Are You Still Using Outlook As Your Resume Management Software?

Thursday, July 29, 2010

If you answered 'Yes' to above question, I am afraid that you are not using latest technology to its full potential. Using Outlook (or Outlook Express) as recruitment software or resume management application or resume management system has several disadvantages, mainly:

1. You can not share resumes on your desktop with other users and vice-versa. (Unless you have invested in other technologies like MS Exchange)
2. You can not search attachments. Most of the resumes you get are received as attachment with the e-mail. So you can not use keyword based search.
3. Only option to manage resumes in Outlook is to use folders. You may have folders for short-listed candidates, candidates called for interview, rejected candidates etc. but folders too become unmanageable when you have several vacancies and need to track applicant for each vacancy.
4. You can not keep a history of your interaction with applicant. If you spoke to a candidate today and lets say he was available only after a month, where do you record that information?
5. Using e-mail client as Resume Management system is at the most a make-shift arrangement which would soon get out of hands and become unmanageable.

There are several resume management software, resume management system, available in the market today. Some of them are desktop based applications that require you to install them on each and every PC (just like you do with Outlook) and other are heavier client/server based models which requires huge investment.

Web 2.0 has made it possible to deliver Software as a Service and thus some players have started offering Resume management software, or resume management system, as a service. In such a setup, you pay a monthly subscription fees and all you need is a web browser to access the application. However not all Resume management SaaS are created equal. Some key features that one should look for are:

1. Does it provide direct integration with your mail system?
2. Does it have a built-in resume parser to extract key information from the resume?
3. Does it offer full text based searching (like Google)?
4. Does it have bulk email/SMS options?
5. Does it provide you facility to import your existing resumes from Outlook/Outlook Express or other sources?
6. Does it provide user interface for manual upload of a resume?
7. Does it support all file formats i.e doc,txt, html, etc.

These are some of the key things that you should look for in a system before making a decision. There are other resume management systems, resume management systems, that offer Outlook plug-in feature to upload a resume to the system. But I am not a very big fan of such a feature as it involves manual intervention. If a user does not upload a resume to system, resume is lost forever. So integration with your mail system is the key.

Using such a system would also mean that you separate out your personal/corporate business mail accounts from the ones which you use to receive resumes. Reason being that you would need to configure the system with your user-id and password so that it can directly connect to your mail server and pull out resumes. If you are sharing an email id, then privacy of your business/personal mails may become a concern for you.
There are multiple ways to handle such a situation

1. Separate your email accounts. Accounts that are receiving resumes should not be used for any other communication.
2. Create dummy email account on hotmail/Gmail and define mail rules in Outlook to forward mail containing resumes to this dummy account.
3. Create dummy email account on hotmail/Gmail and just manually forward the mail containing resumes to that account and configure your system to connect to this free account instead of your regular account.

Once you have setup the process, your resume management system, resume management software, would automatically connect to mail server, fetch resumes, parse them and keep them in the database. Then all you have to do is to search using specific skill, location, keywords, etc.

If you are using a system that allows online technical screening, it would automatically notify applicants about online employment test and would record scores without any manual intervention.

Technology is revolutionizing recruitment process all over world. Are you using right systems to recruit the talent you company deserves?

Author is Founder at eScreener and worked extensively on recruitment technologies. eScreener is Applicant tracking system (Recruitment software) that fully automates the process of applicant screening. It has a sophisticated resume management system that includes direct integration with mail server, bulk upload of resumes from Outlook (or Outlook Express) as well option to upload a single resume. It has built in resume parser that extracts information from information. You can also configure it to automatically screen candidate skill once a resume is received.

Check out more details at http://www.escreener.co.in.

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