Jobscience Discovers New Business Opportunities in the Cloud with the Force.com Platform

JobScience’s CEO, Ted Elliott, has always been quick to understand the value of new technologies and how to reap the benefits for his business and his customers. A longtime Salesforce CRM customer, Elliott was an early supporter of cloud computing, visualizing not only the benefits for his company’s operations, but also how the company could adapt its business model to better meet its customers’ needs via the cloud. After successfully launching versions of JobScience’s traditional products on AppExchange, Elliott has bet the future of the company on salesforce.com’s Force.com platform.

Getting Started With Force.com

JobScience's first Force.com-based product came about almost by accident. The company was asked to create a version of its recruiting system for Hire Heroes, an initiative of the Health Careers Foundation. The organization specializes in career placement for servicemen that have been wounded or disabled. Elliott quickly determined that the best and most efficient way to deliver a high-quality hiring system was to leverage the Force.com platform. Elliott obtained ten licenses of the Nonprofit Edition for free from the Salesforce.com Foundation and rapidly built an overlaying recruiting platform using Force.com.

Based on the enthusiastic response of the organization, Elliott decided that his company should pursue a new business opportunity developing applications based on the Force.com platform.  As a longtime salesforce.com customer, Elliott had the utmost confidence in the company's service delivery. JobScience started by building an application to automate all aspects of a company’s recruiting process; TalentPath was born.

JobScience now offers a full suite of talent management products built on the Force.com platform, including TalentStaffing for finding and hiring the best recruits, TalentCentral for creating and managing a company’s career portal, and TalentPlan for adapting staffing plans to fulfill a company's corporate mission.

Navigating the Cloud with Force.com

Force.com offers all of the power of .NET and J2EE without the worries of building and maintaining the infrastructure needed to provide solutions based on those platforms. JobScience doesn’t need to invest in hardware and software to deliver its Force.com-based products, or in the manpower needed to maintain them. Elliott estimates that the company is saving at least $40-50 thousand each month by outsourcing the infrastructure to salesforce.com. “Not only is it cheaper,” he points out, “It is also more reliable.”

Another key advantage of working with Force.com is the ability to quickly iterate so products can be constantly improved. “When we started working with Force.com we couldn’t believe the difference,” says Elliott. “Working with .NET it would have taken ten times the amount of resources and effort. With Force.com we can build new features and products in days or weeks. We can do prototypes virtually overnight.” New products and versions can be made available over AppExchange, swiftly reaching an appreciative audience.

Elliott is quick to point out that Force.com is more than just a development environment, server farm, or distribution vehicle. “With Force.com we automatically benefit from salesforce.com development updates,” he says. After the launch of Salesforce CRM and Google Apps, integrating Salesforce CRM with Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar and Google Docs, JobScience promptly announced integration between its talent management products and Google’s applications. “Because we can leverage salesforce.com’s Force.com development efforts, we’re the only talent management product that offers Google integration to its customers,” he adds.

Forecast Calls for New Business With Force.com

As JobScience grows its business, Force.com has become a launching pad for the company to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing, and tap into new opportunities beyond human capital management.

The company’s new product line —ProBono— is a suite of complementary applications designed to increase productivity by automating a variety of business tasks including developing corporate mission statements, analyzing a prospect’s buying profiles, conducting professional background checks, and more. ProConnect, the first to launch, provides end users with access to the Salesforce Certified Consultants at JobScience via live online chat. 

As the market penetration of cloud computing tools grows, the opportunities for applications like JobScience’s ProBono line will continue to skyrocket. By basing its development efforts on the  Force.com platform, the company can continue to stay ahead of the competition with faster dev cycles, lower infrastructure costs, and the ability to leverage salesforce.com’s own development efforts. For JobScience, the future is anything but cloudy.

How do I get started?

The best way to get started is to sign up for the Force.com Free Edition.