Having a decade of experience helping companies drive their digital transformation, Avature Makes Strategic HR Possible

Avature is a highly flexible enterprise SaaS platform for Global Talent Acquisition and Talent Management, and the leading global provider of CRM for recruiting. Founded by Dimitri Boylan, co-founder and former CEO of HotJobs.com, Avature brings commercial internet technology and innovation to recruiting, onboarding, and internal mobility and performance challenges.

Avature’s vision is to support strategic HR initiatives by introducing a consumer web quality platform that can be customized quickly and easily by their customers - allowing them to design and implement innovative programs to compete for and retain talented people.

Used in more than 100 countries and 17 languages, Avature has over 650 customers of which 101 are Fortune 500 organizations. Avature delivers its private cloud services from data centers in the US, Europe, and Asia, and has offices in Buenos Aires, London, Madrid, Melbourne, Munich, New York, Paris, Singapore, and Shenzhen.

The Story So Far

Many of Avature’s senior management worked together in a previous endeavor, HotJobs.com. Dimitri Boylan co-founded HotJobs.com with Richard Johnson in 1997, served as COO and later CEO, took the company public, and sold it to Yahoo! in 2002.

The HotJobs.com story was one of early web innovation (patented online parser, real-time web content publishing, etc.), rapid sales growth, aggressive brand building, including four Super Bowl commercials, and strong customer support.

Aside from becoming the second largest online recruiting system in the United States, HotJobs.com also introduced the first fully web-based enterprise recruiting system as an ASP (later referred to as SaaS) product in 1998, which supported 10 large multinational companies by 2001. HotJobs.com also acquired and restructured Resumix, the largest client-server ATS product in the world (over 200 Fortune 500 customers).

At the time HotJobs.com was purchased by Yahoo! for $433MM in cash and stock in 2002, it was the 49th most visited website on the Internet, and supported a user base of millions. The company grew to 750 employees, 14 offices, and over 6,000 customers.

HotJobs.com grew from $3.4MM in revenue in 1997 to $117MM in revenue in 2001 and raised $168MM in private and public capital. In 2001, HotJobs.com’s NASDAQ market cap increased 300% in a year that the market index declined over 30%. At the time of sale, HotJobs.com was both pro forma profitable and cash flow positive. Some of its team remained at Yahoo! for several more years before rejoining Boylan at Avature.

Convinced that leading recruiting software companies were not helping their customers leverage technology to gain competitive advantage, Avature set out to define next generation software based on Web 2.0 and the changing role of the Internet in peoples’ lives. It developed a powerful Federated Search technology called WebSources, which quickly became popular with a new breed of recruiting professional – sourcing specialists.

Next, the company turned its attention to candidate engagement. Leading CRM products were not suitable for recruiting, so it designed its branded email marketing features for passive candidate engagement, developing advanced segmentation based on candidate progress through pipelines and talent pool attributes.

Along the way, Avature realized that it could get hiring managers to participate in recruiting if it gave them a modern website with real-time information on recruiting projects. As it turned out, this added transparency helped to hire managers to gain new respect for the work that went into building good talent pools and recruiting passive candidates.

Finally, the company realized that every company has a different way to go to the market and attract and retain great Talent, so it delivered a flexible solution modeling capability for the creation of referral management, agency management, internal mobility, and even fully bespoke recruiting solutions for any region of the world.

Today, Avature continues to find new ways to deliver innovative software, so Avature’s customers can define pioneering business practices and find their competitive edge.

Customer Success Stories

Autodesk

Tired of the lack of transparency and coordination inherent in individual tracking systems and spreadsheets, software company Autodesk sought a recruitment technology solution that would serve as a high-performing alternative. After choosing Avature CRM, Autodesk managed to achieve their goal of full implementation in just 90 days, and have continued to reap the benefits – from more effective candidate sourcing and tracking to nurturing of candidate relationships and more.

“After a university recruiting info session, we typically had 100+ people to manually send a thank you email to. With Avature, not only have we been able to automate a branded thank you message, but we can easily identify event-specific attendees for future messages and campaigns…and that’s amazing.”

- Rick Aldridge, Sr. Manager of Global Talent Acquisition Operations

Philips

Well known as a consumer electronics and lighting company, but lacking exposure as a healthcare provider, Philips sought a way to transform their brand and communicate their full employer brand to potential candidates, all while building their talent pipelines with highly qualified talent from non-traditional competitors. After choosing Avature CRM to support their talent initiatives, Philips experienced vast improvements across their recruitment strategy — including talent pool growth of 225%, significantly increased email open and click-through rates, and candidate conversion rates far above the industry standard.

“Avature has really helped us recognize the most value we can get for our recruiting efforts. My team last year had over 30,000 applicants for Philips sales jobs and we hired roughly 1000. (...) Avature kept us from losing touch with them and kept us from having to go start the search all over again. It also allows us to talk to our customers about what the pipeline looks like for their region.”

- Alan Blevins, Director of Talent Acquisition.

Meet the Leader

Dimitri Boylan, Founder & Chief Executive Officer: Prior to founding Avature in 2004, Dimitri co-founded HotJobs.com in 1997. Dimitri took HotJobs.com public on the NASDAQ (HOTJ) in 1999 and grew the company to over 100MM in revenue before it was acquired by Yahoo! in 2002 for 433MM.

Dimitri is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained a BA in biophysics. In his post-graduate research at the University of Illinois, Dimitri used Cray supercomputers to model macromolecular movements. His graduate research has been sighted in over 30 scientific publications, including Nature.

“Our unique software development cycle allows us to respond quickly with new and updated code every three weeks! We like to think that the best is yet to come.”