With Its Latest Acquisition, Oracle Wants To Help You Get A Job

Oracle just bought SelectMinds, a New York-based maker of social recruiting tools.

SelectMinds specializes in mining current and former employees' networks for job referrals. Oracle plans to tie it into other software products which manage companies' talent.

Earlier this year, Salesforce.com, the upstart that's proving to be Oracle's archrival in cloud software, bought a startup, Rypple, that manages some human-capital functions.

Workday, a company that's in registration to go public, also does cloud-based software that helps companies manage employees.

Some of this software overlaps with the recruiting functions many businesses use LinkedIn for. But SelectMinds also manages job listings on LinkedIn.

The eventual aim for all the players in the market is to manage employees all the way through their career-from identifying them as a prospective hire, to bringing them on board, to cultivating their performance over time.

Terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed.