Daxtra: bringing the internet inside
Edinburgh 2008-04-15
Daxtra's cover story from the March 2008 issue of Recruitment International
The internet is continuously and rapidly changing the wealth of opportunities and threats for all businesses in the service sector, and none more so than the recruitment sector. Candidates and open vacancies can all be found on the web somewhere, and what the recruiter has to do is what recruiters have always done - find them, assess them, bring them together, and make their money in the middle. As such, recruiters need to be especially aware of internet trends, because those that see and exploit the opportunities will prosper, while those that don’t will gradually be left behind in this increasingly connected world.
One of the most exciting challenges facing recruitment over the next few years is how to recognise and exploit the opportunities that present themselves on the internet, and how to avoid the pitfalls. Social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Xing, eCademy and Facebook, ‘bid-ask’ style referral sites such as Zubka, and the ever-growing hoard of niche job board sites makes for a dazzling, if slightly confusing and distracting array of opportunities for agencies to exploit.
It was not so long ago that the candidates on a CRM system were a recruiter’s main ‘advantage’; selling your services to a client in a competitive tender often involved presenting the size, demographics and skills of candidates on your database in the most flattering light. Now, though, some say that all that is required is a log-in to a few big job boards, and that the database no longer matters. However, to a large extent this misses the point, and poses a central dilemma; if everyone can access the same information, how can you get advantage from that?
“One of the most exciting challenges over the next few years is how to recognise and exploit the opportunities that present themselves on the internet, and how to avoid the pitfalls .”
Andrei Mikheev, CEO of hi-tech internet specialist Daxtra Technologies says: “The way to get advantage from the internet is the same as getting advantage from any other source of information - namely to have systems that enable you to use it, to report on it, to search it, and to share it throughout your organisation better than the next guy - knowledge management over global sources.”
Andrei sees the solution to the ‘advantage dilemma’ in greater linking of an agency’s internal systems to the net, or actually the other way round. “Although one can take a view that as soon as they’ve found a great CV on the internet they can start the placement process, for an organisation of bigger size it is very important to seamlessly import this CV into its recruitment workflow,” he says.
“Key to exploiting the modern internet is the ability to get information from online resources actually inside the organisation in an effective and useful way that links to and meshes with the actual placement workflow of that business,” he continues. “For example, it is one thing to find a great CV on TotalJobs, but if you have to wait a day to get it onto your CRM system in order to send it out, odds are that one of your competitors will get there first!
“Or perhaps one of your colleagues will also see it, and you might both be chasing after the same candidate, leading to an unprofessional impression, or worse, internal conflict over ‘ownership’ of candidates. Or a recruiter might find a great candidate on LinkedIn, but unless that candidate is brought inside the organisation the candidate is available only to that recruiter, which can be a waste.”
But how do you ‘internalise’ the internet? In actual fact, Web 2.0 technologies make this far easier than it was before. Linking candidates directly to your CRM system is vital if knowledge about candidates is to be shared throughout the organisation. Traditionally the way to do this is to ask the candidate to email you their CV (or to download it from a job board) and get administrators to load it into your system, be it via Adapt or Vurve or another CRM system. Andrei comments: “At Daxtra we are proud to say we have largely automated this time-consuming and resourceintensive process, and now more than 200 agencies in the UK, large and small, including a majority of the Top 100 recruitment agencies by revenue use our CandidateCapture system every day.
“As soon as a CV comes into the organisation (by email or through a job board) Daxtra’s CandidateCapture system not only registers it on your database but now it can also suggest which open vacancies it is most relevant to and notify involved consultants, thus making instant impact on the placement process. We now load in excess of a million CVs onto our customers’ databases every month, and time and again we are told that CandidateCapture ‘does what it says on the tin’, which is a great vindication of what we originally set out to achieve.”
Daxtra’s new product line, SearchStation 2.0, brings the candidate inside in an altogether more proactive way. It is written based on the same Web 2.0 standards used by sites such as YouTube and Facebook, which provides a uniquely powerful sourcing system, tightly linked to the internal recruitment process, which allows recruiters to search over their internal CRM system and many internet sources at
once.
Once new candidates are found, SearchStation enables recruiters to select the promising ones, and instantly register them on the agency’s CRM. “SearchStation not only allows agencies to make much more efficient use of information by being able to search multiple internet sources at once and presenting the results in a single unified interface, it also remembers which candidates you’ve already seen and which candidates already exist on your database because one of your colleagues has already imported them,” comments Andrei. “Once they are on your database, they’re in your placement process. You can code them your way, match them against all your existing open vacancies, link them to your billing process, and share them with recruiter colleagues in the same way you might share regular
candidates.
“Daxtra’s SearchStation also supports most advanced models of automated matching between candidates and vacancies, combining various aspects of candidates’ competencies and vacancies’ requirements. This functionality is very popular with some consultants, while
others prefer to be in the ‘driving seat’ of their sourcing process and use Daxtra’s powerful natural language search algorithms with intelligent ranking and drill-down.” Either way, Daxtra sees its tools as an aid to recruiters finding great candidates, rather than a tool to replace the recruiter.
Nevertheless, automating existing processes like loading candidates onto your CRM system, or searching for new candidates on multiple internet sources simultaneously, is only the beginning as far as Andrei is concerned: “Although our current products greatly help to bring the candidate inside, they do not fundamentally change the way that recruitment companies interact with the internet.” To do that, Andrei insists, requires systems that ‘deeply link’ the outside web to your internal CRM system.
“A candidate may have a profile on LinkedIn or Facebook, have posted their CV onto Monster, Jobserve and CWJobs, and have applied to an advert you put out for a vacancy, hence being on your CRM system. All these pieces of information need to be linked together so that if they update their employment status on LinkedIn you know about it.” Andrei says. “You don’t need to go to LinkedIn and find them so you can update your database; the technology recognises the update has occurred and updates your CRM system for you. You then know they’re seeking employment, they come up in searches over your CRM system and they can be matched against the open requirements you are currently resourcing.”
For some years now, Daxtra has been offering solutions for bringing candidates into recruitment CRM systems with maximal speed and accuracy and minimal fuss. Worldwide, hundreds of agencies use Daxtra’s products to identify and load CVs onto their databases in their thousands and even millions. Now Daxtra sees the future as delivering evermore capable systems that can assimilate and exploit the multitude of new routes to candidates and clients that the internet is making available. Inside Daxtra there is an excited feeling that whatever the future holds for recruitment information processing systems, Daxtra will be part of it.
Andrei concludes: “Although we can’t know now what the future of online recruitment will look like, we can, however, be sure that organisations that understand that knowledge is power and therefore seek to extract maximal value from the wealth of information available on the internet will prosper. That we very much see as our job for the years to come!”
You can download the PDF version of this article here.
Andrei Mikheev, CEO of hi-tech internet specialist Daxtra Technologies says: “The way to get advantage from the internet is the same as getting advantage from any other source of information - namely to have systems that enable you to use it, to report on it, to search it, and to share it throughout your organisation better than the next guy - knowledge management over global sources.”
Andrei sees the solution to the ‘advantage dilemma’ in greater linking of an agency’s internal systems to the net, or actually the other way round. “Although one can take a view that as soon as they’ve found a great CV on the internet they can start the placement process, for an organisation of bigger size it is very important to seamlessly import this CV into its recruitment workflow,” he says.“Key to exploiting the modern internet is the ability to get information from online resources actually inside the organisation in an effective and useful way that links to and meshes with the actual placement workflow of that business,” he continues. “For example, it is one thing to find a great CV on TotalJobs, but if you have to wait a day to get it onto your CRM system in order to send it out, odds are that one of your competitors will get there first!
“Or perhaps one of your colleagues will also see it, and you might both be chasing after the same candidate, leading to an unprofessional impression, or worse, internal conflict over ‘ownership’ of candidates. Or a recruiter might find a great candidate on LinkedIn, but unless that candidate is brought inside the organisation the candidate is available only to that recruiter, which can be a waste.”
But how do you ‘internalise’ the internet? In actual fact, Web 2.0 technologies make this far easier than it was before. Linking candidates directly to your CRM system is vital if knowledge about candidates is to be shared throughout the organisation. Traditionally the way to do this is to ask the candidate to email you their CV (or to download it from a job board) and get administrators to load it into your system, be it via Adapt or Vurve or another CRM system. Andrei comments: “At Daxtra we are proud to say we have largely automated this time-consuming and resourceintensive process, and now more than 200 agencies in the UK, large and small, including a majority of the Top 100 recruitment agencies by revenue use our CandidateCapture system every day.
“As soon as a CV comes into the organisation (by email or through a job board) Daxtra’s CandidateCapture system not only registers it on your database but now it can also suggest which open vacancies it is most relevant to and notify involved consultants, thus making instant impact on the placement process. We now load in excess of a million CVs onto our customers’ databases every month, and time and again we are told that CandidateCapture ‘does what it says on the tin’, which is a great vindication of what we originally set out to achieve.”
“The way to get advantage from the internet is to have systems that enable you to use it, report on it, search it, and share it throughout your organisation .”
Daxtra’s new product line, SearchStation 2.0, brings the candidate inside in an altogether more proactive way. It is written based on the same Web 2.0 standards used by sites such as YouTube and Facebook, which provides a uniquely powerful sourcing system, tightly linked to the internal recruitment process, which allows recruiters to search over their internal CRM system and many internet sources at
once.
Once new candidates are found, SearchStation enables recruiters to select the promising ones, and instantly register them on the agency’s CRM. “SearchStation not only allows agencies to make much more efficient use of information by being able to search multiple internet sources at once and presenting the results in a single unified interface, it also remembers which candidates you’ve already seen and which candidates already exist on your database because one of your colleagues has already imported them,” comments Andrei. “Once they are on your database, they’re in your placement process. You can code them your way, match them against all your existing open vacancies, link them to your billing process, and share them with recruiter colleagues in the same way you might share regular
candidates.
“Daxtra’s SearchStation also supports most advanced models of automated matching between candidates and vacancies, combining various aspects of candidates’ competencies and vacancies’ requirements. This functionality is very popular with some consultants, while
others prefer to be in the ‘driving seat’ of their sourcing process and use Daxtra’s powerful natural language search algorithms with intelligent ranking and drill-down.” Either way, Daxtra sees its tools as an aid to recruiters finding great candidates, rather than a tool to replace the recruiter.
Nevertheless, automating existing processes like loading candidates onto your CRM system, or searching for new candidates on multiple internet sources simultaneously, is only the beginning as far as Andrei is concerned: “Although our current products greatly help to bring the candidate inside, they do not fundamentally change the way that recruitment companies interact with the internet.” To do that, Andrei insists, requires systems that ‘deeply link’ the outside web to your internal CRM system.
“A candidate may have a profile on LinkedIn or Facebook, have posted their CV onto Monster, Jobserve and CWJobs, and have applied to an advert you put out for a vacancy, hence being on your CRM system. All these pieces of information need to be linked together so that if they update their employment status on LinkedIn you know about it.” Andrei says. “You don’t need to go to LinkedIn and find them so you can update your database; the technology recognises the update has occurred and updates your CRM system for you. You then know they’re seeking employment, they come up in searches over your CRM system and they can be matched against the open requirements you are currently resourcing.”
For some years now, Daxtra has been offering solutions for bringing candidates into recruitment CRM systems with maximal speed and accuracy and minimal fuss. Worldwide, hundreds of agencies use Daxtra’s products to identify and load CVs onto their databases in their thousands and even millions. Now Daxtra sees the future as delivering evermore capable systems that can assimilate and exploit the multitude of new routes to candidates and clients that the internet is making available. Inside Daxtra there is an excited feeling that whatever the future holds for recruitment information processing systems, Daxtra will be part of it.
Andrei concludes: “Although we can’t know now what the future of online recruitment will look like, we can, however, be sure that organisations that understand that knowledge is power and therefore seek to extract maximal value from the wealth of information available on the internet will prosper. That we very much see as our job for the years to come!”
You can download the PDF version of this article here.