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.