I am happy I had the opportunity to review this online recruiter network for the Fordyce subscribers this month. HireAbility is fast becoming a household word in the recruiting community. Although probably the newest of the split networks they are growing by leaps and bounds and will be a major force in this space in time to come. For the purposes of this article, I took a membership in order to properly report on this service.
On signing up, you are given a user name and password to access the site. This service is a web-based model that does not require any local software installation. The heart of their online system is Sarah, a stripped down recruiter database that offers a place to store your candidates and job orders, then search on both. Sarah offers a very simple and easy to navigate interface. You can opt to share all or part of your own candidates and orders with the rest of the network, or certain groups within the network. One of the major features of the network is their shared job orders. Many of the job orders from the network members, that number over 300 at this point, are posted into a database that is completely searchable by anyone on the network.
They go to great lengths to help all their members facilitate the building of their own recruiting community by fostering personal communication and conducting online sessions between members with similar specialties.
There are three types of memberships offered. The typical membership is the Exchange Membership, which is basically the full membership and this grade offers Sarah, with the access to all member contacts, orders, and candidates for $85/month ($850/year) then charges a 6% commission for placement on the back end. Their Virtual Recruiter membership is less expensive at $10/month ($99.00/year) but does not offer the unlimited job postings like the Exchange Membership. There is also a 20% split placement commission on the back end for this grade. Interestingly, they also have a Corporate HR Membership level where clients can be members and post jobs to the network. They typically also post the fee they are willing to pay for the placement service.
For an extra $99 both the non-corporate memberships can get a HireAbility email address, marketing promotional materials and access to business cards. They also offer all members a back office/employer-of-record service so that anyone interested in the lucrative temp/hourly market can take advantage of that without all the grief that goes with hiring employees.
All the membership levels also have access to ALEX, the resume parsing technology developed by HireAbility although only the Exchange Membership has access to batch processing. The other memberships allow single resume processing capability only, but all levels will have the batch processing capability in the new software release, which is imminent.
A nice benefit of membership for the two non-corporate grades is their discounts that they have worked out with some of the major recruitment vendors including Yahoo/HotJobs (resume database), LinkedIn (job postings), Buzz Recruiter (websites), Absolutely HealthCare (job and resume service), InfoGist (Internet search tool), and SkillSurvey (reference checks). Some of these are worth the monthly price alone.
Although still fairly young compared to some of the other recruiter networks out there. HireAbility is growing very fast and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them at 500…1,000 members before too long. I have spoken on many occasions with Craig Silverman, Executive Vice President of HireAbility and know they have a solid plan in place for future growth.
They are about to release a new web portal powering the recruiting network, that promises easier navigation and communication facilitation. Look for a paragraph or two about this new release in this column in the next month or two.
I want to thank Craig, Eric Cullin, Andrew Stock, and Joanna Ransley as all were a great help in putting this article together. I would encourage anyone with any interest in increasing their billings to take a close look at this service. Anyone with any questions or comments can contact Eric Cullin, Senior Business Development Executive at HireAbility. Eric can be reached via telephone at (734) 397-4430 or via email at ECullin@HireAbility.com. You can also visit the HireAbility website at www.hireability.com for more information.
TIP
Invisible Web – a.k.a. Deep Web
I am asked about this all the time. Most of you know that the traditional Internet search engines search for web pages. That is great when we are looking for web pages but what if we are looking for specialized web-based databases that contain information that we can use. This requires the use of specialized search engines that do a great job in navigating the portion of the Internet not accessible from the standard search engines. Here are a few web-based tools you can use to look for whatever you like.
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ – This is a project by the University of Michigan that mainly is for academically oriented resources.
http://www.findarticles.com/ – An excellent collection of over 10 million articles on almost every topic you can think of.
http://www.libraryspot.com/ – List, lists, and more lists.
http://www.firstgov.gov/ – The U.S. government’s official web portal. More information than you could ever think about using. State government info as well.
http://www2.library.ucla.edu/search/eresources.cfm – A proprietary web database from UCLA. Much information not found anywhere else.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. For more information about the invisible web there is a wonderful resource available at About.com. Also try:
websearch.about.com/od/invisibleweb/a/invisibleweb.htm
You might be surprised at what you can find at some of these sites.
Mark E. Berger, C.P.C., AIRS CIR has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm and its predecessor, M.E. Berger & Associates since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and is an expert on recruiting and sourcing products, services available on the Internet and how these products add to the bottom line. Mark’s interests include successfully integrating both computer and Internet recruiting technology into a traditional recruiting environment. He has taken AIRS I and II training and has obtained the AIRS CIR designation. Mark is also on the board of directors for the Missouri Association of Personnel Services. He can be reached at mark@ramseyfox.com. His website is: www.swatrecruiting. com and we recommend you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.