- Founded by a Londoner and now headquartered in Hong Kong.
- Expanded rapidly in Melbourne, Johannesburg, and Tokyo.
- Multilingual CV parsing software has been key in the expansion process.
GRMSearch, one of Asia’s leading recruiters in legal and compliance founded by Londoner Rob Green, explains how they managed to expand so fast across Hong Kong, Melbourne, Johannesburg and Tokyo and the role that technology and people have had in it.
Headquartered in Hong Kong and founded by Londoner and CEO Rob Green in 2009, GRMSearch in its current incarnation officially came to life in 2013, after Green purchased and rebranded a firm he co-founded called CML Recruitment.
Hong Kong presents both a world of opportunities and challenges. It is the gateway to the massive Asian market but it also is home to several thousand recruitment agencies. In such a highly competitive market, Green highlights the crucial need for the introduction of improved data management practices and cutting edge search technologies into the firm’s daily workflow.
In the immediate term, GRMSearch is grappling with legacy database challenges that stem from Green’s buyout and rebranding of his previous firm. “When I bought the firm in 2013, we had to migrate the data from the old system to the new one,” Green says. “The data was legally held by the old firm CML, so we had to migrate it over. We’re talking about 100,000 people – and there was a lot of missing information.”
All of the legacy candidate data needed to be seamlessly updated and transferred onto GRM’s new databases. To do this manually would not only have taken a huge amount of time, but would have also introduced a significant – and costly – margin of error.
Green met Daxtra’s Asia CEO, Sergei Makhmodov, at an industry trade fair in Singapore, where they discussed how to fill in personal details without error, and automatically putting information in the right columns. “For me the thing that clenched it was the relationship Daxtra has with our database provider Bullhorn.
Once the reprocess is finished, our database will be one of the cleanest in the market.” For this reason, GRMSearch decided to work with a suite of Daxtra products that streamline different process such as:
Candidate Search
Daxtra software eliminates wasteful hours cross-checking candidates. “What they’ve done with Search is quite clever,” says Luke Hawkins, a director in GRM’s Hong Kong office. “It’s intelligent search, so it will pull up a column and say ‘You searched accounting. What about accounting in banking?’ That means you can quickly refine and improve your search because Daxtra works out patterns and makes recommendations for you.”
Candidate data loading
At the same time, GRM can rest easy that any new CV data introduced into its systems will be correctly coded in the company’s massive database. “Fundamentally, manual coding is never 100 percent reliable,” Hawkins says. “Unfortunately, when it comes to things like career history, very few people take the time to code these things properly. It's busy work that Daxtra has thankfully eliminated from our workflow.”
Linking GRM database to the Internet
GRMSearch recruiters will enjoy a next-generation tool that gives them the power to seamlessly pull candidate data from any website they come across and add it to their databases.
The Future
“We’re on an exciting growth trajectory,” Green says. “The strategy that I wrote is the first five-year plan, and we’re ahead of schedule. We’ve continued to reinvest in technology and our own people. Our service will get tighter, and better, and Daxtra will hopefully play a big part in that. As our teams grow, our database will grow. Tokyo alone may double our database, and with Daxtra’s help, we just might be able to expand upon our success more quickly. ”
