in a volatile economy, when employment targets are sometimes at odds with a company's revenue.

The links to the main ERP applications are critical to Netscape, because it keeps all parts of the business, including line managers, accounting, and HR, involved in the hiring. "You have to make sure everyone's looking at the same data and making decisions on that," Monroe says.

Icarian Workforce will ship in February. Pricing has not been set.


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