Recently, I had a briefing with Jerome Ternynck (MrTed’s chief executive officer [CEO]) about the company and Version 9 of its product TalentLink. One key statement that Jerome made on talent acquisition was that before you manage talent, you need to make sure you acquire the right people for your company. Many human capital management (HCM) vendors have talent acquisition functionality as part of their offering, but MrTed specializes in this first and essential step of the talent management spectrum.

A Little Bit of History

MrTed was founded in 1999 by two recruitment specialists—Frederic Trinel and Jerome Ternynck. In 2000, MrTed raised a significant amount of venture capital and released MrTed’s flagship product called MrTedTalentLink (in November 2000).

The company is one of the e-recruitment pioneers and its product was architected as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution since its creation. MrTed is now present in Europe, USA, and Asia. The company has 60,000 users (approximately 3000 customers) in over 100 countries.

MrTed’s Perspective on Talent Acquisition

MrTed believes that talent acquisition applications should be standalone and “connected but not integrated” to talent management solutions. There are several reasons that support this statement:

• Talent acquisition should be an application open to the external world, whereas talent management should only be accessible for internal use only.
• Talent acquisition solutions deal with important volumes of data of relatively low value, but talent management administers deal with low volumes of high- importance data.
• Talent acquisition software needs to be localized for each region or country, therefore requiring flexible workflows—which is not the case for talent management, where workflows are fixed for long periods of time and processes are standard for all locations.

In other words, according to MrTed integrating talent acquisition and talent management into a single product will only bring complexity and risk, and not much value to its users.

MrTed’s Offering and an Overview of Version 9

MrTedTalentLink is the main product offered by MrTed and targets global corporations with more than 10,000 employees. Nicknamed Cloud 9, the latest version of MrTedTalentLink is delivered as a SaaS product. I was given a demo of version 9.3 and the following new features caught my attention:

• The user interface (UI) has been radically changed and allows users to easily modify it, create workspaces containing dashboards, task lists, news, and everything is configurable on the fly.
• MrTed created 40 applications based on best practices for talent acquisition, which can easily be added and managed in the workspace.
• Predictive matching functionality to find the best candidates for each job description, and classifying them based on pre-defined criteria.
• Corporate branding allows customers to not only use their logo and a different color scheme, but also to automate single- or multi-company branding.

Another thing worth mentioning is MrTedTalentLink’s reporting capabilities, which includes standard reports but also the option to create ad hoc reports, as well as its ability to integrate with many other software applications (MrTed recently forged its partnership with Workday), done through MrTedTalentHub and portals, which link the system with career specific sites.

Finally, MrTed offers SmartRecruiters, a free (really) recruiting software product for small and medium business (SMBs)—companies having up to 2500 employees. SmartRecruiters is offered as an Open SaaS (a mashup of SaaS and open source) and is based on a community platform that connects recruiters with other recruiters.

The flexibility and the functionality offered by MrTed are not surprising, considering the company’s history in talent acquisition in the cloud. I was surprised by its idea to separate acquisition and management when it comes to human capital. I tend to agree and disagree at the same time, which I will discuss in more detail in a future blog.

In the mean time, let me know what you think about talent acquisition in general and MrTed in particular.