Recruiting Software

2010-01-25T15:29:00.001-08:00

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2010-01-25T15:24:00.001-08:00

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2007-10-30T07:20:00.000-07:00

Recruiting Software – Emailing Do’s and Don’ts

In a previous article I gave some pointers on how effectively to use emailing as a recruiting tool. In fact, I made the premise that I don’t believe you can be a competitive recruiter without a robust emailing program. The program must reach candidates, clients, potential candidates and prospective clients on a selective and continuous basis. The program should be an integral part of your recruiting software. It definitely should never be separated from the recruiting database requiring a forced dialogue between recruiting information and emailing information. The two pieces, recruiting data and emailing data, and their associated software should be one and the same. If they are not, no matter how good the interface is it will break and require constant attention.

However, no matter how good the recruiting software emailing features are if they are misused it can cause more problems than it solves. Your biggest issue is not to get yourself blacklisted as a spammer. It is just as bad to look like a spammer to candidates as it is to clients.

I like to break recruiter emailing down into two components. The first component is the day to day stuff where you are contacting candidates and thanking them for resumes, telling them about positions and sending rejections. This will be the same for clients, sending resumes, telling them about candidates, etc. The receiving part is here as well, for clients and candidates when they respond to your emails. All of the above should be available in your recruiting database and quickly accessible by person (candidate or client), by position, by company and by anything else you may need such as by recruiter, date and job title. Most importantly, the emailing information must not include the junk of a typical “in” and “out” email box. The email correspondence that gets to the recruiting database must only be about contact with clients and candidates.

The second emailing component is the one where a recruiter can truly rise above the competition. I call this component “broadcast emailing”. Some would say this is a component of CRM. I do not. Put a CRM article link here.

Broadcast emailing for recruiting must be robust and capable of sending at least 1000 qualified and verified emails every 5 minutes. To get this speed you must select your SMTP server with great care. SMTP server selection will be the content of a future article. Once the email is out you certainly do not want individual copies of the email in your Sent Items box for each person. However your recruiting database should tell you what you emailed on a given date to this person. How then can you know all this and not bloat your server or computer with 1000’s of copies of emails? Your recruiting software must be clever.

Check list for good recruiter emailing practices

• The recruiting emailing function should check and make sure the email addresses are valid. Email servers POP and SMTP can catch the fact that you are sending to invalid addresses. Your email server or some major POP server providers may blacklist you. Kiss your global marketing program good bye.

• The emailing recruiting software must de-duplicate before sending. Again the ugly grim reaper of blacklisting will rise from the lands of POP and email servers if they discover multiple emails going to the same address.

• The Tool does not send to possible invalid addresses unless you force it. Some recipient servers only validate once you send.

• The recruiting system has to be aware of the email bounce backs so the bounce backs can be removed automatically and any recruiter can see that this candidate or client has an invalid email address. Three things are important here: 1) It is very important that the recruiter does not have to do something special to see that the email address is invalid. 2) Don’t lose the original invalid email address. 3) The recruiting emailing function should not go through the wasteful steps of validating and/or emailing to this invalid address again.

• The recruiting emailing features must include intelligent address validation. For example, our recruiting software validation breaks addresses into 3 primary categories which are Valid, Maybe, and Invalid. Maybe and Invalid are subcategorized into Maybe (Busy, Timeout, Refused, Deferred and Other) and Invalid (Syntax, Bad Domain, Bad User at Domain and Other). This allows the recruiter to decide If the recipient servers are lying, greylisting, etc).

“greylisting is related to whitelisting and blacklisting. What happens is that each time a given mailbox receives an email from an unknown contact (ip), that mail is rejected with a "try again later" message (this happens at the SMTP layer and is transparent to the end user). This, in the short run, means that all mail gets delayed at least until the sender tries again - but this is where spam loses out! Most spam is not sent out using RFC compliant MTAs; the spamming software will not try again later.”

• Recruiting emailing logs must be kept of each validation run. In the event of high volume refusals or deferrals these logs can be reviewed by a person not a computer. In this instance, automation will fail you and you may get another “Hal 2000” on your hands.

• The recruiting emailing system should be able to use any SMTP server for sending (Authenticated or Anonymous). We recommend authenticated because many recipient servers won’t accept email from an anonymous server. However, an anonymous server allows you to use mail servers other than the one associated with your corporate domain and allows you to switch easily if necessary.

Here are some pointers for selecting a SMTP server:

Make sure it requires authenticated access.
Make sure they do not allow Open Relay Mail.
Dedicated is always better than shared.
Make sure SPF configuration is set for your Domain.
Make sure Reverse DNS resolves to your mail box.
Determine the type of Spam Filtering that is in effect.

• The recruiting emailing features have to allow easy access to templates that can merge data about individuals into many thousands of emails. The templates must be versatile enough to use text, MS Word or HTML formats. The recruiting system must have a safeguard in place so that emails include the common Electronic Communications Privacy Act disclaimer in the footer. This is important in all mailings to help keep you off the blacklists.

• The recruiting software should include a user managed “do not mail” function in order to keep either groups or individuals off emailing lists. You can enter specific email addresses or domains which ensure that even if you select the recipient, the recruiting system will not send to these recipients or any recipient at that domain. (The easiest way to get blacklisted is to send an email to someone who has requested removal from you list.)

• The recruiting email validation process should be multi threaded (10 threads) but the send process should be single threaded. This helps ensure that the send rate stays below the radar of flood based spam filters.

2007-10-07T15:37:00.000-07:00

Recruiting Software - Rolling Your Own

Oh no! This is the worst decision a recruiting firm (Contingency or Retained) can make.

I can make countless analogies here. Would a surgeon operate on himself or make his own instruments? Do pianists build their own pianos? Does a pilot build his own plane? Why would a recruiting firm build their own recruiting software? It does not make sense, unless the recruiting firm is global with thousands of employees. Even then I would question the wisdom of this decision. Yet there is not one week that has gone by in my 15 years of giving recruiting software demos where I find a firm seriously considering such a decision!

I believe buying the worst recruiting software application is better than building your own even if the custom software does work well and does exactly what you want. Although you will soon find out that it never will.

The worst that can come of building your own recruiting software is that you are actually successful and have it working pretty well. Then the money pit and resource drain starts. Every time computers and/or software evolve to new heights your spiffy recruiting software stays where it was, or you invest in yet another round of upgrades and retrofitting. Better hope those computer geniuses are still around to make the changes or else your new computer genius may say “this is spaghetti code and we need to start all over”. J

So, why do some recruiting firms do it or even consider it? I don’t really know, but here are some of my best guesses from most to least likely.

A successful recruiting firm has a business model that does not quite fit their current software or anything they have looked at. Of all the reasons for rolling your own, this is probably the best. But, it is still wrong. The development will cause lack of focus on recruiting. The long range effects are still just as devastating because the recruiting software monster once created will have to be fed and cared for. Similar to your children coming to you with tears in their eyes for the adorable puppy and you say yes. After about a year, guess who ends up feeding it, walking it and taking the now full grown dog to the vet. Does your custom recruiting software pay its way by contributing more to revenues than other commercial software? I doubt it! A pot of gold does not exist at the end of the custom recruiting software rainbow.

Another reason may be that the recruiting firm is a start up and doesn’t see anything that fits its perceived business model. The watch word here is “perceived”. The firm has no idea how it will actually be functioning a year from now if it survives. Why in the world would you be writing a recruiting tool for a recruiting method that has not proven itself?

And finally the worst reason for rolling your own! The owner or a partner prides him/her self on their own technical prowess and possibly has even written a program or two. I cannot think of a better way to assure failure for either the software or the recruiting company. Ah, the pride of authorship and believing “I can do everything better than anyone”; tsk, tsk glad I never worked with you as a recruiter.

Ok, so what do you do if you have looked and looked and can’t find anything you like but you absolutely need some kind of recruiting software? Find the one that is the closest fit, make it work, stop worrying about technique and get on with the business of recruiting.

Almost all software of any kind at best answers about 80% of what you want to do with it. Here are some tips on selecting recruiting software, taken from our web site at http://www.go4recruitingsoftware.com/.

1. The first step is to have a good idea of how you do, and want to do, your recruiting. If you are already thinking about rolling your own this should be no problem.

2. Decide on the recruiting software before you buy the hardware. So many times I have seen someone buy an expensive piece of computer hardware and then start looking for software to run the business with and find that the choices are limited because of the hardware.

3. Determine the prospects of your vendor being around for you five years from now. Once you have converted or entered your recruiting data into a recruiting system, you are dependent on being able to get at it or at least convert it. If your vendor goes out of business you may have serious problems in getting to your resume database.

4. Determine the software tools that were used to build the recruiting system, i.e. computer language, database engines and other software tools. What you’re looking for is to make sure that your recruiting software is not dependent on some specialized software tool or vendor that may not be able to or may not want to keep up with the rapid changes in the computing industry. For my customer's protection, I like to put my money on Microsoft’s flagship products, i.e. MS WORD, MS ACCESS, EXCEL, OUTLOOK, VISUAL BASIC, C#, SQL SERVER and the latest and greatest Windows operating system.

5. Determine the quality of the product with some bellwether questions; does the product have a demo? Will the demo un-install from your computer? Where and what is the size of the customer support staff? Evaluate the quality of the documentation.

6. Finally perform some simple bench marks relating to the amount of work required to perform basic recruiting tasks. Remember that basic recruiting steps are performed many times a day and the time consumed mounts rapidly if the task is just a few keystrokes or clicks more.
From the point of entry to the system, how long, how many keystrokes and/or clicks does it take me to find a person picked at random based on skills, name, salary and or geography?
How long, how many keystrokes and/or clicks does it take me to get a phone number of a person from various points in the database?

How quickly can I find out the latest conversation with a client or applicant that has just called, while I am performing other tracking tasks?

From any point in the database what steps do I have to perform to search for information? Are my searches restricted to certain areas or can every field that displays or accepts data be queried? When I do search for information and the results are displayed, can the displayed information be changed or updated or is another task or screen required for updating? Is there ownership responsibility for the data entered into the database? Can you tell who entered a note, job order, calendar or resume? What are its emailing capabilities for initial and broadcast emails? How does it get along with MS OUTLOOK?

2007-06-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

Recruiting Software – Effective use of Email

Recruiters cannot be competitive without a good email system. Outlook is a good email system but forget it if you think it is good enough for you to compete as a recruiter for candidates and job orders. Recruiters demand a lot from an email system. Gopher pay's pretty good attention to notes on applicants and clients and that was really important 5 years ago. However, email and the internet has made email activity more important than the manually entered note of a single recruiter.

When a recruiter searches the database for applicants or clients they are reviewing the activity of each individual or company. The content of incoming and out going emails may be more important than the notes entered by an individual recruiter.

So, a recruiting system has a problem. How can it capture all the content between recruiters and their clients and applicants so that all the recruiters and management can see the total activity? Solving this problem can be a disaster for the recruiting database if we as developers are not careful.

The most troublesome solution would be to attach or embed the email system directly into the recruiting database. Can you imagine the power and resources it would take to keep a 10 person recruiting database going when it also included all their emails, regardless of how good the spam filters were! Oh yes, some might see it works, but as an old recruiter actually using something like this I would say forget it! Give me a roll of quarters and a phone book. J

Another impractical solution would be to embed a custom email solution into the recruiting database and not allow any other email methods except through the recruiting database. I say impractical because the system would breed discontent among the recruiters on a daily basis, comparing it to MS Outlook and all that it is capable of. Let’s face it, a recruiting database developer could put 10 of they very best programmers working for 5 years on an email system and still could not come close to the functionality of MS Outlook. More importantly, they could never achieve the acceptance of their system over the common mindset of the PC user that MS Outlook has achieved. If it does not work like MS Outlook then something must be wrong or “it’s not intuitive”.

A third solution would be to provide keys in the recruiting database to the email system of each recruiter. Under this method when a recruiter brings up information on an applicant or client there would be an email control that would either retrieve all the “IN” and “OUT” boxes of all of the recruiters’ email applications. As you could guess, this would be very slow, especially with MS Outlook. MS Outlook is by far the most common email system in use today by recruiters. The recruiting database would have to keep track of each recruiter’s own personal email system for email addresses to the database. Even with Microsoft Exchange this would be almost impossible to keep the database responsive enough for recruiters who are always up against the desire for a very fast response time to their needs.

A fourth solution getting closer to success would be to bring in all the “IN” and “OUT” emails for applicants and clients to the recruiting database and leave the individual recruiter email systems intact. This method requires a conversation between the independent email system and the recruiting system that tells each what the other is doing. It would be tricky but doable. This method still needs to solve three issues that would bring down any recruiting system if they were ignored.

The first issue is all the back and forth replies you see in MS Outlook. Each reply gets longer and more redundant from previous replies. The recruiting database does not need to see the redundancy. It needs only the whole conversation once. If it did carry the conversation like MS Outlook the recruiting database would get very big and slow very fast. The second issue is the question of the email marketing of the recruiting database. Can you imagine the size of the recruiting database if it kept a copy of each email blast to 5,000 people? Not to mention the danger of getting blacklisted. This is a whole other area when working with email within a recruiting system. The third issue is how to handle all the attachments to those emails!

In summary, I think the fourth solution is best but the recruiting software must solve the three issues. I think Gopher has a pretty good solution to those three issues.

2007-03-13T08:29:00.000-07:00

Recruiting Software Support

I think recruiting software deserves a little more attention to support and the help than most software. Many recruiters using commercially developed recruitment software are using it all day long. In fact, they never leave it except for lunch, coffee breaks and naps. Other software applications are come and go like drive by’s. However, even if it is “drive by” software the customer can still have a serious problem that demands fast customer support. I am only trying to point out that continuous use software should have a more in depth and responsive support program. The continuous use customer naturally has more dire problems when the continuous use software is failing vs. “drive by” software.

Several things we consider when looking at recruiting software support are:

How quickly can the customer reach someone?
How much knowledge does the support person have of the recruiting software and of the recruiting industry?
How much empathy does the support person have for the recruiter’s problem?
How much confidence does the recruiter have after the support call?
How much time has elapsed between problem and resolution?
How many people did the recruiter with the problem have to talk to before the problem was resolved?
Is there a quality check initiative in the customer support program?

I am not going to say too much about the above when it applies to both “drive by’s” and “continuous use software” but I will rant and rave about industry knowledge, empathy and confidence.

How quickly can the customer reach someone?

I think a good standard response time is about 4 business hours for the recruiting industry. If the problem is “The recruiting software is down and I am going to lose my family, house and eldest child.” than the response should be immediate. I also think it is a good idea for the recruiting software vendor to “put his/her money where his/her mouth is”. If response is not made within 4 business hours the customer should receive some kind of monetary credit. I do not believe that a recruiter who depends on the recruiting software for his/her livelihood can trust the words without some sort of monetary penalty if the support is not available in time.

Notice that I have not asked you to consider whether or not you get a live person on the phone. This comes up often at our firm. I believe there is a problem with live coverage. Have you ever called your health insurance carrier, phone company, federal government or Dell? Chances are that you may get a live person after much patience and you have pressed all the correct buttons as directed by the prompts. The person you have reached is clueless. He/she can’t help you but may direct you to someone who can. I would much prefer to dial a number and leave a message regarding my problem and have the confidence and comfort that someone will call me back within 4 hours that can actually solve my problem.

How much knowledge does the support person have of the recruiting software and of the recruiting industry?

This is a “biggie” for recruiting software. I absolutely hate calling someone like Dell or EarthLink and getting transferred to someone in India who answers with a robot like voice and gives me scripted answers to scripted questions. I feel that recruiting software problems are more dynamic, complex and derive more from humanity than pre-programmed responses.

I cannot believe that any recruiting software vendor can be proud of, or even claim to have, a support program if the support person has not been thoroughly schooled in the profession of recruiting. Unfortunately, I have to admit that our company can do much better in this area. I am seriously considering have all support people who have contact with recruiting customers spend one month with one of our recruiting customers as a trainee. I just cannot figure out how to absorb the time and money to follow through with this.

How much empathy does the support person have for the recruiter’s problem?

This has happened to all of us. You make the call to get help and you actually get your answer but you are still troubled, confused and you wish you could have talked to someone who had more empathy for your rather human problem.

Recruiters are getting beat up all day by clients, and applicants and other recruiters. When they make a call for help they usually need a shoulder to cry on and sometimes patience because they are angry, frustrated and even scared. Empathy is an absolute must from any customer support person.

How much confidence does the recruiter have after the support call?

Like I said above, supporting a person whose very livelihood depends on the functioning of recruiting software is more than simply answering questions. This person must have confidence in the software. All software has bugs and does not always work the way we wish. The support group has the challenge of helping the recruiter be a better recruiter rather than fix the bug. In fact, if the recruiter walks away happy and with more confidence of our support and the bugs remain unfixed than the support person has done their job.

How much time has elapsed between problem and resolution?

Don’t know, but the customer must know that they are not being ignored or treated from a pre-written script.

How many people did the recruiter with the problem have to talk to before the problem was resolved?

It is really nice to say “you will always get a real person on the phone when you call”. Call me weird but if I have to go through “phone button hell” and then have a real person who “records the incident”, please shoot me!

Is there a quality check initiative the customer support program?

If the recruiting software vendor does not have a continuous program to ask candid questions about “how we are doing” and is willing to publish them then the vendor does not have a good support program.

2007-02-16T09:13:00.000-08:00

Recruiting software – Is it different?

Of course it is! All software is different. But what are the unique characteristics of recruiting software that make it different from MS Outlook, an accounting system, banking software, computer design, graphics design, marketing, etc.?

All of these applications have uniqueness and characteristics that allow them to be defined as a group. What are the characteristics of recruiting software applications that allow them to be identified? Of course, this could be just another sneaky way of asking the question, “What do you look for when selecting recruiting software?”. Every recruiting software vendor has one of those documents including BlackDog Recruiting Software.

But really that is not what this article is about. I am trying to get to higher ground here. I do not want this article to become a document that says “recruiting software must do this and if it doesn’t pick ours because it does”.

All professionals have tools they use to do their job. A surgeon uses a vast array of very special instruments and specialized computers to perform her work. An artist has his brushes and special paint mixes. A carpenter uses saws, ladders, leveling devices, etc. An accountant has accounting systems.

All of these professionals share a common characteristic in that they use a variety of tools to perform their work.

Recruiting software as a tool for a recruiter is unique from the above examples in that it is designed to be the only tool a recruiter will need besides a telephone, and even that is under assault by recruiting software vendors!

Wow! Think about it. Recruiting software just put mankind back 30,000 years where the only tool he used to stay alive was a sharp stone and his brain!

Of course recruiting software systems are not exactly sharp stones, but some are close. J

In all seriousness now, the more that an applicant tracking/executive search/ recruiting software system can do for a recruiter the better the tool. It is an all in one tool because of the characteristics of the recruiting industry.

Most of us recruiting software vendors are driven by incorporating or interfacing any new technologies that help a recruiter into their own software, i.e. phone and video conferencing, PDA’s and video resumes.

Staffing or recruiting software vendors are like the Wal-Mart of the software world, meaning we would like to be the one stop shop for all your recruiting needs by bringing everything a recruiter needs under one roof.

But there is a dilemma for us vendors. The profession of recruiting is, for the most part, a niche oriented business. A recruiter specializes in medical device sales, helicopter pilots, hospital staffing, etc.

Recruiting software has to be more specialized than a contact management system or a CRM system because these tools are too general. Recruiters need more preciseness than this, or they find themselves spending too much time finding the people they need. Consider, for example, the difference between a table saw for a finished carpenter and one for a fine furniture maker. Both tools would get the table made but the one made by the finished carpenter would have taken longer and would not look as good.

The dilemma is how to make recruiting software be an all in one tool for the recruiter and still be specialized enough to serve the unique characteristics of their recruiting niche?

Some recruiting software goes too far and works only for a specific recruiting niche, i.e. nursing, attorneys, etc. For a recruiting software vendor they are too specialized and can’t evolve quickly enough as the environment changes so they become extinct and leave their customers in a very desperate situation.

These systems are just a hair above custom software. I may write a future article about custom software, but generally I think it is a bad idea for any recruiting firm.

2007-01-11T09:13:00.000-08:00

Recruiting Software – Ten worst ways of using

I talk to a lot of recruiters and recruiting firm owners Monday through Friday. I have been on this schedule for almost 20 years now. We talk a lot about recruiting software. As I sit here and reflect upon what I have heard over the years, I try to make sense of all those conversations. I am looking for a nugget of wisdom that I can write about that would be helpful to recruiters.

I am tired of all the sanctimoniousness sound bytes for selecting recruiting software:
• ‘I am the best because … and we have …’
• ‘We have on site support …’
• ‘We are user friendly …’
• ‘We are state of the art ...’
• ‘Our software is totally automatic just turn it on and watch the money roll…’
• ‘All our competitors are stupid and have inferior products …’
• ‘We are easy to use …’

Why not flip this analysis of recruitment software to the other side? How is the recruiting software firm planning to use and implement a recruiting software system once they have made the agonizing purchase? Out of the mouths of customers and potential customers I have heard incredulous strategies that still to this day make me chuckle. I have been told I have ‘dark humor’, along the lines of ‘The Far Side’ material. Perhaps that is just a polite way of saying I have no humor at all. So you won’t hurt my feelings if you think these strategies are more sad than funny.

Here we go with my pick of the 10 most stupid uses of recruiting software tools.

1. “We are going to buy the most expensive recruiter software package available because we believe if you pay top dollar you get the best product. But since we are paying so much we are going to buy only one license and let all 20 recruiters take turns using it.”
2. “We are going to buy some cheap contact management software and install it on each recruiter’s PC. Each recruiter will have their own private database.”
3. “We are going to make a fresh start because the last three recruiter systems we bought did not work out.”
4. “We are going to buy a recruiting system for the recruiters, but we are going to let the sales people either buy something else or continue with their present system.”
5. “We are going to buy recruiting software that we can customize to our own very special way of recruiting.”
6. “We just hired a ‘Super Star big biller’ recruiter who wants us to switch to the recruiting software that he/she is used to using.”
7. “We have purchased some good recruiting software but we only use it for searching resumes.” “We have purchased some good recruiting software but we only use for finding phone numbers.” “We have purchased some good recruiting software but we only use for writing notes.”
8. “We have purchased recruiting software and we are making a lot of the information private for each recruiter or for management eyes only.”
9. “We can’t find any recruiting software that suits our needs so we are going to write our own.”
10. “We want our recruiting software to be able to delete or purge out undesirables.”

Taking turns using the recruiting software.

This is by far the most ridiculous use of recruiting software and is therefore number one on my list. What do the other recruiters do while the one recruiter has the floor? I suppose they are working off of printouts from when they had the computer time. Trust me when I say that recruiting software used like this is more trouble than it is worth. Too much administration and none of the recruiters have up to date information when they are talking to clients and applicants. If I say any more I run the risk of being put in the same bucket as the owner by bothering to make a comment.

Each recruiter has their own recruiting software.

This is close to number one but at least the recruiter’s own desk has access to organized information to applicants and/or clients. It is still pretty bad however because of the overlap, redundancy and the inability of the firm to take advantage of collaboration. Collaboration makes two and two more than four because of the shared knowledge and experiences. The recruiting firm who thinks that recruiters should be treated as independent cells is dead wrong even if the firm is successful. Collaboration would make them more successful.

Making a fresh start because the last recruiting system did not work out.

This is like the tennis player blaming the tennis racquet for losing. Do you remember Billie Jean King playing Bobby Riggs? Maybe not, but Bobby Riggs used to beat guys with a broom. I wouldn’t be surprised if Federer could beat most amateurs with a ping pong paddle.

I am always very hesitant when a recruiting software prospect comes to us complaining that his current recruiting software is no good. I will listen harder if the maker of the software is out of business, quite common, or if they complain about a lack of support. But if they start complaining to the effect that they do not like the way it works and it doesn’t do this and doesn’t do that, then I am scared to death. It is not the software, my dear recruiting friend, it is you! Stop looking for someone to blame and try to gain some introspection.

Separate but equal systems for recruiters and sales.

There is no such thing as separate but equal. History has proved that over a million times. A corporation, partnership or privately held recruiting firm has more than one person for a reason. As a group of recruiters and sales recruiters they are more individually productive than they would be as individuals. It makes absolutely no sense to separate data between clients and applicants and keep recruiters in the dark. It is also terribly redundant and makes it necessary to do many things twice (redundancy, yes?).

Heavy customization of commercial recruiting software.

This locks you into a point in time and you will soon have outdated software with no easy way to take advantage of new technology.

We just hired a ‘Super Star Big Biller’ recruiter and we are going to follow his/her lead on recruiting software.

This is a classic case of “the tail wagging the dog”. If he or she was such a super star why aren’t they out on their own or building a company of their own? I really don’t believe you can employ hired guns in the recruiting business as they are too disruptive. It never works, they leave and you end up worse than you were before, but with a smaller savings account. Sounds like a divorce, doesn’t it?

We only use our recruiting software to search resumes.

All good recruiting software is designed to be a complete system for any recruiter. If a piece of it is doing something you don’t like, then learn to like it! To circumvent what it can do starts a chain of events that just begets more confusion and work. These people, I believe, give rise to the “we need a fresh start syndrome”.

In my opinion, using only a limited portion of recruiting software is like buying a grand piano and then only learning how to play “Mary had a little lamb”, because you are too dumb or lazy or both.

Private information in recruiting software.

If you read the above you already know how I feel about this. This concept can only hurt the recruitment effort. If your recruiting firm succeeds with this policy in place than it is succeeding in spite of privatization, not because of it.

We are writing our own recruiting software.

This way is the same as five, only worse. Now the recruiting firm not only has to pay attention to recruiting but recruiting software. Their biggest issue is how they can keep up with evolving technology. How can they ever hope to keep the same programmers working on the same code they created over the years? You cannot expect programmers/software engineers to be loyal to a small recruiting firm. It is very similar to a doctor trying to be his own physician.

Purge the database of undesirables.

How can a recruiting firm keep another recruiter at the same company from making the same mistake if the database does not have road signs for danger?

This is the end of my nuggets of wisdom.

2006-12-18T08:12:00.000-08:00

Recruiting software, American import or American export?

Corporate America has given us life and has given us death.

The global economic structure is evolving at a fantastic pace. So fast that I believe children growing up will not be able to identify their growing years as ‘do you remember when’, because the social, political and economic fabric will have changed five times before they are 25 years old.

I have always believed that the recruiting industry was an American innovation like the light bulb, but I have to admit that I never really researched it. I suppose a more astute historian can find the beginning of the profession going back to Roman times or further. I also believe that the genesis of the recruiting industry was fostered by the invention of the American corporation. Then along came ‘Bell’ with his telephone. Then came Alan Turing with his “Universal Turing Machine”. Here is an excerpt from the site of Andrew Hodges:

“… So who invented the computer?
There are many different views on which aspects of the modern computer are the most central or critical.
• Some people think that it's the idea of using electronics for calculating — in which case another American pioneer, Atanasoff, should be credited.
• Other people say it's getting a computer actually built and working. In that case it's either the tiny prototype at Manchester, (See this Scrapbook Page) or the EDSAC at Cambridge, England (1949), that deserves greatest attention.
But I would say that in 1945 Alan Turing alone grasped everything that was to change computing completely after that date: above all he understood the universality inherent in the stored-program computer. He knew there could be just one machine for all tasks. He did not do so as an isolated dreamer, but as someone who knew about the practicability of large-scale electronics, with hands-on experience. From experience in code breaking and mathematics he was also vividly aware of the scope of programs that could be run.
The idea of the universal machine was foreign to the world of 1945. Even ten years later, in 1956, the big chief of the electromagnetic relay calculator at Harvard, Howard Aiken, could write:
If it should turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincide with the logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence that I have ever encountered.
But that is exactly how it has turned out. It is amazing, although we now have come to take it for granted. But it follows from the deep principle that Alan Turing saw in 1936: the Universal Turing Machine …”
Then came along Bill Gates and here we are today. I’m writing this article for the web to help promote our recruiting software product, “Gopher for recruiters”.

I cannot say that I am a die hard American patriot who lives and breathes each day pontificating on the great American ideals and principles of freedom. But I do love my country and I am loyal to the core.

But lately, in the autumn of my years, I am being haunted by recurring dreams and thoughts. Call it senility if you will. I feel like a Roman citizen, a Greek soldier or an Aztec engineer who suddenly is aware that all things come to an end and new things take their place, good or bad but forward they must go. My way of life as an American citizen is also in the autumn of its years.

To my great surprise it is not the Hitlers of the world that are bringing about our destruction. Lo and behold, we are clones of the Romans! We destroyed ourselves with the greed and corruption of the absolutely un-patriotic American invention - the “American Corporation”. The same vehicle that got us here has turned on its master and is devouring us.

An American corporation is a single minded entity whose only goal is profits. Oh you will hear the PR and read about their great humanitarian contributions, but if there are any contributions, it is only a strategy for higher profits.

The American corporation is a mindless animal that will drive itself and we Americans to extinction by exhausting its own food supply to the point where the food can’t be replenished. It will then evolve into something else, to the good or to the bad I do not know.

Finally, on to my point. I think almost everyone will agree that the wellspring of computer software was born in America and was fueled from the American corporations’ drive for profits. A tremendous stride forward for the world. People from all countries, some without a roof over their heads and not knowing where their next meal will come from but with a cell phone in their hands.

But now the American corporation has turned on its master. For profit alone, it exports the work that creates the new fabric of our world, computer software! A computer is nothing but a lump of plastic and metal with software to bring it to life. A cell phone is nothing more than a tin can tied to a string without the computer software burned into its memory chip.

The result of this exportation is not only the loss of American jobs but the decay of our educational system. We used to rank the highest in percentage of population having higher education. No more, now it’s third at best. Today we can’t even defend ourselves in a war without dependence on other countries to supply materials and computer software. We are in a downward spiral and the corporate monster has such a strangle hold on our American political system that I think America can see itself falling from a tall building but there is little to do but wait for the impact.

So what should I do with this vision of doom and gloom? Not much. A little defiance if you will for my own sanity and feeling of self worth. I often think of James Fenimore Cooper’s book “The Last of the Mohicans”. Who will be the American Hawkeye?

Our small privately held corporation will never export the labor to create our recruiting software products. Our customers will never make a support call and get routed to another country and speak to someone who barely understands English, who, like an android, is reading from a scripted diagnostic language. Complicated machinery like recruiting software must be supported by people who have a feeling for the software and what and why it is doing what it does. I think recruiting software has to be supported by an organization that has an extremely deep understanding of what the American recruiting industry is all about.

I know I cannot make a speck of a difference to the American path. But, at least I will go down fighting with the satisfaction that I did my best to prevent the selling of America. I am ashamed to have laughed at Ross Perot and his big “whoosh” of American technology and jobs. I do not buy products if I know the support will come from an offshore person who is no more than a robot speaking in poor English.

Corporate America has given us life and has given us death. I look into the
mirror and see the horror, for it is I!

2006-11-20T09:55:00.000-08:00

Recruiting web sites: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Most recruiting firms do not have a clue as to what to do with their web site. What I most often see is their extreme attention to its appearance. A professional look is the common theme. Yes, they are correct in that it does have to be professional; however, it also must provide value to the visitor. There has to be a reason the visitor is happy that they have landed there, because they have gained something. The visitor does not just want to see pages of how good you are. When candidates visit, they need to see something that will help them in their job search and when clients visit, they need to see something that will help them in their candidate search. A few recruitment firms do a decent job of offering available positions for the candidates to review. Almost none offer anything for the client in the way of available applicants. Very few offer any supporting tools or informative material to help find and hire quality candidates. To be honest with you, I think most recruiting firms think of their web sites as something closely related to the sign they put on the front door of their office.

Perhaps I am being a little too harsh but a lot of my company’s time is spent connecting our recruiting software to a client’s web site and I am often thinking that these customers just don’t get it. I wrote an article a few months ago, “Recruiting on the Internet and the Future of Recruiting Software”. This article does point out what future recruiting web sites will be like just to be competitive.

“These web sites of the future will not simply be job boards like Monster, Career Builder or Dice. These exchanges will be run and operated by people with the knowledge of very specialized skills. The biggest change I see coming however is the ability of recruiters to market and the means with which they market to their customers and candidates.”

So, I finally get to my point. Recruiting firm web sites must be professional, “The Good”. Recruiting firm web sites must offer value to the visitor, right now mostly “The Bad”. Now on to “The Ugly”, recruiting firm web sites have to be found by the millions and soon to be billions of people using search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo to find stuff like applicants and new jobs. Recruiting firms do not have a clue as to how to get ranked on the first page of Google when an applicant is searching for a position in their profession. Let’s face it, it doesn’t matter how great your web site looks or how many cool things you offer the visitor if it can’t be found. If the web site cannot be found, it is totally and utterly useless. Some recruiting firms still think they need to personally direct their clients and applicants to their web sites and then provide some functionality. Wrong and very wrong! If you have to direct applicants and clients to your web site like a guide leading a blind person then you’re missing the point of having a web site. You need to be found by the people who are looking and who are unknown to you!

If you go to Google and search for “recruiting software” you will find that our company “BlackDog Recruiting Software” ranks in the top five on the first page under the natural search rankings. Don’t confuse this with the paid for ads that appear on this page. People pay far more attention to the natural selections than the paid for ads. How did we get there and how do we stay there year after year? Here is a brief list of do’s and don’ts for good search engine ranking on the words you choose as key words.

• Don’t be so quick to turn this responsibility over to a Search Engine Optimizer, (SEO), who guarantees you number 1 ranking on Google. There are plenty of these companies out there and some are very good. However, most are very bad. The problem is that you won’t know until it is too late and your site is blacklisted or your site is held captive by this SEO with pages that are under the control of the SEO.
• Common sense usually dictates if you think it through. Google has a lot of useful information on how to produce a good web site that will rank well.
• Figure out the key words that your clients and applicants would use when they search for applicants and jobs. Use some of the Google tools to test these keywords and the frequency they are used. You may have to go off the beaten path for typical search words. Typically you look for high numbers. However, many recruiting firms are niche oriented to a specific skill or profession. So, high numbers on certain search terms may not even show up on the radar of Google but they can be extremely productive for the recruiting firm. Test the words out by running them in Google, MSN and Yahoo and see who comes up on the 1st page. Don’t get carried away with too many search words or phrases. You should concentrate on five to seven search words or phrases because you can’t use them all with any degree of density on your web site.
• Only focus on Google, Yahoo and MSN. No other search engines matter! Never get lured into those ads talking about getting you listed in thousands of search engines.
• Pay very close attention to your Title tag, your Keyword tag and your H1 heading tag on all your web pages, making sure that your keywords are used and in the proper density and placement.
• Don’t have less than 600 words on any page. Graphics are great but Search Engine Spiders have no appreciation for good art.
• Have a ton of content and pages on your web site. Don’t even think you will have a top ranked web site with about 20 pages. You need at least 50 pages.
• The pages must not grow stale; they must frequently change in some way with new and fresh content. Look into RSS feeds.
• Have outgoing links to web sites ranked high for your key words.
• Don’t use frames.
• Check the site constantly.
• Find some good software that helps you design a proper page that Google, Yahoo and MSN likes.
• Use Google site maps.
• Write articles for your recruiting niche and get them published.
• Create a blog related to your web site and post to it often.
• Don’t pay too much attention to sneaky tricks to get high ranking. They will eventually get you blacklisted.

That is it folks. Follow these basic rules and you will have a web site that will drive your revenue and billings to the top of the recruiting world.

2006-10-20T05:42:00.000-07:00

Recruiting software for greenhorns

I believe many recruitment systems being developed today make two important incorrect assumptions.

1) The developers of the recruiting software believe they know what the recruiting process should be either because of extensive analysis or extensive personal experience.
2) The recruiters who will use their recruitment software are experienced recruiters.

There are few things in this world that where absolutes can be applied. I have been a recruiter for almost 20 years. I have been writing recruiting software for 30 years. I have talked to thousand and thousands of recruiters and recruiting firms and gave demos on countless numbers of techniques and recruiting processes. I have learned at least one absolute.

No two recruiters recruit the same way!

I believe most recruitment systems are flawed with the concept that recruiting is a predicable process and there designs reflect their predictions. I believe a recruitment system more than anything else must be designed with the idea that the recruiter using the system will use it in ways never thought of. Believe me I see it every day.

Therefore good recruiting software is not about features that assume a recruiting technique is valid and therefore the feature is cool. Good recruiting software is about the ability to be molded around good recruiter’s successful techniques. It is about making the recruiter’s techniques better not changing them!

The second point of this article is about the headline “Recruiting software for Greenhorns”. The recruiting industry is a volatile fast paced industry. Recruiting firms come and go faster than “.com” business’s. Most successful recruiting firms have at there core, a method of bringing in fresh faces as recruiters. Most of these “greenhorns” don’t make it as recruiters and end up moving on or end up in some kind of support role for recruiter’s i.e. Researchers, sourcers, etc...

So we come to the 2nd flaw of most recruiting system, the recruiting software developers assume that the person using the system knows what they are doing! The reality is that very major portions of the people using recruiting systems are “Greenhorn recruiters”. Put this together with above the recruiting software programmer that thinks they know what recruiting is all about and you have the classic case of the “Blind leading the blind”.

If you know, as recruiting software developer, that a fast majority of your customers don’t have a clue as to what they should be doing as a recruiter then why don’t you write to this audience?

Recruiting software should be hard wired to the heartbeats recruiting industry. Information and recruiting training should be immersed into the software itself. The recruiting firm should be able to adjust and add to its training of greenhorns with the recruiting system. If the recruiting software is good recruiting training and the process of recruiting should be so blended that you cannot see the differences between the two processes.

Ask yourself can the recruiter be advised on some of these topics and more with the recruiting software:

Job Orders: Better, Faster, Smarter
The Recruiter/Telephone Connection
Recruiting Scripts
Are you retainer-ready?
Can I get that in writing?Resume Makeovers: Should You Even Bother?
Can Cold-Calling Be Taught?

How to Avoid a Candidate Accepting a Counteroffer Niche craft: 9 Steps to Refining or Selecting a Niche
How to Improve Interviewing Accuracy by 50 to 100 Percent
A Smart Way to Gain Candidate Referrals Getting Around the Gatekeeper
Latest recruiting news

If the recruiting software does not address the needs of the “greenhorn recruiter” find one that does.

2006-09-19T09:05:00.000-07:00

Recruiters have a tough job, managing them is even tougher! I see it as two problems: How do you identify the process to manage? How do you monitor for the good and the bad in the process?

After 25 years in the business of recruitment and recruitment software, I have never have seen two recruiting firms with the same recruitment process. For that matter, recruiters in the same recruiting firm usually have different techniques and styles.

Let’s go back to the first problem. How do you identify a recruiting process? The first indicator is pretty obvious. Are placements being made? If placements are being made are they enough to sustain growth or stay in business? I think it is a reasonably safe assumption that these are the bottom line indicators for a successful recruiting firm. Now all you need to do is back up from the bottom and look for more indicators.

What has to happen before a placement? Answer: an offer by an employer and an acceptance by an applicant. There are a few milestones here. We can monitor offers and acceptances. I think a traditional sales word would be “closes”. If your firm is getting a ton of offers but very few acceptances, this is certainly a show stopper. Something in your management process should show the ideal offer to acceptance ratio for your firm and your recruiting niche. The ratio will vary depending on your niche and the recruiting style.

Moving to the other side, how many offers are you getting? Do you know about how many you should be getting in any given period, one month, one quarter, one year? Do you know if a particular position is getting more action than other positions? Do you know why? Do you know if a particular industry is getting more action, a particular client? Do you know which client generates the most offers? Do you know which person in a client company generates the most offers? Do you know which recruiter is generating the most offers?

Normally I would say offers translate into placements. Does the recruiting firm have a good offer to placement ratio? What is a good offer to placement ratio? Normally anyone with half a brain would say 100%. But 100% may not be as good as you would think. Perhaps the firm is culling too much. Culling could be from the clients. If you cull from your client prospects too much and only take the locked slam dunk orders could you open the gates a bit and take a few marginal orders and get a lower offer to placement ration but raise the number of placements made?

On the applicant side the same thing applies. If every one of your candidates accepts every offer you get for them perhaps you should take a look at your fallout ration after the start dates. Could I get more placements if I got more offers but with a lower percentage of acceptances?

Ok lets move on up again. Are we getting enough offers? How many offers per month, per quarter or per year do we need to hit our projected revenue targets? Do we have a projected revenue target? This question can break down along the same lines as above, by industry, by position type, by client and by recruiter.

If we are not getting enough offers, how to get more? More interviews, more job orders, more applicants, more phone calls or more contacts? Should we be contacting more clients or more applicants? How much time is being spent finding candidates? How much time is being spent finding job orders? How much time is being spent on client prospects? Are we spending any time on applicant prospects? A candidate prospect is a candidate who we contact just to establish goodwill and trust not necessarily for an immediate position. Are we making enough contacts either via phone, email or conferences or association functions? How much is enough?

So now we know what questions to ask to manage the recruiting process. How do we get the answers? Now I get to my punch line and the intent of this article. The answers should be available in your recruiting software. If these answers are not available then find recruiting software that will give you these answers. Also make sure that the cure is not worse than the disease. By that I mean make sure that the effort to get management information from your recruitment system does not take such an effort that it actually impedes the recruitment process.

One of the first rules of good recruiting software is that information to manage the recruiting process must be available on an Ad Hoc basis. As you can see from above there are literally hundreds of variables that can be reviewed to help mange the recruiting process. It would be ridiculous to have a single report or set of reports that identified all these indicators. Therefore, the process of answering these questions must be as dynamic and creative as the manager asking the question.

The best way to ensure good management information from your recruitment system is to make sure the system itself is easy to use and that any recruitment task to be performed is made easier by using the recruitment system. I like to call this concept the “natural recruiting process”. If the recruiters use the recruitment system for finding candidates, marketing to clients, scheduling their follow ups, sending resumes and actually communication with other recruiters then you have software that gathers management information naturally.

If you have a system that doesn’t quite do all the steps, i.e. mass emailing or depends on the Outlook calendar for scheduling interviews or follow ups, then you have an unnatural process where some of the management information is missing in the recruitment software. Or, even worse, the recruitment software is so labor intensive on some tasks that the recruiters find easier ways to get the job done without using the recruitment system.

So if you have you have an easy to use, all encompassing recruitment software system that can answer any Ad Hoc question easily you are halfway there. Now you need a set of reports that hit the high points of the key variables that are important to the success of your recruitment firm. Where do you get these reports, from the vendor of your software? Perhaps, but most vendors don’t know your particular brand of recruiting. Reports supplied by recruitment software vendors are too generic for an industry that is so specialized to a process and a recruiting niche. Also the variable you need to see today may not be the one you need next month and the report must be able to change accordingly.
The bottom line is that the recruitment firm needs a good, easy to use tool to prepare and change their own reports to suit the needs of the given moment. The reporting tool must not depend on technical expertise but on recruiting expertise.

2006-08-16T15:09:00.000-07:00

Recruiting Software Auto Matching

Recruiters need flexibility for software auto matching applicants to clients. However the recruiting software database must contain complete and accurate information on applicants and positions for auto matching to work.

Before we can begin to discuss recruiting software auto-matching, I think it best to define two types of contingency recruitment.

One camp of successful recruiters relies on the ability to start from ‘ground zero’. This recruiting model follows the method taught to me by my mentor and the basics of that model have stayed with me for 25 years. When I think about it, it may be a part of my foundation stones when I write code for our recruitment software application. By the way, my mentor was a very successful recruiter. He would say to me at least once a week, “You know when you can rightfully call yourself a recruiter when you can take a phone book and roll of dimes, go to a pay phone and find the person your client has asked you to find”.

I am not sure if that holds in today’s world of the internet and globalization of the workforce. But I do know that my mentor could still find people with a phone and phone book. The only thing that may change would be to substitute the roll of dimes for a roll of quarters and perhaps give him a laptop.

The other camp of successful recruiters relies more on an established network of contacts in a specific field or profession. These recruiters spend most of their time taking care of their ‘flock of candidates’. They are always adding quality people and dropping off the ones that turn out to be average or below average. Remember, recruiters are not paid handsome commissions to produce the ‘average’ professional.

Auto matching is a tool more for the recruiter who starts from scratch. But as I write this article it comes to me that auto matching is useful in another recruitment model. Some recruiters fill professional positions that are a ‘plug-in’ for the business process. Don’t get me wrong, these individuals are still highly skilled professionals. It is just that their skills are so precisely adapted to a particular function and they are almost interchangeable. Nurses, teachers, airline pilots fit this definition. Most professional nurses, teachers and pilots will probably retire as a nurse, teacher or pilot.

When all is said and done auto matching is a good tool for recruiters in some situations but best be left unused in others. Now that we have somewhat defined the area for the auto matching tool we can describe how it should work. I think auto matching first deals with the fundamental principal of good recruiting, which is to have a good description of the position you are trying to fill. You must also know the personality of the client. If you have a complete, well written job order and your recruiting software database contains accurate information on clients and candidates, good auto matching software should work well when matching candidates to the position. If your recruiting software database contains missing or inaccurate information on clients and applicants then your auto matching software will not work well no matter how good it is.

In order that I may pontificate on auto matching I must make a couple of assumptions.

• The recruiter relies on having access to large bodies of applicants and their resumes.
• The job description contains a great deal of information and details about the position and the skills and qualifications of the person needed to fill it.

Ok, now we are ready to begin as we sit in front of a computer staring at the source code. First and foremost the program must be flexible. It must have the ability to be tweaked and tuned by the recruiter for the particular recruiter, recruiting model and position sought. In other words, auto matching must have many options to change the matching algorithm by changing matching factors and the weight or importance of each factor. Here is a list of matching factors scheduled for use in our recruiting software.

Matching Factors
• Salary
• Location
• Job title
• Years of experience
• Keywords and phrases • Education
• Years in one position and years in one company
• History of companies worked for
• Age
• Style of company
• Budget responsibility
• Number of people responsible for
• Certifications
• Publications
• Memberships
• Accomplishments
• Year of last degree
• Rate of promotion and salary increase

Things you can do with matching factors
• Establish a rank factor or eliminate the factor from the algorithm.
• Establish a plus or minus variance for any or all factors.
• Establish an overall score and rank accordingly.
• Compute keyword density.

I am sure anyone reading this article can think of other factors and weights. The ability of an auto matching feature to add, change and delete factors and weights is critical to a good auto matching feature. I would take it one step further and allow the recruiter some control over how these factors should be identified.

2006-07-22T09:42:00.000-07:00

We have started to upgrade our interface to MS OUTLOOK in our recruiting software. OUTLOOK is has a tremendous usage. Most executive search recruiters evaluating recruiting software are already using OUTLOOK.

Can OUTLOOK be used as a total solution for a recruiter?

No, it cannot. But many recruiter prospects come to us with this challenge. They are heavy users of OUTLOOK but they have exhausted the limits of OUTLOOK as a recruiting tool. However they want to continue using some OUTLOOK features. The challenge for recruiting software is provide the recruiter with recruitment software that blends the use of OUTLOOK with their recruiting software. The real challenge for us vendors is some tasks performed by OUTLOOK are best done by a recruiting system whose primary focus is Applicants/Candidates and Clients.

So we have a customer who definitely needs more recruiting software power. However they are desperately hanging on to features in OUTLOOK. They want to continue using them. They are comfortable with them. Change is always traumatic and downtime can be expected. Downtime for a recruiter can be catastrophic.

So what should a recruiting software vendor do when they introduce their product to a customer who is a heavy OUTLOOK user? Should we insist that the customer stop using OUTLOOK start using our product for tasks they were performing in OUTLOOK? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Good recruiting/staffing software needs to adapt into an OUTLOOK environment and the recruiter must be able to continue sometimes less effective steps than if they were to abandon OUTLOOK all together. Efficiency is not necessarily the final word for a recruiter to be successful. Sometimes we as vendors lose track of our goals and make efficiency and features into deities they don’t deserve. If a good recruiter is comfortable, happy and is doing a good job, is there any reason to turn his or her life upside down in the hopes that after the ravages of change they will come out better for it. I don’t think so. Many recruiting companies loose good recruiters this way.

So I think good recruiting software has to provide options where OUTLOOK can be used or not used without affecting the recruiting system. Data must flow freely between the two systems. The recruiter must be allowed to continue to perform certain tasks that are more comfortable in OUTLOOK. HOWEVER, NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF THE RECRUITING SYSTEM!

What makes OUTLOOK so useful but not completely a recruiting system? The biggest difference is OUTLOOK is targeted for its user and all his or her activities, email, contacts and notes. But it is the view of a single user. Recruiting software is primarily geared for collaboration and the compiling and organizing of information on clients and applicants. OUTLOOK could care less if someone in the contact is an applicant or client. Outlook’s method of storing information as notes, contacts and even resumes does not lend itself to the one critical need of a recruiter, searching for candidates or clients that have a particular work history or job need that demand certain skills. OUTLOOK does not lend itself very will to bringing a job order or requisition together as a complete project. The pieces candidates, notes, references and interviews have to be manually put together. A recruiting system brings this information together as the natural course of filling a position. When you look up a candidate in a recruiting system you generally know all about them i.e., all contacts, notes, resume, interviews, salary, work history etc... When you look up a client it is generally the same thing, all contacts, and plans for contact, positions filled and progress on assignments.

OUTLOOK is not designed for this natural gathering as a recruiter works, so using OUTLOOK alone as recruiter eventually bogs the recruiter down as the number of applicants and clients increase.

Good recruiting software should not bog down as the numbers of clients and applicants increase.

How do we keep recruiters happy using our recruitment software and still not get bogged down using all the neat features in OUTLOOK? Not very easy, but are some key points that recruiting software must be able to do with OUTLOOK.

• Since OUTLOOK has a built in PDA interface the recruiting software should have an exporting and importing feature to OUTLOOK that is expressly designed for PDA use. It makes no sense to for the recruiting software to have a separate PDA interface.

• Recruitment software should have it’s own calendar system independent of OUTLOOK. BUT the two calendars must be able to talk to each other. If an entry is made in the OUTLOOK calendar there must be an option to post to the recruiting calendar and vice versa. Implementing a Calendar interface to OUTLOOK is full of land minds and can easily lead to an unwieldy tasks imposed on the recruiter.

• A recruiters notes are always about an individual either a client or applicant. OUTLOOK notes don’t necessarily attach a note to a client or applicant and I think this is where the OUTLOOK note system should be customized to identify people. I think notes should go only one way to the recruiting system notes. Porting notes from the recruiting system to OUTLOOK notes makes no sense.

• Emails of applicants and clients should definitely be available in the recruiting system. We are still undecided if they should be redundant residing in both the “pst” file and the recruiting software. What is definite is a good filtering interface so the recruiting system only accesses emails of clients and applicants.

• Batch emailing to clients and applicants is a must for recruiting software if it is going to have any CRM capabilities. OUTLOOK makes it tough to batch email because of its security features.

• Outlook’s contacts can either be expected to be all clients and applicants or have an identifier that says that they are not either and therefore not part of the recruiting system.

Interfacing to OUTLOOK is a tough job, especially since it is constantly changing. But bottom line I believe recruiting software can be judged by its interface to OUTLOOK.

2006-07-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

Recruiting Software VS CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

What is CRM? If I buy CRM software will I be a better recruiter?
Should recruiting software have CRM features? Do recruiting software vendors include CRM in their product?

I think CRM is a lot of smoke created by some very good marketing people who could sell ice to Eskimos.

A common definition for CRM is “The process of using information to find, secure and keep customers. The people, events, and questions associated with marketing, sales, and service”. Yikes! I thought that is what recruiting is?

Why am I on such a soap box? Because I talk to about 50 different recruiters and recruitment firm owners a week and every once in a while I get asked does this software contain CRM. A few years back when the question was asked I was at a loss for words. I had no idea what they were talking about. I was terribly concerned that after 25 years in the recruiting industry putting in 10 hours a day seven days a week I had completely missed something and an entire process went right over my head.

So I went to work reading and studying everything I could find on CRM and came to the conclusion that CRM and recruiting software are one and the same. If your recruiting software does not have the characteristics defined by CRM then you do not have recruiting software.

First of all, who are the customers of an executive recruiter? Candidates and clients are! As any recruiter knows the product of a recruiter is also the customer, the candidate, one unique characteristic of the recruiting industry.

Let’s go back to that CRM definition above. “The process of using information to find, secure and keep customers”. Your recruiting software must be used to find and track candidates and clients. Once found the software has to keep them available to you through periodic contact.

Next, “The people, events and questions associated with marketing, sales and service”. Ok, if your recruiting software cannot help you market to different demographics of clients and candidates then why are you using it? What are you using to market to clients and candidates? Do you have a separate system for this? Do you have a separate database for marketing to clients, a separate database for marketing to candidates? Do candidates sometimes become clients? Do clients sometimes become candidates? Is candidate John Smith repeated in the client Database and then again in a separate marketing system? How silly these questions are! If you answer yes to any of the above I suggest you reconsider your whole approach to recruiting.

And if you have this separation how in the world are you ever going to keep track of the events and questions? Perhaps if they are all separate I can sell you business idiot consolidation software that will pull all these desperate systems together for you.J

So I will answer the leading questions. If I buy CRM software will I be a better recruiter? No, because you’re an idiot for having recruiting software that is not also CRM. Should recruiting software have CRM features? Of course, CRM and recruiting software are one and the same thing. Do recruiting software vendors include CRM in their product? Yes, if they don’t they are not a recruiting software vendor.

2006-06-12T11:23:00.000-07:00

To me the critical part of a recruiting system is the calendar, day-timer, tickler or daily planner. Microsoft’s Outlook calendar has had an unbelievable impact on anyone using a computer for their daily work. Is there anyone who does not use a PC in his or her office environment? Therefore, I believe it is a must for any recruiting system to have a very strong interface to Outlook’s calendar. I believe the interface should work both to the recruitment system and from the recruitment system.

The primary challenge for me is security and privacy for the individual and protection from overwhelming information that impedes the recruiter’s job rather than enhances the recruitment process.

My experiences as a recruiter taught me if there were more than 20 activities on my calendar for any one-day I was out of control and would just spin. So, as soon as you plug yourself into that Outlook calendar it is like plugging yourself into the Hoover Dam. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for because you may get it J.
The objective is to provide an easy two way street between Outlook and the recruitment system but not overwhelm the recruitment system with information from a single person’s Outlook because the recruiting system is multi-user and shared by all.

2006-05-09T10:39:00.000-07:00

I have been working with Google’s Adsense for one of our web sites. It is one of the easier things to do when embracing Google’s marketing strategies. A curious discussion however has come up amongst the staff at BlackDog. Have you ever been working with or known somebody for many years and then one day get shocked that you and the other person have a wide difference of opinion on a subject?

The point was brought up that the Adsense ads sometimes are from our competitors! I can filter out competitor ads if I want, but do not. Here is the point were I am shocked; I am not sure if I am shocked at the Gopher staff or myself?

I have always believed that it is wrong to deny you have good competition when talking to potential customers. In fact, I get the question asked of me often during demos. I always provide the names of the companies who I think make up our top five to eight competitors. I never say anything bad about them; in fact, I say they are all very good.

The recruiting profession is very diverse. One recruiting software product may be a better choice for one recruiting firm because of their business model. My only advice on the subject when asked is to look at track record, reliability and try to look deeper into the demo of a product and envision the practicality of the features. I believe too many people are drawn to gimmicks only to put them aside after they get bored with them. So the question always is, is it a gimmick or a feature?

We all have been on the other side of a sales situation where we are considering buying something and the question of competitors comes up. The salesperson who draws a complete blank on the subject has always turned me off. To me, this is dishonest. Why does this salesperson fear the competition so much that he/she refuses to recognize that competition exists? Why would I work 20 years to produce a product that could not stand up to good competiton?

Oh yes, every time one of our site visitors clicks one of our competitor’s ads we get paid by Google. I like it when Google pays me and I make money from the competition.

2006-04-26T19:01:00.000-07:00

We have begun development of the 2006 Gopher. I think I have some good ideas that will help our customers be more successful, but you never know for sure. Some will embrace the changes. Some will ignore the changes. Some will not want to be bothered. Some will hate them. I give about 15 demos a week and have a pretty good idea of what changes in Gopher will do the most good for a recruiter. But, again, it is my opinion as well as the Gopher staff who have been listening to our customers every day.

The decision process of what to add and what to change got me thinking about recruiting software in general. The process prompted me to write and publish an article “How Important is Recruiting Software in Determining the Success of an Executive Search or Staffing Firm”? The article describes my experiences in recruiting and writing recruiting software. It supports my conclusion that recruiting software is not as important as I or anyone else might think.

We begin writing the new Gopher and I will really get wrapped up in the totally cool work we are doing. But I will always get pulled back or haunted with the thought; does this new feature really help a recruiter? Am I simply creating a new toy to amuse myself? Worse, is it just a new toy for the recruiter to keep from getting bored?

2006-03-14T13:40:00.000-08:00

I am back from a little vacation and we need to finish work on the next release of Gopher. I have put about three months of work into revising one of our web sites, www.go4recruitingsoftware.com. The intent of the revision was to go completely in the opposite direction of our other active site, www.resume-software.com. To me, www.resume-software.com is the typical ‘in your face’ web site promoting recruiting software.

With www.go4recruitingsoftware.com, I threw out all the books and the thousands of dollars we have paid to marketing consultants, went with my instincts and tried to follow the advice from the current leader in marketing, Google.

Google’s message over and over again is ‘… offer your audience something of real value and they will come’.

So, I wrote 60 pages of what I consider to be valuable content for anyone in the recruiting business. The site map will give you the complete picture of the site. You will notice right away that the site is very plain. I did not want any glitz or clever animation screaming at visitors to ‘try this, go here’.

My vacation took me to Jamaica. My wife wanted to see the real Jamaica so we went to Ocho Rios for a few hours not knowing it was a stop for the cruise ships. Our guide advised us to go to the city’s flea market. The market covered about 4 acres of space. We walked inside and were immediately pounced upon by every trinket maker in the world. We walked in a small semi circle hoping to find a way out. This took about 10 minutes. But in that short time we must have been called to about 50 times from vendors selling their wares. We finally escaped into the fresh air. Then it hit me! This is what Google has been talking about! The internet is full of vendors screaming at you to come over here and take a look at what a great trinket they have for you!

It took me almost three months of research to find and identify material, which would be useful to recruiters. I have scheduled weekly updates to the site so the information won’t get stale or out of date.

I believe the biggest value the site offers to recruiters is the importance put on marketing rather than a software product like Gopher. I believe too much emphasis is put on features and search tools. Gopher’s emphasis in the past has been on ease of use, simplicity and making the use of Gopher flow naturally for the recruiter. The direction is going to change to emphasize marketing. Let me drive home the point with examples of 3 of the most successful technology companies in the last 50 years. The first one to come along to teach us something about marketing was IBM. This was back in the days when I was an Operation Manager responsible for the ‘iron’. I knew there were better computers than IBM but IBM’s marketing was so good at getting market share that I would be a fool to invest in anything else. I would lose staff and eventually lose my job.

Then along came Microsoft. They had the worst OS you could imagine but that did not stop them from dominating the computer market and changing the face of computer technology forever. The marketing came first, the technology followed.

Now you have Google! Great marketing but this time the product is different in that, unlike Microsoft and IBM, the product is good too!

I also tried to add value to the site by providing a live example of how Gopher can import any resume. I felt actually showing the product was better than talking about how great it was and letting the visitor see for themselves without being bothered by some vendor hawking their wares. Another addition to the site is recruiting tips. However, I am taking the recruiting tips in a new direction. I am opening it to our customer base for submission and connecting the tips directly to our product. Gopher’s menu system will be directly linked to the web pages for recruiting tips and advice. We already have this feature in Gopher but it is hard coded into the software. The next release will contain links to the web pages making the recruiting tips more fluid and dynamic like the internet itself.
The resume parsing and dynamically linked recruiting tips will be topics for future blog posts.

2006-02-18T18:13:00.000-08:00

WOW! I’ve put 25 years in this business which seems to evolve overnight. This is my first Blog, my first post, as the architect of Gopher for recruiters. Will this blog help me produce a better product? Will it help me market our product by attracting more links to our web site? We will see.

Here are the thoughts that are with me daily as President of BlackDog Recruiting Software. What are the recruiting tools of the future? Where is this recruiting industry going? I wish I had the clarity of vision to see and make perfect decisions to improve our product. We are a small company serving the very small industry of contingency and retained recruiters. Spending six months worth of resources in the wrong direction can be a disaster.

Deployment model

Should we go entirely web based and leave the private network behind? Is that where the entire computer industry is headed? How can the obvious vulnerability of such a model be protected? Logging in and getting ‘page not found’ can spell disaster for a three person recruiting company. I think I am going to stay with both models, the private network and two versions of the Web model. One web model is ASP based so that we can support the total computer needs of a recruiting firm, not just their recruiting software. The second model will be totally web based; we will support Gopher and let the recruiting firm take care of their other computer needs.

Web sites for recruiting firms

Does having a web site help a recruiting firm attract and find the people they need to fill positions for clients? I think so, but for the past 5 years this area has hardly been used by contingency recruiters. Retained search firms only use it as a marketing tool. We have provided a web interface for 5 years. What we thought was cool has morphed into something else! So because of the increased interest in productive web sites for recruiters, we are re-writing the interface for more recruiter control and more options to edit the material presented. The way I see it there are 3 models:

1) A place to direct a candidate to so that the recruiter can gather information from the candidate.
2) A marketing and research tool for candidates to go to so the recruiter can find them quicker.
3) A job board type model so the client and candidate can get together on their own without much work by the recruiting firm. The candidates and clients would also have the ability to edit their own materials.

We are working on producing all three. I think the model with the most potential to be profitable for the recruiting firm is the second one, where candidates find the recruiting firm. Recruiting is a niche-based business. If the firm can identify the keywords that candidates use to find recruiting firms or companies specializing in their expertise, than the web site has the opportunity of ranking high on searches for those keywords and will be found by more candidates. The biggest challenges are either teaching or providing the expertise in web design so that the site ranks high in search engines. Everyone knows search engines are the beasts driving the growth of the internet and Google is the 500-pound gorilla.

PDA’s

The main purpose of a personal digital assistant (PDA) is to act as an electronic organizer or day planner that is portable, easy to use and capable of sharing information with your PC. It's supposed to be an extension of the PC, not a replacement. Do they help a recruiter become a better, more productive recruiter? I think in some cases they do but in other cases they are just gadgets for the recruiter to play with and impress friends or clients.

It is a good thing if the PDA impresses the clients. I think they are good for recruiters who spend a lot of time out of the office either traveling and visiting client sites or traveling between recruiting offices. In those cases though, I always ask myself, where is their laptop?

In any case we are building an interface of our recruiting software, BlackDog, to the Blackberry PDA. I like the name synergy:)) I am also thinking of using the feature as a marketing tool by advertising a free Blackberry already built with an interface to the Gopher recruiting software for customers who buy three or more Gopher licenses. ‘Buy a BlackDog get a Blackberry’.

Email

Email is a big topic and big problem for BlackDog Recruiting Software.

We have two email systems in Gopher, one that is internal to Gopher and one that is interfaced to MS Outlook. Some venders build an interface from Outlook to their product, but there is a heavy price of having two applications and the bloat hit you have to protect against because of the tremendous amount of email that recruiters need. We are going the route of staying in one product, our Gopher. The emails to and from any candidates and clients have to be accessible quickly from any user and we can’t depend on an exchange server, as it is too complicated and too difficult to support. We have to build a completely seamless interface from our calendar to the Outlook calendar because the Outlook calendar is used to communicate to non-Gopher users. If they only have Gopher users in their calendar system than we want them to use only the calendar in Gopher and not Outlook. Our calendar for recruiting is better but we have to prove it. Yes, I know, what about all the features for mass emailing and auto email responses.

Resume importing

Without a doubt resume importing is the single most important feature of recruitment software.

I think we have the best on the market because we have outsourced this feature to ResumeMirror in Canada. The product is iRex. A few of our competitors use it as well. We also have our own built in resume parser but it is not as good and is a backup to iRex. My concerns are that it is very expensive and they have us at their mercy for pricing and future development. I received a wake up call when ResumeMirror bought the old product ‘ResumeBreaker’ that we used and they dumped the support for ResumeBreaker and we could do nothing but switch to iRex. Their support and service is very good but I am uncomfortable with our dependency. We should have at least two vendors and also improve our own.

I must also think about the next step for this product. What else can we provide the recruiter that would make the parsing of resumes more valuable? Here are my thoughts.

Rank the candidate based on the quality of the resume. Ranking factors would be education (including the quality of the school), work history and the quality of the firms in the candidate’s work history. Personality profiling of the candidate to the personality profile of the company and the styling of the resume would be two other ranking factors. If the style of a web site can make or break a company, I think software can be used to style a resume for the best performance.

What about video resumes and interviews? I don’t know, what about them? The future, or not, or just too soon to say?

Should we focus on finding resumes on the internet or leave that to companies like TalentHook and dtSearch? I think we should focus on good nurturing of the quality candidates already discovered and add to this group on a low growth method, because discovery is too risky in putting a bad deal together. However, this method is good for the contract placement industry.

The GUI

What about the look and feel of the product itself, the Graphical User Interface (GUI). You get better curb appeal when your product has the look and feel of a Microsoft Office product like Outlook, Word and Excel but you take a hit in overall efficiency because of the ‘list’ nature of the design. If you go the Gopher route and break from the mold you create a problem that prospects think the product is outdated. You have an extra learning curve, but once learned the efficiency is forever leaving the list type systems in the dust. We are going to stick with the form based, people centric model and just get better at marketing the difference.

Security

Some of our customers want total control of what other people can have access to in the Gopher database within their own recruiting firm. Some want the recruiters to see only their own records. This makes absolutely no sense to me. I think it really hurts the company but we are going to provide it as an option.

Everything Else

Then, of course, we have an almost endless list of suggestions and wishes from our current customers. The last release of Gopher covered 90 of these topics and the next will cover 90 more. My biggest headache is that one customer who comes up with a problem that no else has ever had. These problems just eat our lunch as far as resources are concerned, and is probably the single biggest reason for me having a sleepless night. After 25 years we don’t have many of these problems. We know how to build bullet proof software but when a bullet does get through it can be a mortal blow to the customer. I wish I could develop a special hit squad that does nothing but resolve these most extreme cases.

Support

It is all about support, recruiters need a lot of help as it is a tough business. How can we provide it without making the product to pricy? How do you draw the line between recruiting support and recruiting software support?

Marketing

Gopher is marketed almost exclusively through web searches. Heck that is the main objective of this Blog, to provide valuable content to our market of recruiters so we can be ranked higher in the search engines! We are doing well in Google and MSN. We were doing very well in Yahoo. We were number one for months but suddenly we dropped into obscurity on Yahoo, to number 49. We can’t figure out why. Talking to these guys is like trying to reason with ‘Hal’ from the Space Odyssey. What really bugs me is that we are a quality company offering a quality product, how can you drop from number 1 to 49 without changing your web site?