Bank of Montreal and Harris Bank, Chicago Use Recruitsoft for North American Hiring.

Business Editors

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--December 19, 2000

Recruitsoft (www.recruitsoft.com), a leading application provider of enterprise-wide recruiting solutions for Fortune 1000 companies, announced today that Bank of Montreal and Harris Bank, Chicago (TSE: BMO; Nasdaq: BMO) have chosen Recruitsoft's Recruiter Webtop(TM) to power, integrate and automate the corporate recruiting process throughout their North American operations.

Recruiter WebTop(TM) powers the career web pages of large corporations and also provides a complete business application over the internet that supports every aspect of the corporate recruiting process including requisition management, sourcing management, global collaboration management, recruiting workflow management, candidate relationship management and web access to a range of recruitment enhancement services.

Currently in a period of rapid change, Bank of Montreal seeks highly qualified and skilled employees. In order to efficiently and effectively fill these needs and locate the highest quality candidates in the market, Bank of Montreal will employ Recruitsoft's powerful hiring management solution to automate and optimize its entire recruiting process throughout its operations in Canada and the U.S.

Bank of Montreal will implement Recruitsoft's Recruiter WebTop(TM) solution in three phases. Phase one will see the Recruiter WebTop(TM) used for all external hiring, phase two for all internal hiring, and the final phase will integrate Recruiter WebTop(TM) with the Bank of Montreal's human resource information system (HRIS).

"The financial services industry in North America is in a period of rapid change as a result of the tremendous impact of technology. Bank of Montreal is a leader in innovation," said Kevin Scott, Vice-President, Strategic Staffing, Bank of Montreal. "We are very committed to using this technology to support and leverage our search for talent."

"In today's economy, corporate success depends in great part on the ability to hire the most highly skilled people before the competition," said Louis Tetu, CEO, Recruitsoft. "Bank of Montreal has proven its leadership in human capital management, and Recruiter WebTop(TM) will further speed the institution's sophisticated recruiting process and enhance the quality of its hires by allowing recruiters to spend more time on value-add services such as interviewing."

In response to the need for a more efficient hiring process, Bank of Montreal has redesigned its staffing processes and begun assembling a centralized team of professional recruiters skilled in the business of sourcing and recruiting. The Recruitsoft solution will be a key tool in ensuring effectiveness, efficiency, rigour, and results are achieved.

"In addition to a more efficient hiring process, Recruitsoft will enable us to provide all employees with the most current job postings and information available. As well, Recruitsoft can help the bank to give employees a greater voice to encourage them to develop their own career plan internally rather than going elsewhere," said Sue Craig, Senior Consultant, Strategic Staffing, Bank of Montreal. "Streamlining the internal hiring process was an important consideration in our decision to select Recruitsoft as the Bank of Montreal's hiring management system."

Available positions will be posted on the career section of Bank of Montreal's website at www.bmo.com. Candidates are invited to submit their resumes for consideration for posted positions and to be added to the candidate database.

About Bank of Montreal

Bank of Montreal, Canada's first bank, is a highly diversified financial services institution. The bank operates in more than 30 lines of business within its group of companies, including BMO Nesbitt Burns, one of Canada's largest full-service investment firms, and Chicago-based Harris Bank, a major U.S. mid-west financial institution.

About Recruitsoft

Recruitsoft (www.recruitsoft.com) delivers the most complete online recruiting solutions for leading companies across many industries. Recruitsoft clients include Hewlett Packard, Dow Chemical, MetLife, Hasbro, Deloitte & Touche, Bombardier Aerospace and Transportation, Cabletron Systems (NYSE: CS), and Sutter Health. Recruitsoft is considered to be the best-practice ASP for recruitment management solutions, based on its proprietary ACE Recruiting(TM) process technology, designed in collaboration with large corporations to re-engineer and streamline the corporate recruiting process. Recruitsoft is the first Hiring Management System (HMS) to integrate all areas of candidate sourcing. Accessible via one-click, these sourcing services include: job postings on the corporate Web site, the company Intranet, job boards, advertising in all print media, and contract-assisted candidate sourcing. Recruitsoft is a contributing member of the HRXML consortium.

Recruitsoft is the parent company of Recruitsoft/iLogos research, which studies and monitors trends in the Internet recruiting industry. Recruitsoft/iLogos periodically publishes reports and indices and is dedicated to understanding the needs of large corporations seeking qualified talent.

Recruitsoft is funded in part by Telesystem Software Ventures LP (Telsoft), a venture-capital arm of Telesystem Ltd., a Red Herring Top 100 company; and by Omnicom (NYSE:OMC), the world's leading provider of marketing communications and advertising services, through its Internet investment arm, Communicade.