Zoho is making another move to serve as the IT department for the small business market. Its latest offering is a service for staffing agencies and human resources to automate the process for hiring people.

The new service, available now, is an applicant tracking system that helps staffing agencies and recruiting departments track job openings, resumes and candidates. The enterprise is stil heavily dependent on email and manual processes for any number of practices with human resources being no exception to the rule.
Zoho’s strategy is to create a level of automation that makes a human resources functions manageable, a model they have used for the services they offer for sales, marketing and other functions in the enterprise.
Zoho Recruit has a number of features including web forms; the ability to aggregate resumes from social sites and ways to track the status of a client within the application.
Activity streams are emerging as a standard for new social enterprise products. In Zoho Recruit, though, the activity streams look more like simple views into the status of a job opening, profiles of other people on the team and the interviews on schedule for the day.
Here’s an overview of Zoho Recruit:
It’s clear that Zoho is gunning for the enterprise market with a focus on the small business sector. The company is increasingly perceived as a competitive threat to larger, more established companies. This is illustrated by a Microsft executive’s remark earlier this month that Zoho is a “fake” Microsoft office.
Zoho responded with FakeOffice.org, featuring a video they made in September, renaming it “Fake Office – the Movie.”
Zoho is a challenger to Salesforce.com in the small business market, which has moved up market in the past few years. That approach has worked for Salesforce but in these markets the company faces deep pressures from larger competitors such as Oracle.
Zoho faces its own competition but it has a unique approach. Its products are varied, giving customers the feeling that they are using a service that is customized for their particular needs.
Plus, we like their videos. 🙂 They explain their products. How about that?