The database is at the heart of all modern recruitment companies – but getting the most value out of that database requires innovative recruitment database software which doesn't require you to switch to a different database or change your own tried and tested processes. For ultimate efficiency and to truly get the best from their investment in recruitment software, companies should look not just for recruitment database software, but recruitment process software, designed to fully support internal workflows and procedures.

Requirements of Recruitment Database Software
Having a recruitment database is of little or limited value if a business can't turn that data into business advantage.

The ability to store data and allow that data to be searched and queried are just two functions of recruitment database software. It needs to actively assist the recruitment process, offering time efficiencies at a number of key steps, and assisting consultants to progress the overall recruitment process. But before the data can be used efficiently, it first of all has to be acquired and stored in an efficient way.

Here are the main issues which recruitment database software needs to be able to deal with efficiently:

Time to input data – If data from CV's has to be entered manually into the database this magnifies the human time spent on each CV and tends to undermine the efficiencies gained at the searching and query stages.

Multiple sources and formats – Gone are the days when recruiters could require all applicants to complete an application according to a fixed format, to make reading and processing them easier. Now, especially for specialist skill areas, the challenge is to find quality applicants from whatever source might help, be that responses to direct advertising or finding CV's held on job boards or social networking sites such as LinkedIn. Some CV's may not even be in CV format, but may be a completed profile on a business site. Being able to include all these sources in your database and search them, gives a much wider pool of candidates to work with – but processing all these formats can be a challenge for some recruitment software.

Duplicate CV's – While candidates won't usually apply for the same job twice, they may well apply for multiple jobs with the same company at different times, so it is important to spot when a duplicate CV arrives. A more frequent problem in the age of social recruiting, however, is that the software which goes searching for CV's and profiles online finds someone's CV posted on multiple job boards or networking sites. Here, your recruitment database software needs to spot that they are all for the same person and deal with them appropriately.

Missing data – Your database needs to alert you when there is data missing from CV's and provide an organised way of letting consultants decide how to manage that, instead of simply loading them into the database.

Non-intuitive search languages – Having to learn a query language specific to your particular database creates significant costs for a recruitment business in terms of training and support. It also makes it very difficult to switch between different databases or software if a new search language has to be learned each time.

Matching against vacancies – A database of CV's is of limited use unless it allows quick and easy matching against vacancies. If vacancy data is held in a different place or in an incompatible format, this limits the ability of recruiters to know what matches they may be holding. Ideally, a database should also store vacancy data in a similar format to CV's to enable easy and direct matching, either to match a new vacancy against existing CV's or a new CV against existing vacancies.

Imposing workflows – Recruitment process software which assumes a specific workflow will mean consultants are either forced to adopt new processes – which may or may not suit the specific niche or client base they work with – or force them to find workarounds which can result in the database not accurately reflecting the current state of a particular CV, or vacancy.

All these problems can lead to recruiters switching to different types of database in the hope of improving some of these problems – but the process of switching can itself be disruptive.

Leveraging Your Data with Recruitment Process Software
Getting the best from your recruitment database means focusing not just on the data it contains but the overall recruitment process it is there to support – and this is just what DaXtra's recruitment process software is designed to do. DaXtra Capture and DaXtra Search are our key tools for populating your CV database, finding matches and organising workflows. Designed specifically to meet the needs of the recruitment industry, these two modules offer recruiters:

Easier database growth – Enlarge your candidate pool from multiple sources while also ensuring clean data.

Easier data mining – Easily find data within your database, using intuitive, natural language searching.

Rich data – Enhance business intelligence and efficiency by adding recruiter notes and recording history.

Compatibility with your existing database – We offer a variety of formats to work with most currently used databases.

Reporting – Not just searching CV data and matching with vacancies, but also allowing you to search and report on your own data e.g. by recruiter or by team, or by skill. This turns your database into a business intelligence tool to help make strategic decisions, monitor performance and give visibility of your data assets.

Support for the way you actually work – You dictate the workflow you want to have, with the database assisting and enabling that. For instance, CV's can easily be compiled into longlists or shortlists, ready to be passed on to another consultant for action or review.

Recruitment Software from DaXtra
You can request a demonstration of DaXtra's suite of Recruitment Software by clicking the button at the top of this page, or go straight to the contact page.

Social recruiting is revolutionising the recruitment industry and posing significant challenges for resume tracking software. The traditional way of finding suitable candidates for a position was to advertise a vacancy, wait for people to apply (imposing whatever constraints one wished on the format, language and content of the application) and then choose between those applicants. The advent of internet technology and social networking for business purposes means that this model of recruiting is now incomplete if not entirely redundant.

To take advantage of social recruiting, resume tracking software needs to be able to cope with resumes from all types of sources and in any language. Here we take a look at these challenges and how DaXtra's resume parsing and searching software meets these challenges.

What is Social Recruiting?
Social recruiting is a new channel for recruitment whereby people post their CV on a social media or business networking site, and this information is acquired by recruitment software. Sometimes the posting of the CV/resume is intentional – the person is actively job-hunting and wants their curriculum vitae to be found by a potential employer. But sometimes the person is not actively seeking work and has simply filled in a skills profile as part of joining a business networking site (for example, LinkedIn or Xing).

Employers and recruiting agencies are able to search these communities (subject to permission from the site and/or individual members) for resumes or profiles which match skills or experience they are looking for.

The result is that candidates may be considered for positions they may not even have seen advertised, without actually applying for the vacancy.

Social Recruiting – The Challenge for Resume Tracking Software
While social recruiting offers recruiters a much wider pool of talent to worth with, it also poses some practical challenges.

Selectivity – With millions of online CV's on job boards and personal profiles, recruitment software cannot simply retrieve all of them. Volume aside, the purpose of any recruitment exercise is to find quality candidates who have some likelihood of meeting the job requirements. Online searching needs to take place against a vacancy specification, with resume tracking software intelligently acquiring and storing only resumes or profiles which have the right skillset or other key criteria.

Formatting – Resumes found online may be in any format or structure and with different types of data with different headings and labels for the same data. Recruitment database software needs to be able to cope with any format, reformatting and restructuring them into a common format ready for searching and matching.

Language – People with the right skills to match a vacancy might be anywhere in the world, especially for global industries such as IT, communications, oil and gas, for example. Acquisition software therefore needs to be able to process CV's in any language.

Automation and Notification – Finding CV's online is a non-stop process as thousands of CV's are being uploaded and updated every day. Having to manually check for new CV's would be time consuming, so acquisition software needs to be able to run automatically at set intervals, store relevant CV's and notify consultants whenever a new match is found.

DaXtra Support for Online and Social Recruiting
DaXtra's CV search software is designed specifically for the recruitment industry and includes features which provide full support for recruiting using online sources.

DaXtra Parser can parse CV's and resumes in any format regardless of initial structure, ready for processing by DaXtra Search. And it can deal with up to 25 different languages commonly used in business, including Chinese and Japanese.

DaXtra Capture can search a variety of online sources (subject to permission) and these searches can be set to run regularly to check for new CV's. Because vacancy information is held in the same format and on the same database as CV's, DaXtra Search can instantly check incoming CV's against a specific vacancy or set of vacancies. Matches are then automatically notified to consultants. Where there is a partial match but missing data (a likely scenario when acquiring resume data from online profiles) consultants are given the opportunity to review the data and make any amendments to ensure a clean data file.

In short, we offer all the benefits of social recruiting without the technical and administrative overheads that it would otherwise take to handle the huge volume of CV's that are available online.

Once CV's have been captured, parsed and matched, our resume tracking software then helps support your workflows, allowing CV's to be added to lists for action or review by other consultants. Consultants can add any notes required to individual CV's, which then remains attached to the CV for reference by other teams or consultants.

Resume Tracking - To see how DaXtra can work with your existing CV database or pull in new CV's from the web, please request a demonstration.

Software for recruitment agencies has had to evolve fast over the past few years in response to unprecedented economic challenges affecting the global employment market. Here we take a look at some key industry trends which are driving changes in CV processing and recruitment database software.

Software for Recruitment Agencies – Industry Trends
Anyone working in the recruitment industry, whether for a specialist recruitment agency or in-house recruitment or HR department, hardly needs telling that employment – and therefore recruitment – has taken a big hit in the last 5 years.

Many recruiters have gone out of business due to the current state of the jobs market, as demand for recruitment by employers has fallen significantly. As a result, many employers who are still recruiting are demanding lower recruitment rates, or bringing all or some of their recruitment in-house to help cut costs.

For those recruitment agencies still in business, there is an urgent need to spend less per placement – which means cutting costs and getting more done with the same resources. But at the same time, the increased competitiveness means that it has never been more important to provide top quality candidates and to be highly responsive to employer demands. Put simply, in a high unemployment market clients expect more high quality candidates, more quickly and for less outlay.

While unemployment has, happily, stabilised over the last couple of years, unemployment remains high – but this does not necessarily mean than it is any easier to find the right candidates for a given vacancy. Job applications are high – meaning a high volume of CV's to be processed – but with many job seekers applying outside of their usual skill area in the hope of finding work, a huge pile of resumes does not automatically equate to a high quality pool of candidates. This is especially true for specialist areas such as IT, communications, oil & gas, where the right skillset can be just as hard to find as it ever was, so recruiters have begun to find alternative ways to source candidates.

Meanwhile, advances in internet technology and the rise of social networking have created a whole new opportunity for recruiters in the shape of online job boards and business networking sites, offering new ways to reach potential candidates. However, making best use of this social recruiting opportunity can be a challenge in itself, requiring significant effort to search and find online CV's and profiles.

Many recruiters have responded to the new climate by going niche (specialising in a narrow sector where demand is strong) and/or going global (providing the same services to a wider client base). While both approaches make good sense, they can require a different way of working and strong technology to deal with the inevitable issues that this brings, such as quickly sourcing highly specialist skills, or dealing with CV's in different languages.

In-house recruiters have also had to adapt as they try to deal with the same pressures as the recruitment agencies: a high volume of applications needing to be processed more quickly and cost-effectively, combined with the need to ensure high quality placements.

Fortunately, software for recruitment agencies and in-house recruiters has been developed to address many of the practical problems created by these trends, and DaXtra in particular have been at the forefront of these developments.

Today's Requirements for Recruitment Database Software
Given these multiple trends, what are the key requirements for software for recruitment agencies, in terms of CV processing and recruitment database software?

Quick and automatic CV processing – To minimise manpower and speed up response for end clients, software for recruitment agencies needs to be able to quickly process large numbers of CV's, which may be in any format, into clean, searchable data.

Online CV acquisition – To source skilled candidates, recruitment software needs to be able to search job boards, business networking sites and other online sources for potential candidates, downloading CV's and non-CV data (e.g. personal profile data) into the database ready for searching. Ideally, the software should be able to run searches automatically and notify recruiters when new matches arrive, saving valuable recruiter time.

Reliable multilingual parsing – To enable recruiters to draw on a wider pool of talent, software needs to be able to deal with resumes in a wide range of languages.

Compatible with current systems and processes – Having to switch to a new type of database is a major cost and disruption for any recruitment business, so recruitment database software should ideally be designed to easily communicate with existing systems, processing new CV's into the required format.

Intuitive searching – Having to train staff to learn a new query language to run searches is also an unwanted cost to a recruitment operation. Recruiting software should ideally allow consultants to use natural, intuitive language to look for resumes within the system.

Cater for skills in specific niches – Niche recruiting requires software which understands the particular jargon and terminology used within the industry, without needing a lengthy period of "training" to get up to speed, and without the client having to specify and encode their own set of terminology.

Supports existing workflow and processes – Most recruitment operations will have well established workflows whereby work is passed to different people at different stages of the recruitment process. Recruiting software should enable this process rather than requiring a change in process which is likely to encounter resistance from personnel using it.

DaXtra Software for Recruitment Agencies
With the highest benchmarking accuracy (up to 95%) for CV parsing across more than 25 business languages, automatic online CV acquisition capability, intuitive searching and full support for client workflows, the DaXtra product range provides unparalleled functionality and efficiency savings for the modern recruitment industry. Software for Recruitment Agencies - to find out more or to arrange a demonstration please contact us.

Many recruiters work in-house for large companies, helping to fill vacancies with current employees or external applicants. As well as all the pressures that operate on independent recruitment companies, in-house recruiting can involve some special challenges, which need to be taken into account when considering staffing software solutions.

Staffing Software Solutions for In-House Recruiters
In-house recruiters and HR departments face many of the same difficulties faced by independent recruitment agencies: high volumes of applications per post especially when advertising externally; limitations on resources available for CV sifting; and pressure to find and place high quality candidates in a reasonable period of time to cover business critical functions.

As described in other articles, DaXtra is designed to carry out curriculum vitae analysis on CV's in any format and language and turn them into structured, searchable data in seconds – effectively eliminating the problem of CV volume. But it can also deliver some important additional benefits for the in-house recruiter.


Non-specialist Recruitment Staff
In-house staff conducting the recruitment process may not be specialists – either as recruiters or in the technical field they are recruiting for. In some companies the person or people carrying out the recruitment may be HR personnel with multiple duties such as day-to-day HR issues, and other Personnel functions.

So it is vital that any staffing software solutions considered take this into account and, in particular, do not require a steep learning curve, particularly when it comes to querying and searching the database for matches with a vacancy. DaXtra Search uses natural language querying, allowing recruiters to enter keywords they are interested in, in a similar way to using an internet search engine. This makes it easy for non-specialist staff to search the CV database and build shortlists based on the best matches.

Internal Lines of Command
In-house recruiters have clients, just like independent recruiters, but these "clients" are other departments within the same company. And there will usually be established processes for carrying out in-house recruitment involving approval at key stages. It is important that any recruitment software supports these internal processes rather than forcing employees to use a different process or devise workarounds. DaXtra does not assume any set process and allows existing workflows to be enabled, maintained and adapted as company processes evolve.

Competition with Independents
HR functions of all kinds have to constantly justify their value to the business, and never more so when times are tough. While some companies have always recruited in-house for a variety of reasons, some have brought recruitment in-house as a way of cutting costs during the downturn. But the true cost of a placement depends on the quality of the person who is recruited – whether they deliver and whether they stay with the company for a meaningful length of time. A cheaper placement isn't cheaper if it has to be repeated every 6 months. And, costs aside, there is often a perception that the bigger recruitment companies are better placed to find good quality candidates compared to an in-house operation. But what does "better placed" mean? It means access to a wide pool of talent due to a combination of industry contacts, access to preferential advertising rates and powerful software which can help to source potential candidates.

But with DaXtra it is possible for a modestly sized company to have access to as wide a pool of talent as they could wish for. DaXtra Search can search a variety of online job boards and social or business networking sites for candidates with the relevant skills. So an in-house team with a limited advertising budget can source a much bigger selection of candidates than they would otherwise expect to achieve. And, because the CV acquisition and processing stages are automated, in-house teams can also be as responsive to the needs of the business as the larger recruitment firms, in terms of time to come up with a high quality shortlist.

Ensuring Equal Opportunities
Whereas a company employing an external recruitment agency can discharge some of their responsibility for equal opportunities by showing that their supplier has an equal opportunities policy, when recruiting in-house it is necessary to have systems and procedures in place which demonstrate that equal opportunities legislation is followed in practice and systematically by everyone involved in the recruitment process.

DaXtra's Capture, Parser and Search software all inherently assist the process of selection according to ability, simply by eliminating human intervention at critical stages.

For instance, when DaXtra goes looking for CV's on job boards or networking sites, it is set to search for specific skills and cannot consciously or subconsciously exclude CV's from the search based on, for instance, ethnicity, religion, age or gender. The parsing stage in which CV's are turned into structured data and incorporated into the database is similarly uninfluenced by such factors. And when a consultant carries out a manual or automated search of the database for resumes to match a particular vacancy, the results are ranked in order of how well the skills of the CV and vacancy fit.

When it comes to sending shortlisted CV's to the appropriate person within the company (e.g. the technical or operational area that will be agreeing a final shortlist and carrying out interviews) DaXtra Styler can be used to anonymise CV's and, if required, remove specific fields that might otherwise indicate age, gender and so on.

Internal and External Candidates
A special case of equal opportunities arises when vacancies are open to both internal and external candidates (which is frequently required by law). Here it is vital that selection and shortlisting are carried out based on skills and experience alone, with internal candidates being neither advantaged nor disadvantaged. With an in-house team it is all too easy for the suspicion to arise – however scrupulous individual recruiters may be – that in-house selection will naturally favour internal candidates, and that the only way to really avoid this is to use an independent recruitment agency.
Using DaXtra Capture to process all applications in the same way, and then using DaXtra Search to perform job matching against a vacancy skills list ensures a shortlist based on ability rather than time served or personal reputation. Visibility or awareness of this automated process within the company can be helpful in promoting trust and a sense of fairness in the recruitment process.

In short, the automated features of DaXtra's staffing software solutions help in-house recruiters to:

• Deliver a high quality recruitment function without the need for extensive additional training
• Conform to workflows required by internal processes and lines of command
• Source candidates from a wide variety of conventional and online sources, increasing the chances of a high quality placement
• Compete with big independent recruitment companies in terms of candidate reach and processing power, enhancing their value to the organisation
• Demonstrate a fair recruitment process which fulfils equal opportunities requirements for both internal and external candidates

Staffing Software Solutions - To find out more about how our recruitment software can assist your company's in-house staffing requirements please contact us.

Glen Cathey posts a fascinating article into Semantic Search and its implications for Recruiters over at BooleanBlackBelt.com, reproduced with kind permission here.

"Semantic search has been a hot topic in Internet search for a number of years now and it continues to generate quite the buzz. For example, Google just recently rolled out semantic search capability. However, when I talk about semantic search, I’m not referring to the semantic web or “web 3.0.”

I’m not so excited about whether or not Google can correctly disambiguate my search on the word “bark” and figure out if I mean “the sound of a dog,” “the skin of a tree,” or “a three-masted sailing ship.” I’m interested in an passionate about semantic search techniques and applications specifically geared towards enabling more effective and efficient talent identification and acquisition.

So exactly what is semantic search?

That’s an excellent question! If you run a search on Google or even a semantic search engine such as Hakia or Powerset for the phrase “semantic search,” you’ll find many confusing results and very little in the way of an easy-to-understand explanation of the concept. I’ll attempt to do my best to explain semantic search in a way that is pertinent to sourcing and recruiting....

For the full article, CLICK HERE.