RecruitingTools.com » recruiting

ATS Meets CRM.. What A Great Love Story

Noel — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 15:55:53 +0000

Guest Post by Becky Franzen

I’ve spent the past month or so researching, demoing, poking holes and asking tons of questions in the hopes to find something really unique that I could offer to my clients AND also use internally. I say unique, but what I was really out there trying to find was a technology that worked well as an ATS, had the smarts of a CRM AND the most important (in my world) a reporting function/capability to really look under the hood to see what was really going on.

In my quest for this elusive relationship, I narrowed it down to a select few and really dove down into the details. I made a spreadsheet with the following things I needed:

Saas
Global expansion capability
Boolean logic
Paid site outreach (can search multiple sites at once)
Non paid site outreach
Resume Parsing
Customized Workflows
Career Portals/Landing Site
Job Posting
Hiring Manager Access
Agency/Vendor Access
VMS Capability
Custom Forms/Templates
Talent Community Adaptation
Mobile App
Dashboard
Reports

- Time to fill
-Candidate pipeline
-Open jobs/requisitions
-Aging
-Source of Candidate
-Affirmative Action

Data Analytics
Integration with

-Social Media
-Background Check
-Reference Check
On-boarding Capability
Learning Management System
OFCCP Compliance

I am pleased announce that I chose Brightmove. They have gone above and beyond trying to answer all of my hundreds of questions, but besides that, they have a really cool technology that your recruiters, sourcers, hiring managers, and executives will love. For those that provide RPO services, this technology really caters to this market as you can have a parent instance and easily create child instances, with the ability to run analytics across all business lines you support.

The top 5 reasons I chose Brightmove:

1) Parsing capability (can upload folders of resumes, parse single documents, have candidates apply through Facebook, and forward a resume to an email address to have it parsed automatically)

2) Reporting (Graphically demonstrates Pipeline, Open jobs, aging reports, Recruiter activity, Source of Candidate as well as ability to run 32 reports with the basic package and hundreds more with the data analytics package)

3) Integrated with Social Media (will update a candidate profile from your system with their LinkedIn Profile)

4) Development of unlimited landing pages (important if you are building talent communities for clients or internally)

5) Ability to be an ATS and a CRM

So, that’s my love story for the day.. feel free to email me with any questions.

Guest Post by Becky Franzen, RPO Director at Employer Flexible originally posted on RecruitingBlogs.com

iMetaSearch: A Powerful new Windows search tool #recruiting #sourcing

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:00:19 +0000

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Group, cluster, sort extract, export, filter: and search keywords, phrases, search results and candidates. This is what iMetaSearch lets you do for free.

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is what stands between Google and iMetaSearch. Now I won’t profess to be a expert in this area, but I will say that I have had a productive time gathering relevant information on my areas of research. The pure definition of LSA or LSI (Indexing) is that the system is analyzing documents to interpret the underlying meaning or concepts of those documents rather than matching word for word. Here is a great visual that breaks it down rather nicely.

If however you just want to assume it works and try this bad boy out you can download the free version HERE from PuffinWare.

See the videos below to help walk you through. We did nto create these videos as they have already been posted and created on the Puffinware website. Here they are. Pay them a visit and try out the tool.

Here is a set of tutorials on the tool. Be sure to visit there site: iMetaSearch

Text from Puffinware site:

This video covers the basics of how to do a search. It also briefly covers the 4 main areas of the user interface.

Groups of Results - each search result is put into a group made of similar results.
Search Results – a list of all the search results.
Selected Result – the details of the currently selected search result.
Extracted Words – a list of all the words and phrases from all the results.

Text from Puffinware site:

This video covers how to explore search results by taking advantage of:

Sorting results by column
Looking at groups of similar results
Updating relevance scores by marking interesting results
Going to the webpage of a result
Exporting results to a CSV (Excel) file

Text from Puffinware site:

This video covers using the extracted words and phrases in the following ways:

Doing quick searches on any extracted words or phrase
Finding all phrases that start with a certain word
Filtering extracted words to find people and websites
Exporting words and phrases to a CSV (Excel) file

Text from Puffinware site:

This video covers how to use groups of related results in the following ways:

Sorting groups by description, color, or relevance
Controlling the number of groups, from large general groups to small specific groups
Marking groups to find related groups, and also related search results and words

Talent Communities are great. The Recruiters Suck

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 03:58:42 +0000

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Engagement. What is it? What does it mean? And how do you measure it? It’s a tough question, and I will jump to say that the vast majority of companies, corporate or vendor based running a form of social campaign

have no clue.

The last few years have seen corporate talent operations engulf social media or “social recruiting” (Google has no definition) as the only absolute in their organization. I want to be clear that I am a firm believer in social and 2^nd generation connecting for the purpose of talent acquisition. But I am a bigger fan of process and meaningful connecting. I talk about it a bit here in the 4 c’s, Engagement and the Electronic Exchange.

This past week I was a silent participant in a recruiting conversation offline that opened my eyes to how dangerously clueless a lot of recruiting leaders are. (Silent as I sat in but remained quiet)

This is a serious problem that will only lead to greater failures. These are large mega companies with billion dollar brands and trillion dollar dreams. Companies that on the surface have elegantly articulated the process for their talent community but have genuinely failed at any backend process that would be recognized as mediocre.

The conversation was around engagement and metrics within the talent community. What do we need to measure and how do we measure it? The companies will 100% remain anonymous and I will not share the participants, but I will share a few good things that came out of the call.

Building and measuring a talent community are 2 separate challenges. How to measure and what metrics “we” (collectively) need and/or want to measure:

Engagement: Engagement was defined as how the organization would approach potential prospects or visitors to the named landing page or community page. Some ideas included activities, contests, give a ways and so on. The end result was an agreement that the engagement must consist of a way to attract potential talent; which I agree with.

The question posed was: What metrics you currently use to measure return on engagement activities? Though I felt this could have been a deeper conversation here are the notes that I gathered during the call.

Metrics to monitor when assessing the return on your talent community efforts: (Not an exhaustive list but a few to get the conversation started):

Content: Content is king and the king will always win. Great content generates great engagement. Though I agree with this there was no serious breakout of what great content is. I am not even sure you can label great content. Great content is in perspective of the reader. My feeling is that you need to understand your target audience and why they are visiting your site or reading your content.

It’s important to understand your goal and have a clearly defined plan on how you will get there and how you will navigate around the roadblocks that will arise. And arise they will.

Content tracking can be accomplished rather quickly and easily with programs like Google Analytics but study these before you choose. There are others that will fit your specific needs better than the standard free applications.
Tracking stickiness: how long a reader was reading your content and how many click thru’s they had during their visit. Did they click 1 article or 4? And which article where they? Were they related to the entrance point they came through to get onto your site or did you entice them to read additional articles that are not related to the original reason they visited your work? Another nice tool I find helps is Yahoo’s Index Tools.
Content Downloads: i.e. whitepapers, research, abstracts. Did you convert the visitor into a candidate? A visitor is a prospect. Do not be fooled by your statistics telling you that you had 600 visitors today but 50 where unique and you only had 5 downloads of the content you wanted to push out.
Measure Subscriptions to your community and to your links or feeds. There are free and paid services. I prefer some of the the paid for tracking details however you can always use free services like a mailchimp (to an extent) but a very strong service or you use an open source like PhP if you can handle it on your own.

A career blog for example that has 17,000 subscribers looks good, but is it relevant? This is the same argument as being a top 10 connector on LinkedIn. What does this get you? Access to more people? On the surface yes, but relevance..not a chance in hell. We’ll discuss that in another post, but you can read bit on relevance at Boolean Blackbelt and Glen’s post on LinkedIn’s Competitive advantage.

Target your network accordingly. If you are focused on sales recruiting than have a plan to target your top prospects (companies not individuals) and work out a way to effectively convert them into a candidate.

Recruiter return is a serious metric that without fail needs to be measured, tracked and monitored. Your recruiters are the face of your organization. Their attitude tells the story. Their ability to effectively articulate the message decides whether or not the prospect is converted into a candidate.

I will leave on the note of “recruiter return” and tackle that in the next installment.

People Search with Zoominfo

admin — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 21:05:34 +0000

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Sourcing for candidates can be simple or it can be frustrating. Putting aside the intricacies of deep web searching this series will be dedicated to listing and explaining some best practices around leveraging people search tools to find and attract great talent. First, let me start by saying that there are obviously thousands of applications that are available to mine HC (human capital data).

Choosing the proper application can only be done by you using what you feel comfortable with.

The tools that I’ll be sharing will not require you to be a super duper sourcing hero. I hope you enjoy. Please share your best tools and practices if you like the tools.

Tool #1: Zoominfo

(Paid – but you can use it free via site searching to an extent) – Sure, it’s the standard and most everyone knows about the tool, but there is a reason for that. It’s good. In essence it’s deep aggregate of HC data that allows you to effectively source data and competitive intel form target companies including sales info, but more important prospect information of potential talent for your organization.

I’ve been using Zoominfo for a couple of years now to uncover talent that I could probably find otherwise, but possibly not as quick without spending valuable time searching.

Why I like Zoominfo:

1. The key is the relevance to the results set provided. The info is concise and package extremly well.

2. You are provided with the sources from which the intel was gathered from for your review. This is obviously a great soruce to have for further research and tracking

3. SImilar to Hoovers and Yahoo finace among others, your given suggestions and information around key intel such as finances, competitors and stake holders.

4. Leveraging the free version, you really do get a significant amount of free data that you can than cross reference.

Here’s an example:

1. Try a very basic Site search via Google to target specific titles / companies etc. You can also go directly to Zoominfo and play with their search features. I tend to have better results through Google. Also try yahoo and bing etc. to be sure you are maximizing all results sets.

2. See the set of results showing “software engineers” from Microsoft

3. Full profile and breakdown of sources of information on potential candidates

Now certainly you can get deeper with the results set as you hone in on your search. As you play with the tool be sure to try the search capabilities internal to the application as well.

Subscribe HERE to stay up to date with our people search series

Search for Resumes with Aggregation with @JimStroud

admin — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 12:00:53 +0000

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Jim Stroud is a regular contributor the Sourcing community and we partner of some projects. I love his work and his videos are very informative. I recently viewed this small training video searching for resumes

on Dogpile.com. loved the video and Jim was gracious enough to allow me to share it on RecruitingTools with our readers.

In this episode of The Searchologist, Jim Stroud explains how to search Google, Yahoo and Bing more efficiently by using the metasearch engine – Dogpile. Plus, Otis Collier gives tips on how to increase views of your Linkedin profile.

Visit Jim’s Website. View other posts by Jim Stroud here

11 Global Research and Information Tools for Recruiters

admin — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 05:41:07 +0000

Download our free toolbar with more than 100+ Boolean Searches HERE

Information Gathering is a vital line to success as a sourcer. Undertanding why you are searching what you are searching can prove to be the difference between success and failure. having a large tool box is great if you want to be the cool kid on the block, but around here I like to knwo that I am spending my time as efficeitnyl as I can. Billing lcients fro hours wasted is not a typical line item they like to see.

Below is a list of 11 strong data and statistical tools we use to create market and talent maps:

World Wide:

World Bank – The world bank is a great resource for learning, tracking and gathering data. This is a great resource for tracking economic and employment trends.

Best used for:

Data: for international and national statistics
Research: for cross sector reporting on human development and statistical economic information
Prospects: Information, analysis and advice on global trends

IMF – The IMF monitors the world’s economies, lends to members in economic difficulty, and provides technical assistance.

Best used for:

Economic Outlooks
Global and regional financial statistics
U.S Labour and economic forecasting

UN – The United Nations can be used for more than just a reference point you hear about on the news.

Best used for:

National Statistical systems
Global research for economic standards
Market research and Trade statistics

CIA World Factbook – provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities.

Best used for:

To study global intelligence
Country comparisons
Country profiles
Military and people studies

Google labs – Public data – The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand.

Best used for:

Population studies including job sector reporting
Unemployment by geo-location
Public data on human capital studies

OECD - OECD brings together the governments of countries committed to democracy and the market economy from around the world.

Best used for:

Statistics comparison for almost any topic

UNESCO - Global and internationally comparable statistics on education, science, culture and communication.

Best used for:

Surveys and studies
World and regional statistics
Science and Technology statistics an surveys

US:

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics – The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor is the principal Federal agency responsible for measuring labor market activity, working conditions, and price changes in the economy. Its mission is to collect, analyze, and disseminate essential economic information to support public and private decision-making.

Best used for:

US Labor studies
Workplace studies
Unemployment rates, stats and charts

Census Bureau – To provide the best mix of timeliness, relevancy, quality, and cost for the data we collect and services we provide

Best used for:

Population & Housing Census – every 10 years
Economic Census – every 5 years
Census of Governments – every 5 years
American Community Survey – annually
Our many surveys — both Demographic & Economic
Economic Indicators – each indicator is released on a specific schedule, see the Economic Indicator Calendar

LatAm & Caribean

CEPAL – CEPALSTAT is the gateway to all the statistical information of Latin America and the Caribbean countries collected, systematized and published by ECLAC.

Best used for:

Studies on economic conditions
Science and technology
Employment and unemployment market and trends

Europe:

Eurostat – European statistical information

Best used for:

Statistical information surrounding European countries
Employment Trends and outlooks

10 Free Screen Capture tools for Recruiting productivity

admin — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 20:00:51 +0000

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A key part of successful recruiting is your ability to organize your desk in a way that you are efficiently communicating and proving key information to candidates as well as clients. There are hundreds of tools available for organization on the web, but which tools are the right tools to play with?

Subscribe here to keep up to date on this series of organization and productivity tools for recruiters.

Screen Capture tools are critical for on the fly presentation needs and data capture. You can use these tools for data sharing or training or simply just too quickly take notes and stow away for later reference.

Here is a strong list of 15 free and low cost screen capture tools for you to try:

Capture: This is a free capture tool that is fairly simple to install and use. Capture works on all versions of Windows, from Window 95 to Windows 7 and everything in-between (including XP, Vista, Win2k, etc).

Faststone Capture: Another great free tool. You can choose to send captures to editor, file, clipboard, printer, email, Word/PowerPoint document or upload them to your website. Editing tools include annotating (texts, arrowed lines, highlights), resizing, cropping, sharpening, watermarking, applying edge effects and many more.

Greenshot: Greenshot is a free open source light-weight screenshot software tool for Windows

MWSnap: MWSnap is a small yet powerful Windows program for snapping (capturing) images from selected parts of the screen

ScreenStamp: ScreenStamp! takes your screen shots by pressing the print screen button on your keyboard, names the screen shot, saves it to your predefined location and stamps the image with the current date and time.

Snippy: Free. Simply click on the little Snippy icon in the taskbar notification area, and mark out the region of the screen that you want to copy — that’s it, you’re done! The cut-out image will now be in your clipboard, and you can paste it in another application.

Webshot: The freeware version comes with a demo of the command line interface, which can be purchased, and used to streamline the screenshot process on whole websites.

Zscreen: ZScreen is an open-source screen capture program for Microsoft Windows. It can upload screenshots, pictures, text & files and put the URL in your clipboard in a single keystroke.

Screenshot Captor: Screenshot Captor is a program for taking screenshots on your computer. It’s different from other screenshot utilities in several notable ways

Fireshot: Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations.

#SocialRecruiting tool Jobmagic for #Facebook

admin — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 12:00:39 +0000

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It’s shaping up to be a Facebook week on Recruitingtools, but that’s OK. I’ve had the opportunity to speak with the folks over at jobmagic the last couple of weeks. In that I’ve run multiple variations of demos and trails of this application both on a corporate level and individual recruiter level.

This is not a paid review. I’ve just had significant success with the tool and felt that I wanted to to share my thoughts. I’ve been speaking with 2 of their people over there. Paul (Thanks for the guidance and product demos) and Jindrich, founder and CEO.

You’ll see the quick breakdown in the video below, but in the end Jobmagic has been givin me a significant reason to use Facebook during the day. It’s certainly not perfect but it’s a damn good tool that you need to evaluate.

You’ve got options to:

Add in a jobs tab to display your careers opportunities from your corporate fanpage or personal page
Search their internal database (growing)
Candidate profile organizer
Job description mathcing with candidates from the internal database
Create, link and share all job posting (Which are Unlimited) across more than 200 social sites

You’ll see how easy you can index your friends on Facebook and how the tool instantly breaks down the demographics and profiles of your connections, how candidates apply and how your jobs are pushed to more than 200 social sites with one click. If you’ve built your Facebook conenctions based on recruitment, industry and location you’ll enjoy this tool 10x’s more.

In the end Jindrich and his team have made significant strides in converting Facebook into a recruiting tool. Take a look at my thoughts here and check them out for a free trial (no affiliate links)

A few more Facebook sourcing tips: Click here

Get the overview here:

About Jobmagic

Jobmagic, the leader in social media recruiting, helps companies to reach the best talent on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and 300 other social networks. Jobmagic’s comprehensive platform includes advanced technologies for social media sourcing, social media optimization, automatic job publishing to social media, referral hiring, talent network management and semantic profile-based matching. Jobmagic is used by companies of all sizes, from Fortune 500 to startups, across all industries from retail to healthcare, and by direct employers as well as staffing and recruiting firms.

WTH is Influence with @radicalrecruit

admin — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 20:48:27 +0000

No need to write on this one…Geoff will do all of the talking…

Geoff’s take on influence and lists…

SourceSolution.com: Name Gen, Target and List Building

admin — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:00:50 +0000

Often times the tools we use as sourcers / recruiters are not recruiting tools. You’ve heard me say it time and time again that we are in the business of gathering information, not resumes. The other day Maha Akiki, a frequent contributor of information to our site shared a link with me that she found while doing some research.

SourceSolutions is not a recruiting tool. It’s a service that helps connect people with business. You won’t find resumes here but you can walk away with great information to narrow your search.

We’ve found that levering SourceSolutions in a way similar to how you’d use jigsaw can help you uncover some great leads. Since the site focuses on CRO and CMO’s you’ll strong data relevant to CMO and CRO’s, Biotech and Pharma, Professional Services and Regulatory.

Pros:

Most info for free
Targeted to the CRO and CMO industries
Few options and filters are intuitive

Cons:

Not every company has lists or information
You cannot search freehand

Cool:

You can Link up to your LinkedIn account to see who you are connected with in your targeted immediate network
You can research pipeline reports from the company and search their management teams

Step 1:

Goto http://www.sourcesolution.com

Step 2:

Choose the heading you wish to research. I tend to choose company directory or Industry Organizations but you’ll find valuable info in all categories.

Step 3:

Choose your company and research pipelines and management teams

Search pipelines for products and release dates

Search management teams for names, locations and titles