* Full text Boolean search of resumes (that’s been available for ages)
* Fuzzy logic/semantic search
* SmartMatch automated skills search
* Natural Language Search (NLS) off a job description
* NLS “more like this” from a selected resume
* Notes search
* Profile search w dozens of field selections
* Quick find lookups
* Subsearches within user created folders
* Integrated search of major third-party job boards including Monster, CareerBuilder, DICE, SecurityClearanceJobs, HotJobs, more.

All the above are lightning FAST except for the Notes search that can slow down if a user elects to search the entire body of unlimited notes text and selects a wide date range.

Guess I don’t understand “why so many ATS vendors have poor search capability” — isn’t that the heart of any system?

SmartSearch is one of the few products that serve both corporate employers as well as third-party recruiters. It never ceases to amaze me how many corporate products are what I call “process oriented” rather than a true sourcing tool with the end goal being to fill the job. Corporate employers serious about recruiting are those that take an executive search/research & passive candidate sourcing approach to talent acquisition — and make the focal point of building a resume database rather than simply using it as a repository for applicants that bothered to apply on the website.

The other comment that resonated with me is that any tool is only as good as the skill of the user. I had one recruiter ask me if an ATS would put him out of a job. My reply was “only if you’re a bad recruiter” in which case an ATS simply helps do more of the wrong things faster.

I agree 100% about the relationship building aspect; finding candidates regardless of search power is not what actually engages the candidate or gets somebody hired. Also, since referrals are and will always remain the best source of candidates, the best search engine in the world won’t deliver a warm referral if the relationship isn’t there.

I’m a talent management consultant that specializes in recruiting, assessing and developing top performers. I also happen to specialize in the high tech industry and have worked with a number of enterprise software companies. Many of the major ATS software companies began as a way to automate and standardize work processes, just like ERP and SCM software. Some of the main benefits being the ability to integrate processes, improve hand offs, ensure compliance, reduce headcount associated with process administration, etc. In some cases these expensive software systems failed to add their projected ROI because they automated poorly designed processes (not the software companies fault, but the fault of those in charge of the process). As these technologies matured the makers realized that they often times needed to re-engineer a companies processes before they installed software.

In the case of ATS software I think they are at this turning point. The first round of the software was simply to automate process, not improve the process. The problem is that the process was flawed in the first place. Frankly, most companies still think that sourcing = advertising a job opening to collect resumes, and recruiting = screening resumes and conducting job interviews. Numerous surveys have shown that this approach accesses only 30-40% of the market at any one time (the active job seekers plus a few passive).

For those who are really cutting edge, they know that the real value add in recruiting comes from relationships. Strong relationships will allow you to access 80-100% of the market whenever you want to. These companies know that to get as close to having “the right people, in the right place, at the right time” you must have a view into all the talent in a given industry, geography, etc., both inside and outside the company, and be able to reach them in a way that gets them to seriously consider your career opportunity. This can’t happen without a trusted relationship or leveraging a trusted relationship. In my opinion ATS software does not help a recruiter maintain nor leverage trusted relationships. Now, LinkedIn does a great job of helping to leverage trusted relationships, but in and of itself does little to develop trusted relationships.

CRM software does a good job of helping build trusted relationships, but only when the user already knows how to build a trusted relationship, because this is what software was built for. No system by itself builds trust, but CRM software automates many things that aid the process. Most can be customized to capture and record the data you want to use to segment customers (or in this case candidates), and support Boolean, wildcard, and other searches. Most allow you to schedule follow up calls, or even automate communications in a way that make you maintain some form of contact on a regular basis (this is a must for the best external talent). When these, along with the other things CRM software offers, are combined with someone who really understands how to develop and maintain trusted relationships WATCH OUT! This is a recipe for an exceptional talent acquisition professional.

I switched to a CRM system, Salesforce.com, a long time ago. I’ve customized it to capture the information I need to be able to search for talent in a very targeted way (including being able to identify people who worked in a specific function in a specific company during a specific time frame). While this platform is still not my ideal solution, it is way better than anything I have ever seen from an ATS vendor. When companies start using CRM type systems to develop and maintain candidate relationships, or ATS vendors realize the recruiting process is only as good as the relationships utilized to execute it, resume/data mining will no longer be a problem it will be another part of every recruiters process.

If you questions or wish to contact me you can email me at cordell DOT larkin AT cordellandcompany DOT com. For more about me see my LinkedIn Profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/cordelllarkin, and to follow me on twitter go to http://twitter.com/cordellco.

As an ATS provider, cBizSoft, we provide a very extensive set of search capabilites in our ATS application cBizOne.

We have a live search bar, whereby a user can search on any combination of fields, and results are displayed while a user is entering the search keywords.

In our advanced find, we have both the keyword search and full boolean search. Our boolean search has no limits (i.e. unlimited boolean string size) and allows unlimited nesting. We also allow stemming and NEAR operator.

We also have Zip distance search.

To put it simply, we do not have a single deficiency mentioned at the beginning of the post.

Interesting discussion and lots of excellent comments. For years, I have been amazed that most recruiters choose to “find” new talent from job boards and guess at appropriate skills, fit and hope there is enough of a relationship to influence any outcome (read: hope is NOT a strategy).

Regarding information mining-too many sourcing and recruiting teams are moving to quickly to fill jobs and service clients and cannot or do not take enough time to learn how to mine data. Their compensation and activity metrics are skewed to other things.

From a functional perspective, many companies try do a good job of mining raw data outside their firewall from Job Boards and the internet at large (sourcing) then try to pass it over to a recruiting team for data verification, storage and relationship building.

The comments about field level searches providing better, accurate search results is true….if and only if the data is maintained and refreshed. There’s the rub….we just do not do a good job of that because we are too busy getting “new” data even if it is already in a DB somewhere.

I believe that data mining is such an art that requires technical skill, patience and lots of training and desire.

Additionally, once their is a good relationship built, candidate self service for data entry and updating helps keep data fresh. However, mining data to develop and leverage great relationships in our ATS systems must become a priority and really generate economies of scale in the talent economy.

Cheers,
MWP