Long
time readers of this column might recall at least a couple of reviews for
RecruitMAX, an excellent web-based applicant tracking system. Now, for your
pleasure, I am happy to be able to write about another fine product from these
people, ProHire. This product was developed with the small agency in mind, both
in its ease of use and pricing.
ProHire
is a 100% web based solution, requiring only an Internet connection and a
browser to access your data. There is no software to install locally on your
system. It uses Microsoft SQL; a database that can support hundreds of thousands
of records without losing data and or suffering performance degradation.
Some
of the slick features include its seamless integration with your company
website. Any job you enter into this system is automatically posted to your
company’s job order page on your website (it is actually a page on their site
that looks exactly like your own page). Truly web based…you do not need to
download any software to your PC. It offers a centralized database shared by all
members of your firm, in real time. Recruiter A knows what recruiter B puts in
the database within minutes. You are networked with other ProHire customers and
have the ability to share both your candidates and job orders on line if you
choose. Any fees are split directly with the two participating firm with no
commissions paid to ProHire.
One
of the coolest features is the Artificial Intelligence “concept” search, not
seen by me in any other system of this type, at least that I have reviewed.
Reduces human error, gets around parsing errors, learns new terminology and
acronyms.
You
can also create email templates, complete with logos and graphics, for mass
mailings. Another neat item…the ability to create searchable questionnaires
for both candidates and job orders to gather that information that never seems
to be on the resume and/or client-provided job orders.
Adding
a new candidate is simple. Click on New Profile and a small pop-up window
appears…type in the name and email address then click Check. The systems
checks for other candidates with that same name and if no one is found a blank
new record appears, with the name and email in there already. The candidate
record is well designed as all the data for each candidate fits on one long
page. No hourglass while looking for skills or phone numbers. You can also
customize the data shown for each candidate in the setup utility, by checking or
un-checking boxes next to the data that you want…or don’t want to see. There
is also a section where you can enter search criteria for that candidate to
facilitate future keyword searches. For example, if you enter accountant in the
space. Any future search using that keyword would garner this candidate. You can
also assign each candidate a password and allow him or her access to his own
record to update, add a resume or apply to a job order, from within your
database. There is also a space to paste the resume into and you can also add
any number of attachments to each record.
Searching
is also easy. These people understand recruiters have different search styles
and capabilities. They have provided an assortment of search tools from the
quick and easy 'Quick Search' to the powerful and comprehensive 'Advanced
Search’. They also have an intelligent search agent that allows users to
quickly generate a list of matching records with very little effort. In a matter
of seconds you are able to access a candidate’s resume, job history and
contact information, all on one screen.
Some
of the productivity tools include a personal planner, to-do lists, forecasts and
an excellent reporting system. You can easily record, view and audit any contact
correspondence between yourself, candidates and clients. You can also view all
planned events for the day and long-term task lists on one easily accessible
page. You can also determine the probability of generating revenue within a
given time frame or run a report detailing past performance.
Pricing
is simple…there are no setup fee and the monthly fee is $100 per user. There
may be an additional charge for data conversion.
They also have some ancillary services built into the
software, which the user can turn on or off as desired. Their Job
Launcher
feature posts each of your job orders to hundreds
of free Job Boards and any FEE Boards that are already established at a cost of
$250.00 per location for unlimited postings. Their Resume
Scanning service for hard copy resumes offers a 24-hour
turnaround and costs $250.00 one time set up and $1.50 per resume. Expertise/
Skill coding for Candidates, Clients and Job Orders costs $25.00
per month and coming soon their Web
Searcher feature will allow the
user to search the entire internet for resumes, including the Job Boards that
the recruiters already have accounts with, all simultaneously, instead of
individually, for $100.00 per user per month.
My
contact for this article, Sean
Sheridan, has been very helpful in getting me the information
I needed for writing this review. Sean
can be reached via email at ssheridan@prohire.com
or via voicemail, toll-free, at 1-877-394-5644 Ext 107. For more information on
ProHire, visit their Web site at www.prohire.com.
Would
you be interested in a Web site packed with advanced Internet recruiting
techniques and methods? Would you be more interested if all the information was
free? Thought so. Read on...
This
is a great site for Internet recruiters with page after page of links and
home-grown resources. Want to locate resumes? Want leads? They have the
information you need. Start by visiting their homepage, www.jobmachine.net
and you will find a very simple, easy to navigate interface. I’ll just start
at the top and go down the line.
The
first section is on Bookmarklets. These are actually small JavaScript applets
that reside in the Bookmarks or Links Toolbar section of your browser and run
from the browser. There are bookmarklets for almost everything. Here are a few
that I like. Page Freshness: Tells you the last modified date of the
current page, according to the server...important when recruiting passive
candidates. List Email Links: Lists all the email addresses, even those
hidden in the HTML. Statusbar Shows URL: Shows the URL if JavaScript has
hid it. Up a Directory: Sends you back one level in the current
directory. Also called “peel back.” Read Cookie for Site: Tells you
what the server of this page is sending or requesting as a cookie to your
browser, if any. There are also bookmarklets for many search engines you can
click on a run a quick search with a small pop-up box. These are just a few and
are available for IE and Netscape. You can right click on any of these and save
them to your bookmarks directory. or drag them right into your browser’s
toolbar.
The
next section, Searching, has links to at least a couple of dozen major search
engines, followed by another page listing the advanced search pages for most of
these engines. Another page offers links to some excellent resources including
an acronym finder, an on-line encyclopedia, a jargon file resource and an
Internet glossary. An excellent Boolean tutorial is also included.
The
next section, my favorite, is Finding People that has four major sections.
Cybersleuthing is a page full of sites where you can investigate almost anyone,
including your candidates. Use people finders, birthday lookups, zip code
lookups, and public records lookups to get started on almost any lead. Amazing.
The Directories page includes at least a couple dozen popular and more obscure
public directories, including white and yellow pages. The next page,
Competitors, is critical for any sourcer...find out who your clients competitors
are...fast. Lastly, Email and Reverse Look Ups is actually a page they developed
themselves where you can type in a phone number and get a name, type in a
address and get a name [or type in a name and get an email address]...not
foolproof but a great set of investigative tools.
Other
sections include resources for online communities, resume databases and job
posting sites, international sites, diversity sites, and skills resources, among
others.
Although
they do offer Internet Recruiting training classes, all of the information
mentioned above is absolutely free to anyone on the site.
Note that some of the resources included are fee-based sites.
They
have published and have available on their website, in PDF format,
a resource called their ‘CheatSheet’ that you can request via email
via a mouse click that gives excellent examples of resume and lead searches for
passive Internet candidates on search engines like AltaVista and Google,
although these searches also work on other search engines as well. You can copy
and paste these examples directly into the search engine query box. They also
offer a free ad-based bimonthly newsletter and a free ToolBag CD loaded with
articles and tools by registering at their site.
That
is a lot for free...isn’t it? Well, if you don’t believe me go to their site
and check it out for yourself. I would encourage everyone to do so. Great site.
Go to www.jobmachine.net.
My
contact for this article, Shally Steckerl, CEO of JobMachine, can be reached via
email at shally@jobmachine.net and
would be happy to answer any questions you have.
AIRS
has entered the outplacement business! While
this may seem strange at first blush, it is really a natural step in fulfilling
AIRS corporate strategic vision. The
outplacement service has 3 components: Corporate Outplacement, Career Portal,
and Career Transition Training.
Corporate
Outplacement services are designed for corporations that want to provide
recently separated employees with a comprehensive package of career transition
tools and training. Leveraging the
same concepts taught in AIRS Selling Recruiting Services course on finding job
orders (previously reviewed in TFL), AIRS is teaching displaced workers how to
find jobs on the Internet both inside and outside of the job boards.
The Corporate Outplacement course is web-based, leveraging AIRS' move
into eLearning. With prices varying from $295 to $595 per employee and the
ability to deploy modularized training for audiences ranging from 5 to 10,000
workers, customized to a corporate client's "look and feel" on-site or
across the web on very short notice, AIRS has begun to gain traction in the
outplacement business. The first
major win is Enron, where AIRS was able to respond quickly to assist 4,400
ex-employees following the company's sudden collapse.
The
AIRS CareerPortal is marketed as the most powerful suite of job search
technologies on the Web. Built around a family of best-in-breed career
transition technologies, the AIRS CareerPortal helps job seekers leverage the
power of the Internet to find their next career--fast.
The portal leads displaced workers through a series of steps to guild
their job search, including:
Module
1 - Planning a Successful Job Search:
Module
4 - Finding Niche Boards that Work
Module
5 - Working with Recruiters
Module
6 - Finding Employers and Hiring Managers
Module
7 - Publishing Your Resume to the Web
Resume Distribution and Job
Agents
Build a Personal Career Network
Displaced workers are supported with a suite of AIRS tools that include:
AIRS
Resume Wizard, marketed as offering optimized workers The most sophisticated
resume and cover letter wizard on the web. In less than 10 minutes, a
candidate can "point and click" their way to a professional resume
and cover letter."
AIRS
Career Transition Training component offers laid-off workers "a unique
blend of traditional job search principles and the latest internet centric job
search strategies. Attendees will learn effective resume building, interviewing,
and networking, while they learn to use the internet to quickly and efficiently
expand the reach of their job search."
AIRS Career Transition Training provides recently separated employees
with the skills to:
This
training can be delivered on-site, at a third party training center, or via the
Web. All attendees are given a
comprehensive training manual as well as access to the AIRS CareerTransition
Portal.
We
are taking a positive stance on the AIRS Outplacement Service.
The Resume Wizard the Strategic Posting Job Ad Wizard, AIRS' Career Site
Dashboard leverages SearchStation to a new market niche, AIRS Xpress leverages
the existing AIRSPost technology, AIRS Virtual Office leverages AIRS' OpenSource
recruitment desktop technology, AIRS Library is an existing service offering,
developed for recruiters and repackaged for job seekers, and AIRS Learning is an
extension of AIRS' ongoing eLearning evolution, already offered in recruitment
courses.
This
may be old news to some of you, but in the interest of the rest of us I wanted
to at least mentioning the following. The Wall Street Journal, back in January,
published a very interesting article on Internet career Web sites. The
information published was no surprise to me but may be to some of you. I have
seen it mentioned now in the Top Echelon newsletter and on the CareerXRoads
website.
I
quote: “At nine big public companies, which combined made more than 62,000
hires last year”…“The percentage of hires made through the four biggest
job boards, Monster.com (www.monster.com),
Hotjobs.com (www.hotjobs.com),
CareerBuilder (www.careerbuilder.com)
and HeadHunter.net (www.headhunter.net),
was far smaller (note: smaller than the 16 percent of total hires that were
initiated at corporate Web sites) - 1.4 percent, 0.39 percent, 0.29 percent and
0.27 percent, respectively.” Don’t get out the calculator…2.86% of the
62,000 hires by the four largest career sites. This information was reported by
WSJ based on a study conducted by CareerXRoads, who we have written about in
this column before.
I
would encourage everyone to read the entire text of this article. For those of
you, like me, who do not read the WSJ regularly (or at all, because they don’t
understand the WSJ), we have taken the liberty of offering this article, in
it’s entirety, with full attribution, on the Swat Recruiting Web site. Go to
our homepage, www.swatrecruiting.com
and click on any graphic to enter the site. Scroll down on the left-hand
navigation bar until you reach the Fordyce Letter area…then click on the link
to the WSJ article.
Next
time one of your clients tells you they are using the big boards to fill all
their jobs…ask them: What about the other 97.14% of your job openings? I
assure you I will.
Since
I just wrote an article about a great site for Internet recruiting tips…JobMachine.net
I may as well steal one from Shally at JobMachine. Here is a good one for
finding resumes on Google.com, the largest search engine on the Internet.
From
www.google.com we start with three
skill-related keywords, then add the terms "(home OR my)" and
"resume". Hence this search begins with six terms.
When
looking for Wireless Design engineers using the terms “Wireless” and
“Design Engineer” is not specific enough. Using the engineering industry
term “CDMA” (Code Division Multiple Access) will increase accuracy.
"CDMA" is entered first. The terms “Wireless” and
“Design” narrow the search further. Search string example: CDMA
Wireless Design resume AZ (home OR my)
We
can find professional engineers by discipline: Mechanical, Civil, Industrial,
etc. A senior engineer in this field usually earns a certification by passing an
exam, similar to the "Bar" for lawyers. Upon final exam, engineers
earn the title “P.E.” (Professional Engineer). Adding a discipline
“civil” and modifier “structural” we find engineers who
have worked in large-scale projects like bridges, roads, tunnels and dams.
Search string example: P.E.
Ph.D Structural resume AZ (home OR my)
The
healthcare field is full of keywords, but many are not unique. Nursing is a very
common term found in fields including home, hospice, maternity and agriculture.
Only “RN” nurses can work in the ER. Licenses are important in this industry
– but “Licensed” is too common. With “Licensure” we find a section
many RN’s use in their resumes, like "Certification" is to the IT
world. Search string example: RN
Licensure Clinical resume Phoenix home my