For too many recruiters, the ATS database might as well be an electronic trash bin. After a quick glance –that’s even if a human scans them at all — resumes go in, but rarely come out.
There’s no reliable count of how many recruiters source from the ATS or the CRM when they get a req. What ATS vendor would commission a survey to report how few customers actually use the database for more than storage?
TalentDrive, which makes a popular sourcing tool, but doesn’t sell an ATS, did ask about that several years ago. Its 2008 survey found 64 percent of the respondents admitting they had no idea how many qualified candidates were already in their ATS. Why is that? We don’t know for sure, though the commentary suggests it’s because many of the systems were “too cumbersome.”
But what if searching the ATS were as easy as posting to multiple job boards is … something most applicant tracking systems are good at?
Enter the TalentStream Sourcing Platform. This new product from CareerBuilder, by way of its Broadbean acquisition, makes it a snap to search the local ATS or CRM and match candidates to jobs. In goes the job description and seconds later you’ve got a list of the candidates in your ATS who are a match.
Using a semantic search capability the results are more finely tuned than pure keyword searching. To put it most simply, you’ll get java developers, not someone who was a barista.
Not enough candidates? Click a tab and search all the external resume databases to which you subscribe or otherwise have access to. Still not finding what you want? Then one more tab click and you can post the job to multiple job boards, including social media. Your last tab click and you can launch a referral program — company wide or to only select groups.
It really is that easy. If you’re a skilled power user, you may chaff at TalentStream’s very basic functionality. The platform lacks the advanced – often complicated — features of many of the standalone tools. The referral tool, for instance, pushes out the job description to whatever groups you create and will do basic tracking. But don’t expect the sophistication of a Jobvite.
That’s not to say TalentStream is bereft of useful features. Recruiters can manipulate the search string, add filters — location search is just one — and, because of an integration with EMSI’s (another CareerBuilder acquisition) rich trove of data, shows you just how many candidates there are in whatever area you’re searching and quantifies the difficulty you’ll have in filling the job.
This seems a good time to mention that CareerBuilder is reinventing itself. The TalentStream product it formally released this morning is only the newest of the TalentStream Technologies planned products. TalentStream Technologies is a unit within CareerBuilder that seems largely devoted to TA technology tools built upon the Broadbean model.
To make it abundantly clear it is not the job board company of the past, CareerBuilder introduced a new logo a few weeks ago. And, indeed it is not just a job board anymore. This new
TalentStream-branded sourcing platform could easily cannibalize CareerBuilder’s job postings. After all, why would you post a job to a commercial board if you can find a perfectly good candidate in your database?
As if to drive home the point, TalentStream alerts you that you already have the candidate in your database before you buy or download their resume from a commercial site, including CB.
That’s just a feature of the new platform and a very useful one, but not the essential reason behind it. As Kelly Robinson, CEO of Broadbean, explained during a demo of the new platform last week, the objective behind the TalentStream Sourcing Platform is to “give that individual (recruiter) back that time.” His reference was to the time it takes a recruiter to post, source, and sift through resumes to develop a list of potentials to contact.
“We make (the searching) a bit more efficient,” he said. That leaves the recruiter more time to review the candidates, qualify them, and spend more time screening.
Some years back, Monster introduced SeeMore, a sourcing tool that also searches the in-house candidate database. It too employs a sophisticated semantic search — Monster’s 6Sense technology. There are significant differences between the two sourcing platforms. Monster’s requires an uploading of the local database to the cloud. Because of Broadbean’s long experience working with dozens of ATS vendors, TalentStream is dashboard ready.