Solutions for Recruitment Agencies

The recruitment industry has invested billions of dollars in technology over the past decades with little to show for it. A recent longitudinal study showed key metrics of recruiter productivity essentially unchanged over a 40 year period. And it’s not surprising when you consider that the way most agencies do business remains largely unchanged: you place an ad, wait for candidates to reply, sort through the response, and forward the most promising resumes on to your clients. CRM and recruitment systems have provided essential workflow as the regulatory environment has become increasingly complex and applicant volumes have mushroomed but, despite their promise, they provide only limited functionality when it comes to resume search and sorting. It’s no wonder that the industry is so prone to boom and bust.

Burning Glass changes this equation with a range of solutions that help you reduce your costs, streamline your operations, and grow your revenues. We succeed where other systems have failed because our technology is built from the ground up around the same challenge that’s core to your business: matching people and jobs. As you know, doing this effectively requires more than just keywords. So we developed artificial intelligence-based technology that is trained to think the same way your experienced recruiters do. First, our patented parsing solutions read and understand resumes and jobs in plain English (or dozens of other languages) in order to discern candidates’ experiences and career paths and employer requirements. Then, our matching engine searches the resume database by looking for resumes consistent with past patterns of placement.

The result is a set of tools for managing and sorting through the torrent of resumes you receive, for building and leveraging your resume bank, for driving greater revenue from existing clients, and for targeting new accounts. Specifically, our solutions help you:

Reduce Costs

• Improve the efficiency of resume processing and job/candidate matching, eliminating the need for data entry staff and freeing recruiters to focus on higher value activities
• Improve the effectiveness of job/candidate matching, freeing recruiters for other activities (hiring manager consultation, sourcing strategy, etc.)
• Maximize the efficacy of your candidate database, reducing advertising costs by decreasing your reliance on job boards for candidate flow

Streamline Operations & Workflow

• Automatically process inbound resume flow, whether from your website, job boards, email, or multi-post feeds, and upload a complete data record directly to the database
• Screen the resumes you receive for quality and deduplicate them against existing database records
• Route resumes to openings automatically based upon relevance scores, not just the job the candidate happened to apply to
• Automate search activity, ensuring that staff take advantage of the database without requiring changes to user behavior
• Reformat resume data directly into brand-specific templates without the need for extensive data entry on the part of your recruitment staff
• Centralize data storage, including the ability to sweep resumes directly from staff email and “desktop databases”

Increase Revenue

• Leverage existing resumes to enable you to get top candidates to your clients faster, putting you ahead of competitors and increasing your likelihood of making the placement
• Broaden your recruiters’ net beyond those who happen to apply, increasing fill rates and therefore revenue
• Target new customers, growing your customer base and increasing revenues
• Actively promote talent to existing customers, increasing placements and associated revenue
• Improve your understanding of the job market, including which employers are hiring, what skills are in demand, and what your competitors are doing, all leading to increased market share and associated revenue

The recruitment industry is notoriously cyclical. So no matter whether times are flush or desperate, our solutions enable you to steer a course of sustainable growth by limiting two of the most significant drivers of an agency’s cost: staffing and advertising.

Reduce the cost and burden of data entry – You receive thousands of resumes. To make use of them, they need to be added to your database. Burning Glass resume parsing technologies monitor your sources of resume inflow, process them in virtually any major document format (e.g. Word, PDF, HTML, ODF, etc.), extract dozens of facts about each candidate with industry-leading accuracy, and automatically upload them directly to your CRM / ATS.

Reduce the cost of advertising – Most recruiters follow the “fly paper” school of candidate sourcing: they post an ad on a job board (often on multiple boards and with repeated reposting to keep the ad fresh) and wait for resumes to arrive. It’s an expensive process that, at best, nets a single catch. The rest of the resumes are thrown away – or might as well be, given the extremely limited use staff often make of the database. Burning Glass’s Lens/Match™ engine can be configured to search either on demand or automatically every time a new requisition is generated – ensuring that recruiters make the greatest possible use of your resume bank. What’s more, Lens/Match is designed to search the same way your recruiters do, thereby ensuring the relevance and usability of the resumes they return.

Improve recruiter efficiency and effectiveness – Studies show that a typical recruiter spends 45% of their time screening resumes to separate the wheat from the chaff. Lens/Match scores resumes automatically based on their relevance for the job, thereby focusing recruiters on those resumes most likely to represent a strong match for the job. In tests, Lens/Match replicates recruiter picks close to 90% of the time. In addition, our Lens/Xray™ parsing engine reformats resumes automatically to facilitate staff review, even creating a summary so that recruiters can pass by unsuitable resumes without needing to read through them.

As a recruiting professional, countless hours of valuable time are spent scouring resumes to assemble a qualified pool of candidates for clients. In this difficult economy, a single job posting can elicit an overwhelming response of thousands of resumes. Burning Glass solutions utilize artificial intelligence capabilities and learn from real life patterns of placement to reduce processing efforts and focus attention on only the most relevant candidates.

As the industry leader in resume parsing and search, Burning Glass solutions enable recruitment agencies to streamline operations by:

Automating resume processing and upload – Our CVLoader™ flexible workflow engine monitors each of your resume channels in order to capture inbound documents, including your website, job boards, recruiter email boxes, or multi-post feeds – without relying on your staff to remember to push them in. It can check them for viruses, screen them to make sure they meet quality thresholds, deduplicate them against an existing database based on criteria you set, and upload a complete candidate record automatically. CVLoader includes comprehensive review and exception queues. It is fully configurable and designed to conform to your workflows.

Automating relevance screening – CVLoader can also invoke our Lens™ artificial intelligence engine to score inbound resumes against the job to which the candidate applied, flagging promising resumes for high priority staff review. In addition, CVLoader can help you get the most mileage out of each resume by routing them to other openings automatically, instead of only considering the candidate for the job to which they happened to apply.

Automating search activity – Changing staff behavior can be nearly impossible, so Burning Glass provides you with an alternative: in addition to a full suite of on-demand search tools, Lens/Match can be configured to search automatically based simply upon a job description – no keywords required. As a result, matches from the resume database can be delivered to staff members automatically, even when they choose not to search, thereby ensuring greater usage of the database and all of the cost and revenue advantages that comes with it.

Keeping your data clean – Our solutions automatically perform a variety of quality control functions, checking for minimum requirements that you have defined (e.g. name, address, last employer, etc.) and routing sub-standard resumes to a holding queue; checking your database for duplicate records and if found, updating the database to reflect the most recent resume or routing duplicates to a review queue, as you prefer; and adding relevant information and coding (e.g. Lat/Lon, industry code, skill context, degree levels, etc.).

Reformat resumes for clean presentation – Our parsing solutions extract and categorize the full range of candidate information directly from each resume and store it in industry-standard XML. As a result, this information can be readily reformatted in your proprietary client presentation templates (including the omission of contact fields, etc., as desired) without the need for extensive staff data entry or formatting work.

Centralize data storage – Resumes flow into your firm from all directions. As a result, many resumes may not make it into your database. In fact, some recruiters choose to keep their most promising candidates in a “desktop database” to avoid competition with other recruiters. CVLoader can be configured to monitor recruiter email boxes and to sweep the resumes they receive directly into the central database, thereby ensuring firm-wide access and reducing the risk of data loss associated with hardware failures or staff departures.

In a difficult economy, all businesses must take a “no stone unturned” approach when it comes to creatively growing revenue. For recruitment agencies, that means maximizing returns from mainstream placement services, but it also means finding new ways of generating revenue without dramatically increasing cost.

Burning Glass solutions provide recruitment agencies with the support you need to “get creative” by finding new revenue streams while further strengthening your traditional line of business. Our solutions:

Get strong candidates in front of your clients faster – If your recruiters aren’t making much use of your resume database and, instead, rely primarily on job board ad response, it can take days before you can start feeding promising resumes to your clients. That’s a disadvantage when it comes to beating out your competitors, many of whom are waiting for the same candidates from the same job boards. By searching the database automatically as soon as a posting is created, Lens/Match™ puts promising leads in front of your staff immediately, reducing delays and putting you ahead of your competition.

Increase fill rates – While you will never be able to fill every requisition you receive, Burning Glass can help you increase fill rates by broadening the pool of candidates you draw from. When you depend heavily on job board ad response, you are leaving too much to happenstance, and the chance that that the ideal candidate will actually see your ad. Because Burning Glass gives you advanced tools for building and searching your database, you gain access to a wealth of candidate resumes you might not have been able to consider otherwise. That means a greater likelihood of finding the right person and of making a placement.

Promote talent to your clients – Too often, recruiters act like order takers. When times are flush, that may work fine, but in a tough economy, that’s not enough. Burning Glass can help your recruiters actively promote talent to your customers. After all, a surprising number of hires are unplanned, or at least unadvertised. By searching the database for resumes closely resembling those of recent placements, Lens/Match enables your recruiters to identify candidates that may be of interest to a client – even when the client hasn’t asked for resumes. And the placements that result can drive up revenues significantly.

Target new customers – In addition to our parsing and matching technologies, Burning Glass maintains the world’s most comprehensive database of job listings, with over seven million current listings amassed from over 17,000 sources, updated daily. When brought together with our advanced text mining capabilities, Burning Glass is able to deliver actionable insight on who is hiring, in what locations, and for what jobs and skills. And it’s all instantly accessible to your recruiters and business development teams on demand through our Labor/Insight™ market intelligence application, enabling them to create prospect lists and to reach out to new customers already knowing what they are looking for and with strong candidates already in mind.

Track existing clients and competitors – The same market intelligence that Labor/Insight provides to facilitate your prospecting activity also enables you to track job posting activity from your current clients and from your competitors. Know if your clients are posting jobs directly or through competitors so that you can reach out to them and discuss how you can win more of their business.