I have said before that the staffing firm market for front office and enterprise solutions is and will become more dynamic (i.e., "stirred up") as new technologies (like cloud, social, mobile, big data, etc.) increasingly come to bear.  2012 was indeed an active year on many fronts.  Quite recently, for example, we have seen some M&A activity among established providers (i.e., Bullhorn’s acquisition of Maxhire and Sendouts) as well as a continued march of LinkedIn to engage staffing firms and recruiters on their “own turf.”  There are also reports afoot that Bond will be launching a new cloud-based, staffing firm enterprise solution sometime soon.

On another front, a new entrant (called TalentRover) has joined Jobscience and Target Recruit as a staffing firm solution built on Salesforce.com’s Force.com “cloud platform.” 

According to TalentRover, its solution’s “features include CRM, ATS, HRIS, accounting software integration, mobile, social media, job boards, timesheet & expense reports, commissions, reports, dashboards and more — all in one easy to use application. As a Salesforce platform application, Talent Rover inherits all the benefits of the substantial time and resources that salesforce.com has invested into the force.com platform. This includes the infrastructure, controls, data management and security that is critical in a cloud based solution.”

So far, so good.  But what’s new? 

Last week, Talent Rover and ADP made public that they were teaming up and targeting the staffing industry to provide a broad, integrated online solution encompassing all of the Talent Rover’s functionality along with ADP’s well established solutions for self-service HRIS and employee benefits (along with the perennial ADP payroll service).  As far as I am aware, this is a new step and a broadened footprint for ADP in the staffing industry, where so far only payroll has been a somewhat known quantity among staffing agencies. 

An ADP spokesperson I talked with last week did say that Talent Rover had become a part of the ADP Alliance Partnership program and that this relationship with ADP did indicate ADP’s continued interest in serving the staffing industry.  The spokesperson also pointed out that the degree and extent of integration between the Talent Rover and ADP applications was something quite unique and unprecedented. 

Talent Rover, for its own part, represents itself as a serious entrant in the space and has been already getting positive buying signals from the marketplace.  This new hook-up with ADP is now just days old, and it will certainly be interesting to see how it is received among staffing firms and whether it will prove an advantageous market-entry strategy for Talent Rover (and perhaps a market expansion strategy for ADP?). 

If nothing else, this development is indicative of some of the new dynamics emerging in the staffing firm market for front office and enterprise solutions, where functionality (that may in the past have been provided by one 3^rd party system/software provider) is now increasingly being provided by collaboration and integration of multiple providers in a cloud setting.