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Resume Databases Boost Recruiters

Technology helps match skills with jobs
By Eric R. Chabrow
Issue: Jan. 23, 1995

Online employment services face competition from another technology: resume databases. Many companies have deployed optical character recognition (OCR) technology to scan job seekers' resumes and store them in a client-server system that tracks and ranks job prospects. "Employers find it's too expensive to plow through mounds of resumes by hand," says career consultant Joyce Lain Kennedy. "So they're letting machines do the initial screening."

At the Vanguard Group, a mutual fund company in Malvern, Pa, recruiters whose desks were once swamped now match job openings with resumes by using the Resumix recruitment-management system from Resumix Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif. The system not only helped Vanguard recruiters clear their desks, but it also cut the time needed to identify a job prospect, says Tom Howard, HR director for Vanguard.

MicroTrack Systems Inc., a Dedham, Mass., maker of a competing system, Restract Hire, claims companies can cut recruiting costs by a third if they check their resume database before advertising a job.

Howard of Vanguard concurs: He's got thousands of resumes from former applicants residing in the Resumix database. "We haven't run a help-wanted ad in the last 1-1/2 years," he says.

Some companies link recruitment systems with computerized personnel systems to fill openings with those who already work for the company. The link checks the qualifications of current staffers, based on internal resumes, called "skills inventories," that employees fill out. The system proposes matches between workers' abilities and a job slot. "Matching employees to skills allows them to grow," says John Younger, an independent HR consultant in Oakland, Calif. "It helps a company to use its resources more effectively. It makes everybody feel good-except perhaps managers who don't want to lose their best person."

Resume databases can also provide corporations with new income. James Gonyea, an employment consultant who runs online service Help Wanted USA, sees companies selling their resume data to information providers like his. He concludes: "They can turn this resource into a profit center."