At a time when every job opening generates a flood a applicants, how can recruiters ensure that the top candidates don’t get lost in the commotion? Yahoo! thinks it has the answer with its Hiring Gateway. Announced today, the Yahoo! Resumix platform is designed to help both hiring managers and recruiters work more efficiently and collaborate in real-time.
Tim Villanueva, vice president and general manager of Yahoo! Resumix, told ASPnews that Hiring Gateway attempts to address the “pain points” felt by hiring managers and recruiters in their search for what he describes as “A players.”
The service is built to recognize the different ways the two groups approach the hiring process without simply layering on feature after feature, Villanueva said. “Recruiters and managers are already overwhelmed with technology. This version is behavior-based, not features-based.”
Yahoo! Resumix focused on three primary area in building Hiring Gateway, Villanueva said:
- Dashboards are designed to match the way hiring managers and recruiters work. For example, the Recruiters Dashboard and the Hiring Managers Dashboard provide access to requisitions, candidates in the pipeline and job board postings. Villanueva said that Yahoo paid careful attention to keeping the interface clean. In fact, he said, Yahoo! implemented feedback from formers employees at Apple, Intuit and Netscape as well as Yahoo!
- Collaboration features that offer integration with e-mail, calendaring and Yahoo! Instant Messenger (IM) technology. In addition to real-time communication within a company, Villanueva points to an example in which he sent an IM message to a promising job candidate who had send a resume just seconds earlier.
- A Knowledgebase search and extraction technology designed to match candidates to job openings. Villanueva said this patented technology applies 250,000 rules to extract the best candidates from a database of resumes. Recruiters can also use a current employee’s resume to help with the search for a candidate with similar skills. “You can take a star player’s resume and say, ‘go find me someone like this.’,” Villanueva said.
“Hiring Gateway shows a solid understanding of the recruiting process and what people need to be involved in it,” Dr. Katherine Jones, managing director, enterprise applications at Aberdeen, told ASPnews. “They know who their audience is in terms of what people need to be involved in the hiring process.”
Jones said efficiency is often loss due to a disconnect between recruiters and hiring managers. “Recruiters leave a stack of resumes for a manager, who has so many other things to do. They would lose top candidates because they weren’t acting quickly. This automates that process.”
Ironically, even with the job market tight, Yahoo! Resumix’ service comes a good time, Jones said. “There was a time when I thought the last thing I’d want to be right now is an e-recruiting company. But even at a time when you can open your door and have 50 good candidates, it’s important to find the great candidates.”
In today’s world where legacy applications need to work well with emerging services, Yahoo! Resumix also offers integration with HR solutions from Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft and Lawson.
Aberdeen’s Jones agrees this is an important capability. “They have the pipes to integrate with enterprise applications and that allows customers the flexibility to choose a best-of-breed application.”
“Right now the industry is fragmented. Yahoo! does a nice job of pulling everything together.”
Pricing for Yahoo! Resumix Hiring Gateway varies, according to Villanueva. Typically, pricing starts at around $200,000 for on-premise deployment. The exact pricing is determined number of users (i.e., recruiters and hiring managers) accessing the system and the amount of professional services involved. Yahoo! will host the service for customers and that pricing is determined on a case-by-case basis.
Do you have a comment or question about this article or the ASP industry in general? Speak out in the ASP Discussion Forum.
