Velvet
Search Management Technology
by Prospect City
Offered
this month is a review of an ATS product that is a bit more than just your
run-of-the-mill ATS product or service. Prospect City is a network of over 1000
recruitment professionals including Research Professionals, Executive
Recruiters, Staffing Executives, and HR Executives linked together with a common
goal, making more placements. Their core service, the Velvet Search Management
Technology software, which this review will center on, is a fully web-based
(ASP) that will contain all of your day-to-day search projects, candidate and
job order pipelines, and other search contacts. Aside from their core service,
which is available only as part of a membership in their network, they also
offer related ancillary services including a project management service that
support your mailings, proposals, data entry and data management; a financial
management arm that supports all your firm’s bookkeeping efforts including
payables, receivables, and payroll processing; and also a research service that
has research professionals standing by to provide leads and candidates for your
job orders either via an hourly rate or project basis. Along with the
researchers there is a message board that allows members to communicate with one
another and share information on job orders and candidates. The core service
integrates seamlessly with the other components of their support services.
First
off, as I stated above, Velvet is completely web-based with nothing to install
on your local PC and no worries about any hardware, software, backups, other
technology issues. To use the system you simply open the Prospect City website,
log in, and start using the software. The main page opens up to a very simply
interface that gives you all of your activity at a glance including active
projects (job orders), call list, lists of people and messages to follow up
with, and recent people you have contacted. If you click on a project, you get a
complete picture of what is going on with that project including contact
information, description of project, candidates submitted, prospects to follow
up with for the project, sources of prospects (a new one to me), and
ex-prospects (another new one). You can also attach pertinent documents to the
project file. At any time on any screen you can click on a contacts name and
jump to a complete profile on that person, including all the standard candidate
information.
Adding
a candidate is easy and can be accomplished at any time as there is always links
to new candidate, new orders, and new project links available in plain view. You
can enter a minimal amount of information for starters and although resume
parsing does not appear to be available, part of their ancillary services is to
allow you to outsource your data entry function to the Prospect City staff.
Entering new companies and projects (orders) are done in a similar
manner.
Their
search function is more simplistic than most products I have review. There is a
small “find” text box in the upper part of the screen, you simply type in
your search terms and you are returned not every scrap of information in your
database relating to the term, presented in an easy to read format and allows
you to locate most anything you are looking for very quickly, including resumes
of your candidates. The search feature also text searches all resumes for
keywords so you do not have to fill out the employment history of candidates if
you do not want to.
What
I like about this service is that is it is so very simple. A trait that I tout
often in this column. Some ATS vendors have so many bells and whistles on their
products that it is often too difficult to know all the features available, much
less learn how to use them all. Velvet seems to be a simple place to store your
people (candidate and job order contacts), your companies, and your projects
(job orders) and offers a very simple and efficient interface to search them all
with ease.
The
price for this service, per their website, is a one-time $1000 set up fee and a
$200 per month per user fee. They do charge for data conversion if you are
moving from a different systems. There are also additional fees for the project
management, financial management and researching services mentioned above. A
nice touch is their 24/7 technical support, a true rarity in this industry.
One
more point worth mentioning. Although Velvet is simple, their development team
is on stand-by and ready to serve any customization requests of their clients.
Each of the clients starts with the base Velvet system and has added new
features and functions (lists, complex searching/queries, branded client
worksites, firm nomenclature, etc.). As a result each firm ends up with a
custom, proprietary system without any of the heavy costs associated with
building and supporting a "home grown" system. Most custom
features are implemented within 24 hours. Most changes range from free to $150).
Prospect
City, with the Velvet ATS and the other services just mentioned, could be the
answer for any firm wanting to concentrate more of their time on placements and
less time on the day-to-day administrative, bookkeeping, researching and other
non-productive duties one always encounters in running a recruiting office, both
large and small.
I
want to thank Bob Stein, President of Prospect City
for his assistance with this article. Anyone interested in more information can
contact Bob via email at rstein@prospectcity.com
or via voice at 630-805-1963. You can also visit the Prospect City web site at www.prospectcity.com
for more information.
FillThatJob.com
From the email pile… Passive candidate detection is still a big business these days and the candidate market tightens up more and more. I noticed an email from FillThatJob.com and thought it looked like a new slant on this type of service. I have not used this service nor do I know anything about it but anyone seeking passive candidates might give them a closer look. Direct from their email:
Personality profiling + resume scrubbing = a candidate that meets all 3 of the most important hiring criteria - stop trying to find needles in the haystack with only a resume to guide you.
We'll get you:
1. Skill
Fit - The Education, Training, Experience and Skills of the
seeker.
2. Company Fit
- The Attitude, Values, Demeanor, and Integrity of the seeker.
3. Job Fit
- The Thinking Style, Behavioral Traits, and Occupational Interests of the
seeker.
We
call our Employment
Matchmaking program Candidate,
Career Opportunity
Match
Program
or
CCOMP.
It works through artificial intelligence - not key words or phrases - and its
effectiveness will amaze you. It is totally new technology for the job board
industry and job seekers love it!
Whether
you have 3 job openings or 300,000 - you can take advantage of this offer. We'll
even upload your jobs for you! WHY
are we doing this at such a great price? Because we want to get
our job postings to over 1 million right now! Few job boards in the world have
that many postings and when we reach a million - this offer will be gone. We've
posted over 250,000 in the last 4 weeks alone! See for yourself why we are the
professional recruiter's new best friend. Find out more at www.fillthatjob.com
or call (866) 961-5627 for information. If you would rather email for
information rknobbs@fillthatjob.com
Tip
– NumRange
This
is a Google tip that anyone that ever goes into Google to search for resumes
should at least know about. It is one of the more obscure and lesser known
methods available to passive candidate recruiters but one of the most helpful in
nailing down candidates within a geographic regions. NumRange is very simple. It
searches for numbers…a range of numbers that you specify. They syntax is very
simple:
Number..Number
(that is two dots and no spaces in between the two numbers). Let’s say you
want to search for resumes in the St. Louis, Missouri area. A simplistic search
using NumRange would look like this:
(resume
| homepage) 63000..63199
We would never actually use the search as above but probably opt for more advanced techniques like the intitle and inurl operators but for the sake of this tip the above example tells the search engine to search for pages with the words “resume” OR “homepage” AND any number between 63000 and 63199. Living in the St. Louis area myself I happen to know that all the zip codes in my metropolitan area begin with either 630 or 631 so to get them all I look for any five digit number between the two in the search string. NumRange can look for any number sequence, not just zip codes it just happens to be a very handy and simple way to zero in on a geographic area. You can substitute the keywords and zip code ranges for the geographic area of your choice. Since the zip codes in the USA start with 0 on the east coast and 9 on the west coast this method can also be used to search vast geographic regions. Complete zip code listing can be found at the USPS web site at www.usps.com.