Hire.com forms strategic alliance with StepStone.com

Hire.com and StepStone ASA have announced a strategic alliance.

The alliance combines Hire.com's award-winning talent management solution, HireEnterprise, with StepStone's European market reach enabling businesses to accelerate their time to hire, reduce costs, facilitate a direct relationship with candidates, and find the best people to meet their hiring needs.

Unlike in the United States, where information about candidates is readily available, in Europe there are strict privacy laws that have a strong influence on the data that is available to corporations about candidates
and the protocols required in storing and managing personal data. As the market-leader in online recruitment in Europe, StepStone's local market
presence and expertise coupled with Hire.com's industry experience provide a unique solution for the European market.


Hire.com and StepStone have forged an alliance like no other in the market, said Kevin Bethke, CEO of Hire.com. Multi-nationals companies can gain a key competitive advantage by choosing the solution with the broadest reach with localized expertise to find talent.

Europe is facing a long-term talent shortage already widely known and documented both in Europe and in the United States. Finding top quality talent has become a critical success factor for businesses. The
traditional, costly model of relying on outside recruitment agencies or a hit-and-miss approach with expensive media will be replaced by companies like StepStone who offer a faster, predictable and less costly way of finding high quality talent. Through their public job boards, StepStone has built trusted relationships with candidates in public talent
communities across many local markets and has an established, strong reputation with European companies.

Hire.com's unique approach allows customers to build and maintain private talent communities of both existing employees and external candidates by leveraging a corporation's branded web site. And, companies can leverage
and protect their global identity while seeking talent. With Hire.com's enterprise talent management solution and StepStone's localized reach across Europe, companies can now take advantage of the most comprehensive,
integrated solution for building relationships with candidates across internal, external private and public talent communities. This approach provides quicker and more effective hiring by building relationships with
the highest quality talent ahead of specific hiring needs a solution never before available in Europe.

This StepStone and Hire alliance brings a new and unique proposition to our customers. This combined approach delivers the best of both worlds leading technology with local added value, said Colin Tenwick, CEO of StepStone.

HireEnterprise, Hire.com's flagship software product, is a modular application suite that broadens organizations' ability to effectively find, reach, and establish meaningful relationships with top quality talent.

Hire.com's customers are able to consistently fill their organizations with top performers while at the same time reducing the cost per hire, accelerating the time to productivity, and decreasing attrition, all key
factors in driving the success of their business. Hire.com enjoys a proven record of unparalleled customer success in Europe having already implemented solutions for Global 2000 customers, such as BP and Reuters, each with a strong local presence in their respective markets.

As part of the exclusive alliance to address the European market, both companies will invest resources locally for sales, marketing and support of the solution. The Hire.com product is already in use with a number of customers in Europe. StepStone and Hire.com will work with leading systems integrators to customize and integrate the solution into a company's existing technology infrastructure.