By: Matt Kelly

It's more than gut instinct that tells Chris Moody the economy is slowing. If he wants quantified proof, he can look at his database.

Moody is chief operating officer of Aquent Inc., a recruiting firm in Boston that specializes in tech-related creative jobs - graphic artists, web designers, multimedia experts. The number of people asking his agency for work has doubled this year, to 2,000 applicants a week.

"Yes, we're getting more applications," Moody said. "It changes, to some degree, how we do recruiting."

The oddly paired forces of higher unemployment and still-scarce talented labor have spawned new pressures on "candidate-management software" to control the recruiting process better. Several startups have rushed to fill the void with packaged software to sell to recruiters. Recruiters, meanwhile, say those packages come close, but never quite hit the target; some recruiters go so far as to write their own programs.

"It never does exactly everything you want it to," David Hayes, president of the seven-person HireMinds recruiting agency in Boston, said of off-the-shelf candidate-management software. Still, Hayes quickly added, he turns to packaged software because "I don't have the time or energy to write it myself."

Hayes uses software from Personic Inc., a company based in Brisbane, Calif. It works to help him recruit talent for wireless or web-browser jobs, but still falls short for the creative jobs he tries to fill because there's no easy way to track a candidate's portfolio.

"That's been a major issue with the software," Hayes said. He even considered hiring a third party last year to write software to bridge the gap, but demand for creative workers fell sharply before he decided to go through with it.

Moody at Aquent echoed Hayes' frustrations with creative jobs. The company wrote its own recruitment software - called the "Great Wall" - to fill the need. The program's name comes from its paperwork ancestor - a big wall in the company's original offices from the late 1980s, plastered with job postings. As Aquent grew over the years, employees found it easier to write their own software rather than purchase a generic product.

"There weren't a lot of companies making it. It was a matter of necessity," Moody said.

Separate life
The Great Wall took on a life of its own as Aquent computerized in the 1990s. The firm's information-technology department added functionality for other departments such as accounting and human resources; now, all departments run their own tasks off the Great Wall system. The company updates its software every six to eight weeks.

Moody and his 20-person IT department examine commercial software offerings frequently, but have seen nothing to meet their specific needs. Since Aquent caters to artistic workers, it needs software that lets candidates create portfolios; some of those portfolios are in unusual media such as billboards and large-format displays.

"The gap between what we need and what they do is widening," Moody said of such commercial software packages.