ëVirtualí consultants solve recruitment and staffing headaches

The way recruitment and staffing companies deliver services is about to go through a major period of change ñ for the better. New technologies are providing the catalyst and will help the industry solve many of its key challenges.

This was the main message to come out of an industry seminar held in central London on Thursday, 12 February 2004. The event was attended by opinion formers and industry experts from over 30 of the UK and Europeís leading staffing and recruitment firms.

Keynote speaker Marius Naum, Director of Global Front Office at Manpower, debated how technology was helping recruitment and staffing companies evolve their business processes and service delivery:

ìIn a highly competitive market, [recruitment and staffing] companies are looking to invest in new technologies to improve efficiency and enable consultants to respond more quickly to client requests and deliver a better service. New technologies are being employed to automate key processes and enable firms to be more proactive in client servicing. The recruitment and staffing industry is grasping IT with both hands and is going through an exciting period of change.î

Some of the new technologies discussed included:

ëVirtualí consultants ñ a new generation of intelligent matching technology is being used to automate the process of searching for and matching candidates to jobs (and vice versa). The technology acts as ëvirtualí consultant, sitting at the heart of a front-office system, providing highly accurate shortlists of candidates ranked by relevance. Searching for candidates is often the most manually-intensive and time-consuming aspect of ërealí consultantsí work, and intelligently automating the process frees them up to focus on client servicing.

Hot skills ñ recruitment and staffing companies are implementing technology that can intelligently profile candidate and client data, identifying sets of ëhot skillsí and those clients which regularly demand candidates with these skills. When a new job seeker is registered with a ëhot skillí, profiling technology can automatically suggest which clients would be most likely be interested in that candidate and create a call list for a consultant to approach proactively. This may lead to vacancies being filled even before they are advertised.

True self-service ñ intelligent matching technology is also being used to create ëself-serviceí facilities for clients and job seekers. A generation on from simple search, this type of technology will always find the most relevant candidate or vacancy, and never returns ëno matches foundí or hundreds of results.

Automated CV and job description structuring technology ñ the majority of seminar attendees thought that this type of technology had evolved to a level where it is accurate enough to be deployed in an operational business environment. The major benefits include minimising the need for manual inputting and increasing the accuracy and relevancy of database searches for candidates/jobs.

The seminar was hosted by NCorp, a leading provider of intelligent candidate-vacancy matching solutions for the recruitment and staffing industry.