October 2004 Column

This writer gets more queries from the readership about recruiter databases than any other topic…by far. In our continuing effort to get the Fordyce subscribers the information they are looking for I am pleased to review an industry-leading product, SmartSearch Online.

SmartSearch Online (a product of Advanced Personnel Systems, Inc. APS) is marketed as a total Internet recruiting solution. In addition to all the basic requirements you need to run your business, candidates, contacts, job orders, etc. it has an extraordinary number of advanced features, many of which are completely customizable, that allow you to run your software the way you run your business. This is a 100% browser-based web solution and does not require any software locally installed. No additional hardware is required although most users should have at least a cable or DSL connection.

Getting down to business, adding a candidate is easy. Click to add a new one, click to upload a local file (resume), select your file, then click the upload button. There is your resume, ready for processing. This is your opportunity to preview the resume and make sure it is the correct person. Click the process button and your new record is created. APS has developed their own parsing engine (many ATS vendors outsource this function) which seemed to work flawlessly. The new record contains the contact information, candidate source, SS#, career start year and highest degree attained. You are able to quickly fill out the rest of the record by selecting from customizable drop-down menus. As general or specialized as your business is, that is how general or specialized your menu items can be. To enter a job order you first pick your contact. Once selected, your job order form is presented with all the available information for that contact. From there you add the order specifics, and outside of the job description/requirements, are able to populate the form with easily customizable dropdowns.

Their search interface is great – extremely user-friendly yet comprehensive. Designed to quickly search the complete text of your resumes using virtually unlimited words, phrases or even complex Boolean constructed searches in 6 MUST have fields, 6 NICE to have fields and 3 MUST NOT have fields. You can also include almost any combination of data from the candidate record such as date ranges, state and/or zip code, relationship, years of experience, education, even skill codes in addition to your keywords. Alternately, you may use a natural language Interface to search by narrative text, like job descriptions. Your search results are shown in a frame on the left side of your screen. By clicking a name on the list you display the appropriate record on the right side of your screen. You can also save searches if you run the same type repeatedly. As I said…great interface.

SmartSearch Online’s integration with Outlook is very convenient, creating reminders for interviews and other important dates while working with candidate, contact and job records. A simple tool allows you to import contact or candidate records from either MS Outlook or a comma-separated file (CSV). You can also create mail merge files from this information. Reporting is considered a hallmark of SmartSearch Online. The system allows for the creation of a virtually unlimited variety of reports detailing performance measurement, diversity and compliance, sourcing effectiveness and up to the minute statistics on hiring activities to name a few. These are actual reporting tools – not canned reports.

The Administration feature of this application is the heart of the entire program. This is where you can set up your database to behave how you want by populating dropdowns and configuring workflow automation. Also accessible from this area are your reports and graphs, any employee accounting/hours information, users, lists, questions for candidates, vendor management, greetings, and broadcast information.

This program is set up to be of value to firms ranging from as few as two recruiters up to a corporate, enterprise-level of usage. Basics described, SmartSearch Online offers a wide variety of related services with their membership. I was unable to test these for the purposes of this review but offer a list of these items for your review. Other available services, some of which require extra cost, include:

Career Center - Fully integrates your recruitment efforts with the World Wide Web. Candidates visiting your corporate website can search for jobs, submit resumes, create an account which allows them to apply for jobs, update their resume, and create a job profile which notifies them when a job meeting their requirements is entered.

Comprehensive Candidate Screening – You can create and manage candidate screening questions ranging from simple yes/no to multiple choice to narratives. Candidate replies are automatically recorded in their permanent record.

Hiring Manager Portal – Your clients can visit your website, log on and manage the jobs they want your help filling. You can also give them access to performance statistics and even allow them to review resumes and leave you feedback.

Wireless Access – You now can have wireless access to your database information if you need it.

Accounting Gateway – Integration with payroll and/or other accounting or HRIS systems.

Email Auto-Reader - Allows users to email Word, RTF, TXT or HTML files directly into the system.

Batch Upload Utility - Allows users to import groups of resumes into the system from a user’s hard drive.

Time Collection - Part of the optional SmartSearch Online Accounting Gateway, this allows employees to enter their weekly hours and managers to approve them

Recruiting Village – A user community provided as part of the service. Includes the use of a shared candidate database with hundreds of thousands of resumes and unlimited job posting to the well-visited Recruiting Village job board.

Background Screening – You can order straight from the software in conjunction with Arrin Systems.

Job Posting – Software integrates directly with your corporate website to dynamically post your open jobs. Also in partnership with GO Jobs, you can also post to external sites.

Vendor Management System (VMS) – Manage vendors and subcontractors. Invite them to participate in filling jobs, monitor their performance and the candidates they have submitted.

Pricing for this service is somewhat above average but you seem to get a lot for your money. There is a one-time setup fee of $3500 then a user fee of $100 per month per user for up to five users. The monthly user fees go down from there for additional users. Included in the setup fee are two hours of Career Center customization and two hours of telephone-based user training included in the Set-up fee. There are extra costs for data migration, custom programming, hard copy resume scanning, batch uploading, the Email Autoreader, wireless access, the Accounting Gateway and the VMS module.

I want to thank Paul Smith, the National Accounts Manager for SmartSearch Online, for all his help in preparing this article. Anyone with any questions or comments regarding this package can check out the website at www.smartsearchonline.com. Or you can reach Paul via voice at 760-941-2800 or toll-free at 800-875-0588, or, via email at psmith@aps2k.com.

It does sort of sound like some type of experimental aircraft but in reality X1 Search is an excellent recruiter resource I was happy to be able to review for the Fordyce subscribers this month. Any recruiter wanting to locate documents (resumes) on their hard drive should check this out. I have written before about the need to save all the resumes a recruiter normally gets in the course of their day...those that you can't use now but might need for another assignment down the road. Keeping the resumes is easy. The hard part has always been getting the ones you need back out again for placement. X1 solves that problem by first indexing, then searching, via keywords, all the documents on your hard drive. The best part is that it searches the attachments in your email messages, something I have not seen before but yet is critical to making full use of your resume stash.

X1 is an Internet download that takes just a few minutes. Once downloaded it is an easy install. The first thing X1 does after it installs is it goes through your hard drive, directory by directory, file by file and indexes every file and email message on the entire drive. This can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or so but drastically speeds up your future searches. Once your drive is indexed you can search your email messages and attachments, contacts and/or any other file on your pc or your network using X1 Search with results displaying as you type the search term.

X1 can locate any word(s) in your email messages, attachments or files, usually very quickly due to the indexing. You can search any of these items by content, name, date or size. X1 also offers Prefix Searches, Phrase Searches and Boolean Searches to help you weed out the undesirables and cut down on wasted time.

One of the things I like most about X1 is its simplicity. Regular readers know that in my book, simpler is better and this product certainly qualifies. It basically consists on one screen in two parts. The left side is your results queue and when you click on one of the results, the items appears in the viewer on the right, which has the capability of displaying almost any type of file. That's all there is to it. If the result is an attachment, Word, Excel, html, Adobe, etc., you can open the original document easily.

I know X1 will make my recruiting life a lot easier as I follow my own advice and keep every resume sent to me, whether I think I can use it or not. I probably have thousands of email messages with resume attachments that were difficult, if not impossible, to search properly without first saving the attachment to my hard drive, which I rarely have time to do.

This product retails for a very reasonably $99 per copy, with a special introductory price of $74.95 through September 15th, which is available via a download from the X1 website. A full featured free 15-day trial of X1 is also available for the website. I want to thank Stephan West who is with Corporate Communications at X1 Technologies for his help in writing this article. Anyone with any questions or comments can visit the X1 website at www.x1.com or they can contact Customer Service at customerservice@x1.com.

I have had the pleasure of reviewing ResumeGrabber by the eGrabber Company several times over the years but never tire of writing about this first-in-class – best in class recruiter-oriented product. There is a soft spot in the heart of any Internet recruiter/researcher that has been around for any length of time for this product. In the old days, this was the product that saved us all from the monotony of the routine we all followed when downloading resumes from the Internet. They were certainly the first to produce an accurate data capture tool available to the general public. To this day, although there are many private/oem parsing services and products available, ResumeGrabber is still one of the only ones available for our personal use.

Many of you have sophisticated applicant-tracking systems designed specifically for our industry, and most of those come with their own contact information parsing engines but for those that do not, one big new feature in ResumeGrabber is that is now works with a number of the leading ATS systems, including but not limited to HR-LOGIX, Hire Bridge, Restracker, and Unicru ATS. For those recruiters still using Outlook, ACT!, or Goldmine for their day-to-day recruiting and contact management, this product continues to work hand-in-hand with those packages as it always has. For those users, or anyone that needs to be able to quickly and accurately import text or web data into a usable format for later use should think about taking a look at this review for ResumeGrabber Standard, v4. Simply put…ResumeGrabber extracts and captures information from a document or web page, then uses that information to automatically populate a new record in your contact management software.

The parsing engine remains top-of-the-line. I parsed a couple of dozen resumes in the course of this review and can report virtually 
100% accuracy in the captured results. The parsing engine supports multiple phone numbers and websites in addition to the standard
 information including the phone numbers, email addresses, resume text, the resume itself, and other details you specify. This version
 certainly retains the ease of use of the previous ResumeGrabber interfaces, while giving you a more complete resume sourcing control
 solution.

Many of the same setup options are available to customer this solution for you and your office. There is some setup involved but it all 
goes towards maximizing efficiency for your particular needs. The Options menu is where you set up the capture in either word (rtf) or 
html formats but you can also choose how to name the file and also choose a directory for the saved resumes. I was able to create a 
new directory on my hard drive for my grabbed resumes and will be able to search those resumes in the future. You can also save to a 
networked drive if you share your information with other recruiters.

The Destination Tab is critical for the power users. Not only is this where you select your contact manager software but you can also 
specify routine information you want added into any user-defined fields. Let's say in Outlook you created new user-defined fields where 
you wanted to put the contacts skills and / or resume source for each contact. If these values are going to be common from one 
assignment to another, you are able to type in the default values to enter into these fields for each new record. This not only saves 
data entry time, but will also enable you to later search on that field.

The Search Setup is a must do (another key feature). This is actually one of the best features when you are adding a lot of new 
candidates. You enter keywords you are going to be searching for…maybe twenty or thirty of the most common keywords you typically 
find in your job orders. Candidates grabbed will have these keywords flagged in the color of your choice on capture.

Again, as in previous versions, ResumeGrabber resides on your computer screen as a simple, floating, “always on top” toolbar. All you 
need to do to capture an document or web page is to simply swipe the name, address, telephone and email (and any other contact 
information available) to highlight, and then click the Go button on the toolbar. You are then offered a modifiable preview of the record that 
will be created.

One more new and welcomed addition to this release is a scheduling feature that, again, works with your contact manager. In the contact
 record preview mentioned in the previous paragraph there is a Set Activity button which, when clicked, lets you schedule a call or make 
an appoint with the individual just grabbed. The call or appointment will show up in your scheduling software at the requested time.

Clicking on the Transfer button creates the new record in your contact manager with the resume text pasted into the new record and the 
resume plainly attached. This candidate is now in my Outlook / Contacts folder. Note that ResumeGrabber can be used to import 
resumes from your email, word documents or any third party job sites including DICE, Headhunter, and Monster.

If you want to add a personal contact or sales/marketing contact you can elect to transfer the contact information without attaching a 
resume. Duplication of records in your contact manager is eliminated as it checks while transferring based on combinations of name, 
company, email address, and zip. You can add links and notes (like job orders, reference letters) as attachments to any record.

Check out this excellent product at the ResumeGrabber home page: www.egrabber.com/resumegrabber/index.html, where you can see a demo, download a free trial and get technical support. The list price is $249.95 per copy.

Google Cheat Sheet by JobMachine

Recently, I heard from Shally Steckerl, who has contributed numerous tips to this column over the years, saying he had completed and is now marketing his Advanced Google – A Recruiter’s Cheat Sheet informational document. This is a two-page PDF doc packed with tips on getting the most resumes out of Google that you can. This doc is short and sweet but has everything you need to be more productive in locating those passive candidates your clients and competition do not have. He starts with the syntax for finding resumes and homepages. Then try the associations, alumni, mailing list and newsgroup searches. The quick reference guide contains Google operators including, but not limited to NumRange (great for zip codes), Definitions (good for acronyms) and Wildcards (good for anything).

Shally is marketing this product from his website for $9.95 and in my opinion worth every penny. Learn this and you can master the art of getting resumes and almost any other type of information out of the largest search engine on the Internet. To order, or for more information, visit Shally’s website, www.jobmachine.net and then click on the link to Cheat Sheet on the left. Check it out.

Google, the largest search engine on the Internet, has many great advanced features. One you can take advantage of right away is to learn how and when to use the “Cached” and “Similar Pages” features. You run you search as always but when you obtain your list of results pay close attention and you will see these features at the end of each search result. Google is always making and saving copies of new pages it visits so if that page disappears, you will still be able to view it in the “Cache” Some pages do not have this option available, as the owner of the page requested Google not cache their page or the page was not indexed in the first place. When you click on the “Cached” link Google will then show the stored page and highlights your search terms in multiple colors. This comes in very handy when working long hours on a hard the search. An example for using the “Similar Pages” feature is as follows. Say I am looking for Engineers in the Bay Area who have a “Memory Flash” background and live in the 408 area code. The search string would look like this:

With this search I came up with seven hits. When reviewing each hit then also click on to the “Similar Pages” link. This will give you additional names, websites, and associations of potential candidates.