For most professional recruiters, a CV management system will be synonymous with a CV database – a place to electronically store and retrieve candidate CVs, making the job of filing and searching hundreds or thousands of CVs easier. But a true CV management system should be more than a CV processor, and should support the recruitment process much more fully, ideally providing end-to-end support from initial CV acquisition, through to provision of a shortlist to clients.
Why an End-to-End Solution Matters
Just holding a CV in a database does not, by itself, offer significant advantages to a recruiter. To process CVs involves the effort saved in getting it into an appropriate computer format, how accurately the data has been entered and the ease with which it can then be matched to open vacancies. Ideally, every aspect of CV technology should support the wider task of recruitment, helping to make every stage of the recruiting process faster and easier.
The first part of the recruitment process is candidate acquisition. Traditionally this means advertising a post and inviting candidates to submit CVs. While this approach is unlikely to go completely out of fashion, proactive CV management software can do more than simply wait to have data entered into it. Ideally it can actively assist the recruiter by searching job boards and social networking sites for CVs and have them processed and ready to use before the first manually submitted CV has even arrived.
When manually submitted CVs do start arriving, most of them will arrive as email attachments. These then need to be opened and submitted to the database, creating work for the recruiter – unless the CV management software can automatically detect their arrival, process them and then notify the recruiter.
Once candidates have been acquired, the quality and accuracy of data coming in is critical. The CVs within a database are only an asset if they have been accurately coded to a level which is as good as that which can be achieved by an expert human recruiter, noting key data and skills necessary for vacancy matching and intelligently recognising the meaning of data from its context and from their own domain knowledge. If each résumé has to be read, coded and entered by hand, there is little benefit in terms of speeding up the process of CV acquisition.
The real value of a CV depends on how easily it can be matched against relevant vacancies, and that means there is a requirement to also represent vacancies within the system in a format which is consistent and compatible with the way that CVs are represented.
Recruiters need to be able to easily search CVs looking for specific skill combinations or other personal attributes (e.g. nationality) to produce a shortlist – perhaps to pass to another colleague for further investigation, or for client perusal. But a fully featured CV management system needs to do more than simply wait for recruiters to initiate searches. If it has the automatic acquisition and parsing abilities mentioned above, it can then take the next step and perform CV searching and matching for all new CVs, notifying the recruiter whenever a new match is found. This saves the recruiter the task of having to perform a manual CV search to check for any new candidates.
The next stage of the recruitment workflow is to draw up a shortlist of candidates based on how closely each CV matches a particular vacancy. The CV search software can of course provide a list of the most closely matching CVs, which could be the basis for a shortlist – but this is a stage which typically requires some judgement by a human recruiter. For instance, there may have been 10 skills required by a vacancy, but the recruiter may know, through discussion with their client, that 4 of those skills are especially important – and so the recruiter will want to check that those 4 skills are being prioritised in the final shortlist. Alternatively, the recruiter may want to speak to candidates before putting them on a shortlist, as a way of checking communication skills, availability for work or to clarify some other aspect of their CV. Rather than imposing a shortlist upon a recruiter, the ideal resume management system will allow a recruiter to compile a shortlist within the system, tagging the CVs that are of interest, and saving the resulting shortlist for future reference.
Daxtra’s End-to-End CV Management System
The Daxtra suite of resume software modules provides exactly this level of recruitment workflow support, freeing up recruiters from the time consuming tasks of CV sifting and data entry, and giving them more time for value added activities such as building relationships with clients and candidates.
Daxtra Capture can acquire resumes from multiple sources including email, job boards and social media, and can be set to run searches against specific vacancy criteria at set intervals, thereby widening the pool of quality candidates.
Daxtra Parser then quickly turns a variety of CV formats into XML format, to a high level of accuracy, ready for use. Very little manual user input is required, except to deal with duplicates or missing data. The speed and accuracy of the CV parser means that being flooded with hundreds of applications per vacancy no longer has to be a huge drain on resources or result in delays for the client.
Next, Daxtra Search allows intuitive searching of the database using natural language – which means minimal training required. New CV’s can be automatically compared to existing vacancies and matches notified to recruiters. Recruiters can create longlists and shortlists within Daxtra Search ready for passing on to other recruiters or to clients.
Together these modules comprise a complete CV management system which has been designed with the needs of the recruitment industry specifically in mind and providing far more holistic level of support than a simple, static database.