Super User
Thursday, 07 November 2013 00:00
The art of speed dating
How do you make a Talent Director fall in love with your product in ten minutes? A speed dating event organised by Reconverse, was one of our first chances to find out.
Faced with a room full of prospects and only ten minutes to impress, our goal was to decipher exactly what the corporates are interested in, what they are looking for and what makes them tick – all while making the most of the opportunity to explain DaXtra’s offering. To provide an insight into our approach, we’ve included an outline of one topic which was popular at the event.
Given the cost of outsourcing, corporates want even quicker access to the best candidates on the market. However those organisations that opt to recruit internally don’t ordinarily have the same level of sophisticated technology often associated with recruitment agencies. With the advanced technology now openly available on the market, recruiters have the chance to equip themselves with the necessary tools to cater for corporates’ needs. So for organisations wanting to manage recruitment in–house, they need to understand whether their existing applicant tracking system (ATS) and customer relationship management (CRM) system have similar functionality to those often used within the agency vertical.
By adopting an agile ATS solution, organisations can compete alongside recruiters to source the best and most suitable talent. This presents businesses with the same opportunities by using similar tools or technology as agency recruiters. A sophisticated ATS, or one that allows for third party add-ons, will also help organisations to improve search capabilities within their existing databases and provide a better and faster experience for the applicant.
Instead of completing lengthy application forms, a prospective candidate can just upload a CV and the organisation can use a CV parsing solution to populate pre-defined fields within its ATS. The time from job specification to job fulfilment is also significantly streamlined. With no need to pass through complex and time consuming processes within a recruitment agency, organisations gain fast track access to the best candidates.
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Thursday, 24 October 2013 00:00
Biting the Budget Bullet
The recruitment sector cut backs had left many HR teams struggling to manage with limited resources and funds. Thankfully, however, this trend is slowly changing and we are finally beginning to see some buoyancy in the market. While 22 per cent of organisations remain affected by budget limits, the pressure of quickly finding and engaging scarce talent is no longer such a concern.
But why?
Last year candidates were faced with very few vacancies and even less desire to take the leap into a new role should one become available – making a move in an uncertain climate is certainly risky! However, there has been an increase in confidence over the last couple of months as both salaries and the number of vacancies starts to rise. This is good news for HR professionals and recruitment agencies, but does it make finding Mr. Right any easier?
The challenge still remains to find the top candidates for each position. As more people begin to look for new opportunities, it takes longer to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
How can investing in technology help deal with the high volumes of applications, sort the good from the bad, and the strong from the weak? HR professionals can use technology to move outside standard keyword search matching and start to explore the contextual relevance of skills and attributes that candidates include within a CV, bringing the most suited to the top of pile. Surely a better alternative than flicking through page after page of keyword results search to find the best match?
Embracing this technology allows you to gain competitive advantage. So how do organisations go about getting the right technology for the job in the first place? The answer is simple – what are you trying to do? Are you trying to post ads quickly to as many people as possible or do you want a system to manage your responses? Are you trying to match candidates to your database? Or are you trying to do all of the above?
It all depends on your requirements. You may need an intelligent tool that understands both the strength of a candidate’s skills and job requirements, whilst also having a level of automation. If you want the whole package then obviously expect the cost to be a bit pricier than the basic offering. So recruiters, it is time to bite the technology bullet – it’s only trying to help!
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Tuesday, 22 October 2013 00:00
Big Data May Be the Future, But the CV is Still King
By now, we’ve all heard our industry’s excitement about Big Data. It’s the future, some people say. It’s going to revolutionise recruitment. Sure, that sounds wonderful. But at this stage, the excitement – while justified – is bordering on hype. I don’t aim to crush dreams or crash the party, but I think it’s obvious that companies haven’t yet figured out how to monetise Big Data. The reason is simple: Big Data isn’t clearly defined, nor is it arranged in a digestible format. Very few recruiters know what specific data sets they are hunting for and for what purpose.
That’s not to say we don’t have any data to work with – there’s plenty, of course. The Internet is overflowing with competitive intelligence. We have the everyday sources we all know and love: company websites, LinkedIn, and the bottomless reservoir of job boards. Still, most of this valuable information is unstructured and scattered across disparate locations. Unless you hire a dedicated research team to hunt for trends and linkages, there is no way to effectively harness the tidal waves of information.
So let’s do a reality check and come back full circle to where this industry started. To where, you ask? To those tried and true CVs – the essential tool of our trade ever since Leonardo da Vinci created the first résumé way back in 1482.
It seems the Internet hasn’t killed off the CV, despite a few wild claims to the contrary. Employers and recruiters are still asking for candidate CVs – that’s unlikely to change any time soon. And it’s undeniably true that CVs are treasure troves of actionable information. Unlike the mountains of Big Data floating ‘out there’ in some intangible and ever-expanding digital universe, the information on a CV is at our fingertips right now.
Here are a few tips on what can be gained from the river of CVs flowing toward you – not only how to filter them against job descriptions, but also how to use CV data to run your business better and reduce the costs of making a new hire. A lot of the data you need is contained in those perfectly (or not so perfectly!) crafted CVs – and the best news of all is that we now have the technology to extract it for you. That’s right: the whole process can be automated.
So, what’s the first step? Well, you should pull all of the relevant factual data from the CVs you've collected and input those invaluable factoids into your database. How do you do that? Do you need to do it manually? Mercifully, you don’t. Today there are résumé parsing software solutions that will do all of the heavy lifting for you. These solutions are relatively low cost and they deliver levels of accuracy and detail at the very least on par with those of a human administrator, regardless of the language or formatting style on the individual CV.
Second, recruiters should routinely track the source of each candidate in order to measure the success of their hiring campaigns. We all know heaps of money is spent to attract the right talent – be it through job advertising, agencies or headhunting. But again, these efforts are usually scattered. Recruiters often can’t tell where the candidates they hired or placed came from – and that’s a big waste!
What do I mean? Well, on a very basic level, if you are making X number of placements from advertising on a certain job board, how does that success rate compare with the other job boards that you use? Knowing this simple fact will obviously help you configure budget allocations for future marketing campaigns.
Digging deeper still, you can start measuring trends in the types of candidates your campaigns attract. Are they seasoned executives? Mid-career hires? Graduates just starting out? Armed with knowledge of the job board’s effectiveness, you can better shape your hiring campaign strategy.
Make sense? Now, let’s step back and consider the volume of competitive intelligence contained in an average CV. For starters, each CV illustrates, in detailed terms, the growth strategies of a candidate’s previous employers. You know, when the candidate writes something to the effect of: “Managed strategic growth project XYZ, and doubled China revenue to US$200 million in 2012.” And then there are those valuable morsels of data about projects in the pipeline: “I led a committee on India market analysis and our company’s India growth strategy.” It goes without saying that such data should be extracted from each CV, fed into your CRM and used for predictive analytics and/or lead-generation purposes.
There’s also an abundance of ‘intelligence’ you can gather about skill sets and qualification trends. To be competitive, candidates must use their CVs to advertise their key strengths, and also highlight their professional and academic qualifications. If you consistently extract, normalise and store this data on your database, you will be able to see the movement of competencies in the market, and their respective supply and demand trends. Such data, when properly organised and combined, will create an oasis of knowledge to drink from as you plan your company’s next big project or business line.
Here’s another way for recruiters to think of a CV: You are selling a product – a job – and each candidate is your potential customer. The candidate’s CV tells you who they are, where they are, and what they want. Why can’t you use this information to advertise highly relevant opportunities to the candidate when they apply for a job via your website? You know, just like Google does with ads. Ever notice how restaurant ads miraculously appear when you’re reading a friend’s email about a great meal? To do this effectively and with the necessary degree of subtlety, you must have structured and normalised competencies data in your database. As I said above, the beauty of this is that the task no longer requires hours of data entry and admin — it’s 2013 and you can automate this process with parsing software and display matching jobs to your applicant in real time during the registration process! This will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your job-filling efforts.
Keep in mind that CVs – similar to all types of data – have a shelf life. People move and change industries, companies launch projects and abandon them and go in and out of business. That means CV data dates quickly and sours like an everyday carton of milk. It’s a familiar picture for every recruiter – peering into the database and realising most of the candidate information is old and out of date. What can be done?
First, you can dust off and refresh your legacy database and commit to making it an ever-changing, ever-evolving organism. How do you do that? You mailshot all of your existing candidates and request an updated CV. Then you can use a good automated parsing system to auto-update the old records as the updates start coming in.
Don’t worry about those who won’t respond to the mailshot. You can safely archive or delete them, depending on your local legislation and availability of space on your servers. From then on, send regular bi-annual ‘courtesy’ mailshots to your candidates – a friendly email enquiring about their current situation will not only sift out those people who choose to opt out, but will also demonstrate that your company values their interest in you as a potential employer.
At Daxtra, we’ve delivered a number of projects like this for our clients. We’ve breathed new life into their candidate databases and helped them pull business-enhancing information from the data at their fingertips. And get this: our findings reveal that in staffing agencies and contingency recruitment businesses the level of duplication among incoming CVs averages 50-60 percent. That means more than half of all incoming CVs are from candidates who already applied to you in the past.
That’s why having an automated CV parsing system in place is a must in this era of information overload. The benefits are obvious. You keep your administration costs down, while you convert unstructured CV data into actionable business intelligence. A good parsing solution de-duplicates repeat candidate files and refreshes an old entry with new information, which means your database will, almost effortlessly, be kept up to date.
With the help of a parsing technology, you can now extract value from every morsel of data that candidates give you. Parsing reduces your workload and costs, while it also gives you invaluable data and real time actionable insights: what could be better? That’s why the CV is still king.
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Thursday, 17 October 2013 00:00
Online dating: Can technology ever substitute human intuition?
How did you secure your last job?
Chances are it wasn’t by walking into a bar and receiving a phone alert with your dream job. In fact it is almost certain that a stranger didn’t approach you, nor conduct a brief interview and you probably didn’t receive a formal offer by email the following morning.
But what if you could?
Granted, a little out there perhaps but too good to be true? Perhaps not. With constantly evolving technology you’d be right to question why the recruitment sector hasn’t moved on dramatically in terms of candidate placing. But in reality, can technology ever be a substitute for human intuition?
Personality and aptitude tests go some way in supplying the employer with a candidate who is near perfect on paper. A step in the right direction to say the least but what use is this to the candidate? You can hardly expect a business to take such a test to ‘prove’ it’s a great place to work can you.
More often than not you’re trying to attract like for like and there is only one sure fire way of doing that – knowing and talking. Recruiters need to know the company and the candidate well enough to find the perfect match and the only way that can be done is through human intuition – one person judging another’s skill.
New fangled technology, regardless of how high-tech it is will never overrule the power of conversation. Variables are intangible, no point in putting technological algorithms in when you don’t know what you are matching to, after all you cannot quantify what the employer needs. Instead recruiters need to invest in technology to aid their job, not do their job. Conversation is key.
Chances are it wasn’t by walking into a bar and receiving a phone alert with your dream job. In fact it is almost certain that a stranger didn’t approach you, nor conduct a brief interview and you probably didn’t receive a formal offer by email the following morning.
But what if you could?
Granted, a little out there perhaps but too good to be true? Perhaps not. With constantly evolving technology you’d be right to question why the recruitment sector hasn’t moved on dramatically in terms of candidate placing. But in reality, can technology ever be a substitute for human intuition?
Personality and aptitude tests go some way in supplying the employer with a candidate who is near perfect on paper. A step in the right direction to say the least but what use is this to the candidate? You can hardly expect a business to take such a test to ‘prove’ it’s a great place to work can you.
More often than not you’re trying to attract like for like and there is only one sure fire way of doing that – knowing and talking. Recruiters need to know the company and the candidate well enough to find the perfect match and the only way that can be done is through human intuition – one person judging another’s skill.
New fangled technology, regardless of how high-tech it is will never overrule the power of conversation. Variables are intangible, no point in putting technological algorithms in when you don’t know what you are matching to, after all you cannot quantify what the employer needs. Instead recruiters need to invest in technology to aid their job, not do their job. Conversation is key.
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Thursday, 19 September 2013 00:00
Recruitment APAC Summit
Recruitment APAC Summit
This year we will be attending The Global Recruiter ‘Defying Gravity’ AsiaPacific Summit 2013 on the 2-3 October at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore! Why? Toshowcase our full recruitment process automation product suite tailoredspecifically for the APAC market.
With 60% of employees looking to change theirjobs in 2013 and staffing agencies ranked as the number one choice for findingthat new role, our attendance atthe event couldn’t be better timed. Havingestablished a strong presence in Europe and the US over the years, we are nowbuilding on our success in the APAC region with the ongoing support of ourcustomers and partners.
Our customer base in APAC is growing rapidly, largely down to theeconomic strength in the region, but also because of our continuous investmentin research and development for territory-specific business needs. Our globalexpansion has been a result of our in-depth understanding of Recruiter’s needsand business processes over the last 12 years (yes - we’re that old!)
The day and a half conference is the premier event forstaffing professionals, with presentations from world leaders in the industry aswell as demonstrations from pioneers and innovators. It will provideinformation, techniques and the latest insight into available technology designedto improve the performance of even the most experienced recruiter.
If youhaven’t bookedyour place just yet, there’s still time so come join us! We look forward toseeing you there.
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