With many more candidates applying for each vacancy, the challenge facing many agencies today is simply how to manage the huge volume of CVs without getting swamped by applicants all chasing the same post.

The team at evolve™ have seen a big upswing in the number of CVs being indexed over the past few months - fortunately evolve™'s unique CV Pool™ technology means that their customers can relax as processing more applicants doesn't mean more work or additional cost!

Ben Stoneham, CTO at evolve™ explains..

"The rapid switch from a candidate scarce market to one in which the problem is just managing the sheer volume of applications for some vacancies was reallly brought home to me last week when a client told me that one of their recruiters had received almost 700 CVs in over a weekend for a posting that would usually have had 30-40!

Although this was an extreme example perhaps, we've seen a significant increase across the board in the number of CVs we process through evolve™ in the last few months; and with the unemployment figures set to rise by perhaps as much as another 30%, we fully expect this trend to continue.

The thing is that for many agencies running conventional front-office systems this increase is a real problem, leading to a significant increase in costs as either each CV will have to be manually entered onto their database, or if they are using parsing technology to extract the candidate data, that obviously has a processing cost too... pretty significant if you are having to get through several hundred CVs, just to place 1 or 2 candidates

For evolve™ customers though, the evolve CV Pool™ allows recruiters to drag-and-drop CVs into the system in any one of multiple formats, including MS Word, RTF, PDF, TXT and HTML, where they are instantly converted and indexed into the evolve™ database, allowing all of their consultants to search and share the CV using evolve™'s powerful CV search and ranking engine. With automatic de-duplication and skills automatching, it means that from 700 applications, you can quickly filter down to identify the right candidate for the role without the cost of processing all of them."

Ben explains that capacity is no problem either.. "We spent over 250,000 upgrading our storage system last year, anticipating continued volume growth... we estimate that we would have capacity for around 200 Million CVs and documents all in, so although we've got a lot right now (over 10 million CVs and documents are managed by evolve™ for our customers today), we should be good for a little while yet! And as evolve™ is delivered Software as a Service, our low startup costs and the lack of IT burden (no backups, management or updating to do) make it the most cost effective front office solution for current times."