Finding the Ideal

Bruce Culver, CEO and founder of IdealHire answers our questions about the ideal way to recruit.

HRM.  What are the main challenges facing companies which seek to recruit the most suitable candidates in today’s job market?
Bruce Culver. Time and available talent are the main challenges facing organizations in today’s job market. There are about 44 million Generation X’ers in the workforce to replace about 77 million retirees. The talent pool is shrinking. Using simple supply vs. demand, it’s easy to conclude that the most qualified candidates go quickly. Companies need to be fast in accessing their job requirements against candidates’ skills and experience. They need to make instantaneous contact with the ideal candidates before they are swept up by someone else.

Unfortunately, experts show that, even with current demand issues, it still takes an average of two months to fill a position. While these positions remain unfilled, the businesses are suffering. Imagine the impact of having an open engineering position or open manufacturing jobs. The cost of not having resources to resolve technical problems or the cost of paying overtime to meet productivity schedules can be in the thousands for companies. In fact, vacancy costs between 48-61 percent of an open position’s salary. Add in the hiring process costs of between 10-15 percent of an employee’s annual salary. Each day the position remains open costs money.

Recruiters and human resource managers have a real opportunity to become corporate super heroes if they can find a solution to shorten the hiring process without sacrificing quality.

HRM. How has the process of sourcing quality candidates changed over recent years?
BC. Unfortunately, the process has not changed.

There are many new tools to supplement certain steps of the existing process but the basic problem of solving the time issue without sacrificing quality hasn’t been solved.  

For instance, key word search tools pull “matches” based on the most fully optimized resumes that have the most hits with the key word you plugged in. In all cases, you run the risk of missing candidates and are forced to further assess the list the tool generates.

Even with the help of these tools, as much as 1 month is spent filtering through resumes to get to a short list of interview candidates. That is why we found it necessary to take a Six Sigma approach to evaluate the traditional hiring process. By mapping out the process, measuring each step and noting the gaps, we found that the most problematic area is searching and assessment. In fact, over 40-60 percent of time is spent in this area. By narrowing the focus to the real problem, our software became expert in creating an “ideal” hiring process.

HRM. Can you tell us a little about the services your company provides?
BC. IdealHire Technologies delivers products to the market that revolutionize the hiring process. We specifically focus on the search and assessment of candidates--improving the time spent without sacrificing the quality of the candidates provided. Overall, our goal is to make the traditional hiring process the ideal hiring process.

Our product offerings are specially designed for the corporate and recruiter customers. Both employ our patented PowerMatch software application, which uses structured information analytics and scientific algorithms to accurately match and rank qualified candidates to specific jobs in minutes.The system works by using a Common Language candidate and job profiling system of skills and depth of experience.. You see every potential candidate and their exact match percentage to your job requirements.

For our corporate customers, we offer Corporate Career Portals. This Software as a Service (SaaS) is designed to run off of a career link on a company’s website. The Portals offer customized search agents, job template libraries, short lists, workforce planning and communication tools as well as act as a personalized company talent pool. Portals can easily snap onto an existing ATS and act as a specialized recruitment tool. A portal requires minimal training, no IT resources and can be lived in as little as 72 hours.

For recruiters, we offer Hiring Centers which are made up of various specialized talents pools. Our customers can post jobs to hiring centers for our military and IT talent pools that are directed back to their websites. In addition, recruiters can run active searches of the talent pool. 

Both are focused on finding the most ideal candidate in the shortest amount of time.

HRM. What has contributed to the increased popularity in candidate profiling?
BC. Our customers see the benefit of shifting the work to the candidate for completing their skills profile. Who would know them better than themselves?

Job seekers come into a hiring center or a corporate career portal through various sourcing campaigns such as links within PowerMatch to popular job boards or system generated email campaigns. They are immediately invited to complete a simple 3 step profile that takes an average of 8.5 minutes to complete. There are more than 12,000 skills for a candidate to select from as well as drop downs to capture years of experience, industry expertise and depth of knowledge. All of this data is captured into a common database so that when running searches, candidates and employers are speaking the same language. We have had more than an 89 percent completion rate for candidate profiles. Job seekers are willing to do the work!

HRM. What sort of companies could benefit from the kinds of solutions you provide?
BC. Just about any company that is growing and hiring can benefit from PowerMatch. The software is flexible and can accommodate a company as it grows. PowerMatch improves the hiring process and maximizes a company’s overall ATS investment. It snaps right onto ATS using HR-XML protocols.

For companies without an ATS, the software provides a resource to capture and maintain the corporation’s talent pool, capture pertinent EEOC information, warehouse top job templates, track top skills requirements as well as the most important: search and find the most qualified candidates for open positions.

Our application is built so that you don’t have to invest in servers, IT support and maintenance. The pricing is fixed and not based on individual license fees.  PowerMatch is meant to be flexible and grows as a company grows.

HRM. What are the benefits to companies which that utilizes a recruitment process outsourcing provider?
BC. Sometimes the applicant you review today isn’t a perfect fit for the job that you offer but a few months from now it could be a different story. With a corporate career portal, you don’t lose all the talent. After 60-90 days, that talent is yours and stored in your database for future use.

In addition, PowerMatch can help track key metrics so that you can measure the success of your outsourced recruitment service. It can also provide an easy means for recruiters to communicate with your hiring managers and forward the best fits. As a web-based application, you don’t have to be located in the corporate office to have PowerMatch work for you.

Everyone’s goal is to reduce the time to hire and find the most ideal candidate for your company. PowerMatch helps both internal and external recruiters do that.

HRM. What have been the biggest developments that you have made recently and where do you see IdealHire going in the near future?
BC. We continue to drive performance of the tool. For example, PowerMatch can search a database of thousands and product a match list within seconds. We have also recently released Version 3.2 of our Corporate Career Portal. Besides significant performance improvements, we have also added graphical enhancements and new Help Tips to make the tool even more user-friendly.

In terms of the future, our products have always and will continue to be market driven. We learn from our customers and have internal metrics to capture their input. We also track key hiring trends so that we can offer additional product features that meet the challenges of hiring before our customers even face them. Last, we have a global research and development department focused on leveraging open source initiatives to provide rapid turnaround for new features and functions and since we are SaaS, every improvement is immediately realized by all of our customers.

For more information, please visit www.idealhire.com. 

About Bruce Culver
Bruce Culver is a serial entrepreneur and innovator who has successfully founded and grown a number of companies including On Assignment, Professional Staffing in England and now IdealHire Technologies, Inc. He has over 20 years of experience in the staffing and recruitment software industry. Mr. Culver also sits on the board of Taser International. His corporate career includes being Vice President of Marketing for Bausch & Lomb/ARL as well as marketing and strategic planning consultant for various large corporations.