Years ago, when the technology of the day extracted all the gold it was capable of extracting from the tons of earth dug by miners, the remainder was dumped as tailings.
Today, new technology and a historic gold price has made it profitable — immensely so for some operators — to sift through those tailings for the leftover mineral. Reprocessing of a tailings heap in Australia has already yielded $1 billion in gold.
There’s a lesson here for recruiters. Your ATS — or whatever you use — is a gold mine, even though so many treat the resumes of candidates they promised “to keep on file” the way miners once treated tailings. New technology and a tightening demand for skilled workers is now making it more attractive than ever to sift through your candidate database to find the workers with the skills and background you need.
Monster this morning unveiled a Cloud “candidate relationship management” tool to make that sifting far easier and, at a price point starting at $2,000, more cost effective than panning for new candidates.
Explaining Monster’s Cloud CRM is easy enough.
Candidate databases — whether in a commercial ATS or in Excel or even in Outlook — are uploaded to the cloud. You can then search it as you would in an ATS, plugging in the criteria the job req requires, and Monster produces a summary list of all those meeting your needs. It will also search the Monster database listing those candidates.
From there you can send customized email messages to some or all of them, tracking the opens, click-throughs, and responses and creating a file record for each candidate. With more than one job, you can track by campaign.
The difference between using the Monster service and keyword searching your own ATS is that Monster’s patented 6 Sense is a semantic search, meaning it understands from the terms you use what you’re likely looking for — and what you’re not.
In a demo of the new product, Javid Muhammedali, Monster’s VP of product management, searched for a biz dev manager with chemistry as a skill. The search turned up candidates with experience in mass spectrometry because 6 Sense understands that mass spectrometry is an analytical chemistry technique. The typical ATS keyword search would have missed that.
“The differentiation Monster provides is our search capability,” Muhammedali says. Though ATS searching has improved dramatically over the years, most are still keyword based.
I asked him about the selling points; how would a recruiting lead sell the service, as inexpensive as it may be, in these days of squeaky tight budgets, especially for HR?
He cited the search capability, and the ease of developing, launchin,g and monitoring candidate campaigns via the CRM. These all make a recruiter more efficient, he pointed out, which is double true for agencies and direct employers with rudimentary or no ATS.
I see another selling point. Candidate databases are recruiter gold tailings. Like the physical heaps leftover from the first pass, the candidate database might as well be dead storage. It’s an open secret that recruiters rarely source from their own corporate ATS. In one notable instance, a lead sourcer at Intuit acknowledged having 230 candidates for a director position, yet no one had bothered to look at them.
Why is that? There are plenty of reasons. Two stand out: 1) It can be tedious using standard keyword searches to find just what you want, and; 2) The candidates have been rejected in the past.
Monster’s new CRM service eases that first issue. The second one, makes less sense today, if it ever did, as skilled workers who want to work for you grow ever more in short supply.
As Dr. John Sullivan said, by not mining your database “the corporation is missing out on a great opportunity.”