ATS
Evaluation Assistance
Many of you may
be going through the laborious and frustrating process of evaluating a new ATS
(Applicant Tracking System) for your office. I know this as in my role as the
technology columnist for this publication I continue to receive many calls and
emails from subscribers asking for my advice in this endeavor. While nothing I
can say or do can alleviate the majority of your anxiety, I have developed the
list of questions below, that are in no particular order of importance, to help
guide you in your decision-making process. Anything you can do to make the
process based more on logic and less on emotion the better. Before you begin the
process ask yourself the questions from the first list. Write down the answers.
Talk about them with others in your office. Be a “systems analyst” for a
day. Decide as best you can before you begin your search what you are looking
for. Once you have a pretty good idea of what you want, use the second list to
whittle down your possibilities. Look at the second list. Delete those questions
of no importance to you. Add a few of your own as you see fit. Ask these
questions of all the vendors you interview. Write down the answers…compare one
to another. Once you have only a few contenders…do a few demo’s. Ask more
questions, check a few references. Unfortunately, you never know if you made the
right decision until after you have already made your decision and have been
using the new product for a few months, however, you should at least give
yourself the best chance you can for success.
The
top twenty questions you should ask yourself:
The
top twenty questions to ask your prospective vendor:
These questions
are excerpted from my new book, Recruiter Computer Report – Applicant Tracking
Systems – Identification, Evaluation, and Selection, which will also include a
directory of dozens of ATS vendors. I have written this book to ease the process
determining which ATS is best for your office. You can learn more about this
book by visiting my Swat Recruiting web site at www.swatrecruiting.com,
or you can also email me at mark@swatrecruiting.com.
WEDDLE’s
2005/6 Directory of Employment-Related Internet Sites
A
couple of months ago I wrote about Peter Weddle’s new resource on association
web sites, which I felt was an excellent guide for recruiters targeting
candidates belonging to specific industry groups. This month I am reviewing yet
another great resource for recruiters…his directory of employment-related
Internet sites. This CD contains thousands of listing, many included for the
first time. You can treat this as an “Internet Address Book” of job boards
and career portals. It contains Internet addresses/URL’s for over 8000 web
sites that specialize in online recruiting.
From
his web site:
I
took at long look at this resource and found it is organized by career/vocation,
industry, and geography. Anyone that purchases this can also get free updates at
Peter’s website. I would encourage anyone that utilizes online resources for
recruiting in any way to find out more about this item by visiting www.weddles.com.
EHSCareers.com
I
recently received an email from EHSCareers.com announcing their service to
support the hiring needs of the environmental and safety career fields. I have
not used their service nor do I know much about it except the information
excerpted from their email below:
“EHSCareers.com
is dedicated to helping companies source and hire qualified EH&S
professionals in a timely & efficient manner. Our database of information on
over 50,000 EH&S professionals gives our customers access to the leaders in
this field.”
For
only $250 a month you receive unlimited
job postings, unlimited resume searches, automatic
candidate notification agents and immediate access to over 5,000
Active EH &S Job Seekers.”
Anyone
with needs in this field should look them up.
Press
Release 1
Bullhorn
Advances Staffing and Recruiting Through
Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
Boston
– December 19, 2005 – Bullhorn, the global leader in On Demand Staffing and
Recruiting software, today announced that its Bullhorn API Toolkit supports
Really Simple Syndication (RSS), enabling staffing and recruiting firms to
syndicate new jobs directly to candidates, dramatically decreasing the time to
source and fill job orders. Bullhorn customers also realize greater client service
efficiencies by using RSS to syndicate job management information from within
Bullhorn directly to their customers, or for customers to make new job orders
immediately available to their staffing and recruiting firms.
To view a live use of RSS to syndicate job opportunities, visit www.bullhorn.com/Home.8.0/BHContent_JobOpportunities.cfm.
“According
to the American Staffing Association, over 90% of employers expect flexibility
in the fulfillment of job orders, and 78% cite the need to fill those orders
quickly,” said Arthur Papas, CEO and co-founder of Bullhorn.
“Bullhorn’s mission is to give customers the flexibility and speed
needed to enable the real-time, on demand matching of candidates to job orders
at anytime from anyplace.”
By
using RSS, Bullhorn customers can leverage the real-time flexibility of an
industry standard syndication service to deliver any information directly to
candidates and clients, using widely available RSS Readers to view the
information. The flexibility and
power of the toolkit enables a customer’s Web developer to quickly and easily
add RSS to their Web site and job board, while leveraging information in
Bullhorn.
“Bullhorn
outpaces the staffing and recruiting software industry with innovation that
addresses the real-time, on demand delivery of candidates for jobs,” said Dan
Donathan, chief information officer of PrideStaff. “As a national staffing firm focused on delivering
innovative staffing and recruiting solutions that are specific to our clients,
we view Bullhorn as a critical business partner.”
The Bullhorn API
Toolkit is available immediately by contacting Bullhorn Customer Support at bullhornsupport@bullhorn.com or 617-478-9126.
Press
Release 2
HireAbility and iXmatch:
Complementary Technology for the ATS/HRIS Industry
ALEX resume
processing pairs with advanced search and matching engine iXfind. Companies
co-write visionary human capital article for Fordyce ATS guide.
Salem, NH - December 20, 2005 - HireAbility(r), a leader in integrated
recruiting software and services, announced today that it signed a partnership
agreement with iXmatch(r), a leader in advanced search and matching technology.
Under the agreement, the companies will integrate and co-market their solutions:
HireAbility's ALEX(sm) automated resume processing, and iXmatch's iXfind(r)
matching engine. The partnership recognizes the high value that the two
companies' products can deliver synergistically to Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS),
job boards, and Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS). It will combine
highly accurate document processing with intelligent matching that takes into
consideration individual preferences at a very granular level. The companies
also collaborated to produce an article that will be published in the
forthcoming Fordyce(r) Letter's ATS Guide.
The integration of ALEX and iXfind creates a solution that is greater than the
sum of its parts. iXfind searches and matches any permutation of HR-XML
formatted data that ALEX extracts from resumes, and it lets users weight various
factors to reflect their personal preferences in order to provide the best
match. For example, if a recruiter cares most about finding a candidate who
worked in development at Oracle Corporation, and cares little about the
candidate's location, iXfind is able to weight those factors with its patented
technology to locate candidates that are the best matches. It learns from users'
stated preferences and adjusts its matches accordingly, as well. The hybrid
approach of using structured and relative matching delivers the best search
results, and should be an important decision criterion for any forward-looking
company evaluating new HRIS solutions, as mentioned in the upcoming Fordyce(r)
Letter's ATS Guide.
"It's a perfect combination of smart product technologies that deliver
immediate ROI for our customers, who see their human capital as a key
competitive lever," remarked Ken Smith, Director of Business Development
for HireAbility. "When Fordyce approached us about writing a technology
article for their ATS Guide, iXmatch was a logical company to tap for a
collaboration."
Automatic resume processing minimizes time spent on manual data entry by
extracting detailed information from resume files, accurately and quickly. ALEX
clients gain the convenience of accepting e-mailed cover letters and resumes,
while greatly reducing their administrative effort. The high quality of the
resulting structured data makes searches even more powerful and accurate.
iXmatch's matching engine provides a giant step up in finding data and making it
available to recruiters at the right time. iXfind does more than just search for
documents via arbitrary or global criteria. iXfind enables candidates and
recruiters to specify all their skills and requirements easily, and delivers a
ranked list of matches based on how well each fits a request. iXfind provides
this personalized match while learning user requirements dynamically.
Daniel Bork, Chief Technology Officer for iXmatch, remarked, "iXmatch
recognized the customer-demand for a variety of resume document processing
technologies. Further, it recognized that HireAbility does the best job of
providing it. We welcome the opportunity to associate our two complementary
technologies."
Tip - Google Extras
Most
of us know the value of Google for search for everything and anything,
especially resumes but they have little known “extras” that maybe some of
you can use:
date:
- used with keywords searches for related documents within a recent date range -
“date: hurricanes 3” searches for documents on hurricanes posted within the
last three months
safesearch: - used with keywords searches for documents but excludes adult sites
–safesearch:movies returns results about movies but leaves out the adult movie
sites.
filetype: - used with keywords to limit search results to specific file types
– filetype:pdf limits your search results to Adobe pdf files – aside from
html and pdf files, you can search for any MS/Office files, PostScript,
WordPerfect, Lotus 123 and others
Q&A – type your question into the search box and your answer will be at
the top of the box – typing “population of USA” (without quotes” returns
the answer 295,734,134
weather – tells you the current weather in a given location –
typing “weather st. louis, mo” gives you the weather in St. Louis, MO
currency conversions – Type in “5 USD in
GBP” (without quotes) then click the search button. You get back the answer: 5
U.S. dollars = 2.83221933 British pounds.
calculations – Type in any addition,
subtraction, multiplication, division, percentage or power calculation you
desire and get a quick answer. Typing in 235 + 879 then clicking search give you: 235 + 879 = 1114.
book searches – type in http://books.google.com/.
Once on the page type in the keywords of your choice and you will be returned a
list of books with those keywords.
define:
- put any word after the colon and you will get the definitions of that word,
probably several.