Software makes job of staff recruitment smoother

By ADAM GIFFORD

Carter Holt Harvey subsidiary Mariner7 has sold its Talent Engine psychometric testing product to recruitment software specialist StaffCV for an undisclosed price.

The deal can be seen as a small win for Carter Holt's programme of realising the value from its intellectual property.

That programme took a knock this month after another software-related subsidiary, Straightedge, dropped its plans to float through the New Capital Markets process.

StaffCV and Mariner7 have been in a joint-selling partnership since April. StaffCV founder Jason Kerr said the success of that led to the acquisition of the product and five key staff.

The StaffCV product allows employers to build their own recruitment web sites and manage the recruitment process.

Talent Engine measures candidates' work preferences and benchmarks them against existing staff, on the assumption that candidates will be more likely to perform well in a job if they like what they are doing.

"The StaffCV product allows employers to create a private talent pool they can recruit from. Talent Engine allows them to evaluate those people using a work-based preference profile.

"There is nothing else on the market to match the complete package," Kerr said.

Kerr said an advantage Talent Engine had over other personality testing products was employers could not access the results of individual questions, but were given a percentage score of how the candidate measured up against the benchmark.

This meant it was unlikely to be subject to what are becoming increasingly common lawsuits by unsuccessful candidates claiming they were discriminated against because of specific questions within tests.