ASKSAM
– Resume Tracking System
The
major problem with most of the recruitment databases is that they are too
complicated. Most try and be all things to all people and can't. I look for
simple and found it here with the Resume Tracking System from askSam
Systems of Perry, Florida. The software is a great tool that simply imports your
resumes into a database then uses an interface to search the text of those
resumes for the keywords you need.
To
mention a negative up front this software does not perform any type of data
parsing. Each resume is imported into a file with a corresponding data entry
form. You have to manually fill out any fields you need for each candidate,
which can be anywhere from zero to dozens of fields per candidate, depending on
your needs. If all you want is an easy way to search your resumes for skills why
use a product with all the bells and whistles you will never use. All data entry
forms are totally customizable...add new fields or delete existing fields at
will.
Importing
a file is as simple as clicking on an Import menu item and the resume is pasted
into your resume database. Once your resumes are in the database you use a
simple search interface to perform the keyword search and are then presented
with a list of matches for further review. You can also keep an unlimited number
of notes for each candidate. They also have a Power Search feature enabling you
to run precise searches against the custom fields you fill out for each
candidate, if any. You can search for any word, phrase, number, or date, or,
combine your search terms with the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT, and use
wildcards, fuzzy searches, proximity searches. Once the resumes are in the
database you can use the full-featured WYSIWYG word processor to edit and format
the resumes. A mail merge feature allows you to send a resume to multiple
companies or process letters to applicants.
Besides
importing entries from word or text documents, you can also scan or type new
data into the system. Also, included are applications to track almost anything
including job orders, employee skills, names, and addresses. Reports are
pre-defined listing job requisitions, open positions (by company or by
location), experience and other information as well.
Overall, an excellent product. It doesn't do everything some of the other
database products do but doesn't try to either. Their list price is $595 for a
single user. There are additional fees for network users and premium support.
They do offer discounts for multiple licenses. If you are in the market for this
type of product I suggest you visit their Web site at www.askSam.com
and download a trial version of the software. Installation is simple. You can
also reach Marlinda
Bullock at 800-800-1997 or 850-584-6590 or via email at marlinda@askSam.com.
By
Frank G. Risalvato, CPC CEO of IRES, Inc.
We
are once again happy to announce that Frank G. Risalvato, CPC and CEO of IRES,
Inc. (http://www.ires.com) is able to
contribute an excellent article to this month’s column. We continue to
appreciate Frank’s kind assistance. He writes about www.candidateseeker.com,
an Internet related service that may be of interest to the Fordyce readership.
Here it is:
Let’s
face it: The “honeymoon” with Internet job boards is over.
The
futility and unevenness of the playing field was made more evident then ever
when I spent an hour with a Hotjobs.com rep recently for latest “tips and
tricks tutoring” on their web board. At
one point I was shown a “trick” (Is it really a trick when the same
technique is being taught to thousands of users!?) as to how to get my ad to
rise to the top of the primordial soup. The rep instructed me how to insert
“html tags” in a manner which created an invisible field of “relevant
keywords” in a white font on white background which would tickle the search
engine’s fancy thus making the ad surface to applicant’s eyeballs more
frequently.
To
those of you that have created web sites and wanted to get it recognized by
search engines, you already know this is the oldest, dumbest trick in the html
coding book. It’s one employed by
some of the tackiest web sites and the reason why your search results often
steer you to the same non-relevant sites when using certain search engines.
Thankfully most good quality search engines were quick to get on to this and
ignored or banned the employment of such “keyword spamming” techniques.
What
gets my goat is that this coding technique is ONLY available to those who
subscribe to Hotjobs.com packaged membership plan that runs at about $4,500 or
so for one year. In other words
anyone else posting via the single pay-per-post basis cannot use the
keyword-spamming trick (as its known) which in effect would significantly
diminish the viewing power of your ad. Yet
you’d never know this unless you spent an hour or two with an insider as I
did! For encouraging such
techniques, which in my opinion promotes an uneven playing field while inviting
abuse, I declare Hotjobs NOT so hot!
Now
for what is HOT (and possibly much more worth your time!):
I
tried a new service offered by www.Candidateseeker.com and was favorably
impressed. Candidateseeker.com’s president and founder Stephen Reuning states
he has received a patent on his new use of spidering technology.
Having said this it should be known the folks working for the PTO will
give you a patent for inventing the shoelace “bow-tie” if one hasn’t
already been issued! You don’t necessarily have to invent something to
get a patent, you just have to be clever enough to be the first to register
your use for it!
Candidateseeker.com
seems to operate like a souped-up, warp speed version of Mailharvester.
For those of you unfamiliar with Mailharvester (www.mailharvester.com)
it’s a program which you download onto your local pc harddrive. It then
acts as your own personal world wide web search engine.
You can enter very specific search criteria. For example you can have it
find all web pages that have the keywords “electronic engineer” and
“consumer products” along with “testing” or “lab” and perhaps
“resume” and then run the program. Depending on your internet connection
speed (if you have dial up be ready to let it run all night!) it will begin
collecting (a.k.a. “harvesting”) all the email addresses having any
association with those “returned” web pages it finds matching your search
string. The results are two
databases, one containing the web pages returned and the other containing the
email addresses. On faster DSL or
cable you can find your self having harvested thousands of email addresses in an
afternoon or left running all night. Your email list could now become the target
market you may want to push your job ad out to.
A
number of problems arise from this practice however.
Depending on quantity you may be restricted by your ISP as to how many
emails you can send before triggering a spam alert (I’ve tried 800 with mine
and so far no trouble but haven’t pushed it beyond that).
Should your ISP let you get by with emailing to thousands, you may be
seen as a spammer by the recipients … not good for image building. And for
those of you on dial-up, as I have at my rural home … fuhgeddaboudit!
Mr.
Reuning states candidateseeker.com has many built-in controls that eliminates
any appearance of spam and ensures those who do respond must do so in a way that
indicates a heightened interest in your ad.
In sum, candidateseeker.com states its like having a room full of web
servers and computers and high speed internet cables whirring away
simultaneously for you instead of your small desktop doing it on its own.
Reuning indicated he was able to convince major web site operators such as AOL
that its filtering and anti-spam controls were good enough so as to permit its
spidering technology to access the member’s pages of such sites.
I
decided to try it by posting one of our nearly-impossible-to-fill
“backburner” insurance underwriter positions and sure enough, I received
about 10 replies over a three-day
period. Each included a MS Word resume attached to the reply email. It was nice
to have the original MS Word document as opposed to the Hotjobs and Monster
custom engineered resumes arriving in HTML formatting which always requires a
second request for a clean resume copy which was an eliminated step here! All
had close-enough insurance experience and were friendly and thanked me for
thinking of them (imagine that!). One was a
“bull’s-eye” whose resume is being considered for three clients.
And the truly wonderful thing about this is the candidate does NOT have his
resume on any site currently! So I have no competition with this
candidate. Apparently he did have
it on a site earlier this year, withdrew it, but candidateseeker.com kept the
resume in its own massive database making this currently “off the board”
candidate available to me!
As
an added bonus I was able to negotiate a special deal for all Fordyce
subscribers interested in giving this new technology a this a try:
If
interested send your well-written job ad (mine was about four paragraphs) to sales@candidateseeker.com
and mention you read about it in Fordyce and the already reasonable $159 charge
per single ad will be waived for your first ad!
CPA
Career Center
CPA
Career Center is a career hub catering to accounting and finance professionals
run by the AICPA, The
American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. In
addition to having a resume and job order posting service they also serve as an
information resource to the industry providing news headlines, industry events
and announcements, industry conferences and seminars, resources and solutions.
Straight from the email and Web site.
A
distinctive database of accounting professionals with the skills, qualifications
and experience you require
Management tools let you post, edit, and delete positions
at any time
Automatic pre-screening and sorting of candidates
Instant email alerts when matching candidates enter the
database
Just
$200 to post your open positions.
Anyone
out there specializing in placing accounting and/or finance professionals should
at least visit this site at www.cpa2biz.com.
Tip
This
month’s tip is by Shally Stecler;. CEO of JobMachine, Inc. Shally has shared a
number of excellent tips with us over the last year or so and we continue to
appreciate his assistance from time to time. This months Shally teaches how to
locate the names of business executives that are in the public domain. Here it
is:
Finding
Execs in the Public Domain
Executives are key corporate figures in the public domain. In an information
society like ours, many details about an organization's executives are in demand
and publicly scrutinized.
Because of this, it's very easy to find out who's who in corporate leadership by
putting together the jumbled details. We can form a very good picture of who an
executive is, where they are and what they do.
The challenge is not in finding a bunch of names corresponding to some
companies, that's "easy street." The real test is in identifying who
makes the exact types of decisions needed and who would be a fit for the open
position we have.
We learned in the last issue that executives are frequently revealed in detail
on annual reports. However, companies not publicly traded, non-profits,
privately held companies, partnerships, new ventures and many offshore
businesses are not required to release annual reports. That's not the end of the
line, however. With a little more work there are other ways.
News Sources
Virtually every company takes advantage of the free publicity and marketing
opportunities afforded by the press. By announcing accomplishments and changes,
including new executive assignments, they inadvertently reveal small pieces of
the puzzle of an executive's full picture. Executive data snippets can be
collected from many published sources like press releases, newspaper and
magazine articles, and white papers.
Search engines are a good starting point to source data about a specific
organization's executives. A simple search string including the company name
"British Petroleum" and the keywords: Joins, Executive, Vice and
President will reveal about 200 pages of data about executives who currently are
or at some point were part of British Petroleum leadership. Depending on the
size of the company or their Internet notoriety, we can easily replace the
company name and the string still works. For example, from Google:
"TOSCO" Joins Executive Vice President
Reveals about 100 pages of data on TOSCO Executives, the Phoenix-based oil
services company that owned Circle K and "76" among others and is now
owned by Philips 66. However, replacing TOSCO with Cisco Systems yields over
2,500 results... far too many to be valuable. In this case, we just add a couple
of skill-based keywords like Real Estate, Controller or Asian Sales.
Corporate
Website
Executives
can often be identified directly from their own websites with a straightforward
search. It takes just two commands, but requires a little preparation. First we
must identify the exact corporate website address, then make sure we want
executives from the parent company and not a separate subsidiary, branch or
division. For example, a search for Chevron executives leads us to find that
Chevron is actually at www.chevrontexaco.com. We use that, plus the "intitle:"
command like this:
site:chevrontexaco.com intitle:executive
This will work most of the time but not always. The search is effective
replacing chevrontexaco.com with phillips66.com but not with bp.com. Primarily
this is due to different countries' approaches to public information. Remember,
BP is a British company. However, even in a European company there are other
very revealing sources inside the corporate site.
News and press releases can contain information the company needs to make public
for legal reasons, or simply to keep investors informed. The keywords News and
Press are very useful. We still need to what the target company website address
is and of course something to identify who we seek. For example:
(news OR press) site:bp.com vice president
Reveals approximately 24 pages of information about British Petroleum Vice
Presidents. More specifically, adding the keyword finance as in "(news OR
press) site:bp.com vice president finance" we identify pages which quickly
tell us John Buchanan is the CFO and Greg Coleman is the Vice-President of
Investor Relations reporting to him. Now we can search for those names
specifically.