Recruiting Software

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Recruiting Software – Emailing Do’s and Don’ts

In a previous article I gave some pointers on how effectively to use emailing as a recruiting tool. In fact, I made the premise that I don’t believe you can be a competitive recruiter without a robust emailing program. The program must reach candidates, clients, potential candidates and prospective clients on a selective and continuous basis. The program should be an integral part of your recruiting software. It definitely should never be separated from the recruiting database requiring a forced dialogue between recruiting information and emailing information. The two pieces, recruiting data and emailing data, and their associated software should be one and the same. If they are not, no matter how good the interface is it will break and require constant attention.

However, no matter how good the recruiting software emailing features are if they are misused it can cause more problems than it solves. Your biggest issue is not to get yourself blacklisted as a spammer. It is just as bad to look like a spammer to candidates as it is to clients.

I like to break recruiter emailing down into two components. The first component is the day to day stuff where you are contacting candidates and thanking them for resumes, telling them about positions and sending rejections. This will be the same for clients, sending resumes, telling them about candidates, etc. The receiving part is here as well, for clients and candidates when they respond to your emails. All of the above should be available in your recruiting database and quickly accessible by person (candidate or client), by position, by company and by anything else you may need such as by recruiter, date and job title. Most importantly, the emailing information must not include the junk of a typical “in” and “out” email box. The email correspondence that gets to the recruiting database must only be about contact with clients and candidates.

The second emailing component is the one where a recruiter can truly rise above the competition. I call this component “broadcast emailing”. Some would say this is a component of CRM. I do not. Put a CRM article link here.

Broadcast emailing for recruiting must be robust and capable of sending at least 1000 qualified and verified emails every 5 minutes. To get this speed you must select your SMTP server with great care. SMTP server selection will be the content of a future article. Once the email is out you certainly do not want individual copies of the email in your Sent Items box for each person. However your recruiting database should tell you what you emailed on a given date to this person. How then can you know all this and not bloat your server or computer with 1000’s of copies of emails? Your recruiting software must be clever.

Check list for good recruiter emailing practices

• The recruiting emailing function should check and make sure the email addresses are valid. Email servers POP and SMTP can catch the fact that you are sending to invalid addresses. Your email server or some major POP server providers may blacklist you. Kiss your global marketing program good bye.

• The emailing recruiting software must de-duplicate before sending. Again the ugly grim reaper of blacklisting will rise from the lands of POP and email servers if they discover multiple emails going to the same address.

• The Tool does not send to possible invalid addresses unless you force it. Some recipient servers only validate once you send.

• The recruiting system has to be aware of the email bounce backs so the bounce backs can be removed automatically and any recruiter can see that this candidate or client has an invalid email address. Three things are important here: 1) It is very important that the recruiter does not have to do something special to see that the email address is invalid. 2) Don’t lose the original invalid email address. 3) The recruiting emailing function should not go through the wasteful steps of validating and/or emailing to this invalid address again.

• The recruiting emailing features must include intelligent address validation. For example, our recruiting software validation breaks addresses into 3 primary categories which are Valid, Maybe, and Invalid. Maybe and Invalid are subcategorized into Maybe (Busy, Timeout, Refused, Deferred and Other) and Invalid (Syntax, Bad Domain, Bad User at Domain and Other). This allows the recruiter to decide If the recipient servers are lying, greylisting, etc).

“greylisting is related to whitelisting and blacklisting. What happens is that each time a given mailbox receives an email from an unknown contact (ip), that mail is rejected with a "try again later" message (this happens at the SMTP layer and is transparent to the end user). This, in the short run, means that all mail gets delayed at least until the sender tries again - but this is where spam loses out! Most spam is not sent out using RFC compliant MTAs; the spamming software will not try again later.”

• Recruiting emailing logs must be kept of each validation run. In the event of high volume refusals or deferrals these logs can be reviewed by a person not a computer. In this instance, automation will fail you and you may get another “Hal 2000” on your hands.

• The recruiting emailing system should be able to use any SMTP server for sending (Authenticated or Anonymous). We recommend authenticated because many recipient servers won’t accept email from an anonymous server. However, an anonymous server allows you to use mail servers other than the one associated with your corporate domain and allows you to switch easily if necessary.

Here are some pointers for selecting a SMTP server:

1. Make sure it requires authenticated access.
2. Make sure they do not allow Open Relay Mail.
3. Dedicated is always better than shared.
4. Make sure SPF configuration is set for your Domain.
5. Make sure Reverse DNS resolves to your mail box.
6. Determine the type of Spam Filtering that is in effect.

• The recruiting emailing features have to allow easy access to templates that can merge data about individuals into many thousands of emails. The templates must be versatile enough to use text, MS Word or HTML formats. The recruiting system must have a safeguard in place so that emails include the common Electronic Communications Privacy Act disclaimer in the footer. This is important in all mailings to help keep you off the blacklists.

• The recruiting software should include a user managed “do not mail” function in order to keep either groups or individuals off emailing lists. You can enter specific email addresses or domains which ensure that even if you select the recipient, the recruiting system will not send to these recipients or any recipient at that domain. (The easiest way to get blacklisted is to send an email to someone who has requested removal from you list.)

• The recruiting email validation process should be multi threaded (10 threads) but the send process should be single threaded. This helps ensure that the send rate stays below the radar of flood based spam filters.

Recruiting Software - Rolling Your Own

Oh no! This is the worst decision a recruiting firm (Contingency or Retained) can make.

I can make countless analogies here. Would a surgeon operate on himself or make his own instruments? Do pianists build their own pianos? Does a pilot build his own plane? Why would a recruiting firm build their own recruiting software? It does not make sense, unless the recruiting firm is global with thousands of employees. Even then I would question the wisdom of this decision. Yet there is not one week that has gone by in my 15 years of giving recruiting software demos where I find a firm seriously considering such a decision!

I believe buying the worst recruiting software application is better than building your own even if the custom software does work well and does exactly what you want. Although you will soon find out that it never will.

The worst that can come of building your own recruiting software is that you are actually successful and have it working pretty well. Then the money pit and resource drain starts. Every time computers and/or software evolve to new heights your spiffy recruiting software stays where it was, or you invest in yet another round of upgrades and retrofitting. Better hope those computer geniuses are still around to make the changes or else your new computer genius may say “this is spaghetti code and we need to start all over”. J

So, why do some recruiting firms do it or even consider it? I don’t really know, but here are some of my best guesses from most to least likely.

A successful recruiting firm has a business model that does not quite fit their current software or anything they have looked at. Of all the reasons for rolling your own, this is probably the best. But, it is still wrong. The development will cause lack of focus on recruiting. The long range effects are still just as devastating because the recruiting software monster once created will have to be fed and cared for. Similar to your children coming to you with tears in their eyes for the adorable puppy and you say yes. After about a year, guess who ends up feeding it, walking it and taking the now full grown dog to the vet. Does your custom recruiting software pay its way by contributing more to revenues than other commercial software? I doubt it! A pot of gold does not exist at the end of the custom recruiting software rainbow.

Another reason may be that the recruiting firm is a start up and doesn’t see anything that fits its perceived business model. The watch word here is “perceived”. The firm has no idea how it will actually be functioning a year from now if it survives. Why in the world would you be writing a recruiting tool for a recruiting method that has not proven itself?

And finally the worst reason for rolling your own! The owner or a partner prides him/her self on their own technical prowess and possibly has even written a program or two. I cannot think of a better way to assure failure for either the software or the recruiting company. Ah, the pride of authorship and believing “I can do everything better than anyone”; tsk, tsk glad I never worked with you as a recruiter.

Ok, so what do you do if you have looked and looked and can’t find anything you like but you absolutely need some kind of recruiting software? Find the one that is the closest fit, make it work, stop worrying about technique and get on with the business of recruiting.

Almost all software of any kind at best answers about 80% of what you want to do with it. Here are some tips on selecting recruiting software, taken from our web site at http://www.go4recruitingsoftware.com/.

1. The first step is to have a good idea of how you do, and want to do, your recruiting. If you are already thinking about rolling your own this should be no problem.

2. Decide on the recruiting software before you buy the hardware. So many times I have seen someone buy an expensive piece of computer hardware and then start looking for software to run the business with and find that the choices are limited because of the hardware.

3. Determine the prospects of your vendor being around for you five years from now. Once you have converted or entered your recruiting data into a recruiting system, you are dependent on being able to get at it or at least convert it. If your vendor goes out of business you may have serious problems in getting to your resume database.

4. Determine the software tools that were used to build the recruiting system, i.e. computer language, database engines and other software tools. What you’re looking for is to make sure that your recruiting software is not dependent on some specialized software tool or vendor that may not be able to or may not want to keep up with the rapid changes in the computing industry. For my customer's protection, I like to put my money on Microsoft’s flagship products, i.e. MS WORD, MS ACCESS, EXCEL, OUTLOOK, VISUAL BASIC, C#, SQL SERVER and the latest and greatest Windows operating system.

5. Determine the quality of the product with some bellwether questions; does the product have a demo? Will the demo un-install from your computer? Where and what is the size of the customer support staff? Evaluate the quality of the documentation.

6. Finally perform some simple bench marks relating to the amount of work required to perform basic recruiting tasks. Remember that basic recruiting steps are performed many times a day and the time consumed mounts rapidly if the task is just a few keystrokes or clicks more.
From the point of entry to the system, how long, how many keystrokes and/or clicks does it take me to find a person picked at random based on skills, name, salary and or geography?
How long, how many keystrokes and/or clicks does it take me to get a phone number of a person from various points in the database?

How quickly can I find out the latest conversation with a client or applicant that has just called, while I am performing other tracking tasks?

From any point in the database what steps do I have to perform to search for information? Are my searches restricted to certain areas or can every field that displays or accepts data be queried? When I do search for information and the results are displayed, can the displayed information be changed or updated or is another task or screen required for updating? Is there ownership responsibility for the data entered into the database? Can you tell who entered a note, job order, calendar or resume? What are its emailing capabilities for initial and broadcast emails? How does it get along with MS OUTLOOK?

Labels: recruiting software

Recruiting Software – Effective use of Email

Recruiters cannot be competitive without a good email system. Outlook is a good email system but forget it if you think it is good enough for you to compete as a recruiter for candidates and job orders. Recruiters demand a lot from an email system. Gopher pay's pretty good attention to notes on applicants and clients and that was really important 5 years ago. However, email and the internet has made email activity more important than the manually entered note of a single recruiter.

When a recruiter searches the database for applicants or clients they are reviewing the activity of each individual or company. The content of incoming and out going emails may be more important than the notes entered by an individual recruiter.

So, a recruiting system has a problem. How can it capture all the content between recruiters and their clients and applicants so that all the recruiters and management can see the total activity? Solving this problem can be a disaster for the recruiting database if we as developers are not careful.

The most troublesome solution would be to attach or embed the email system directly into the recruiting database. Can you imagine the power and resources it would take to keep a 10 person recruiting database going when it also included all their emails, regardless of how good the spam filters were! Oh yes, some might see it works, but as an old recruiter actually using something like this I would say forget it! Give me a roll of quarters and a phone book. J

Another impractical solution would be to embed a custom email solution into the recruiting database and not allow any other email methods except through the recruiting database. I say impractical because the system would breed discontent among the recruiters on a daily basis, comparing it to MS Outlook and all that it is capable of. Let’s face it, a recruiting database developer could put 10 of they very best programmers working for 5 years on an email system and still could not come close to the functionality of MS Outlook. More importantly, they could never achieve the acceptance of their system over the common mindset of the PC user that MS Outlook has achieved. If it does not work like MS Outlook then something must be wrong or “it’s not intuitive”.

A third solution would be to provide keys in the recruiting database to the email system of each recruiter. Under this method when a recruiter brings up information on an applicant or client there would be an email control that would either retrieve all the “IN” and “OUT” boxes of all of the recruiters’ email applications. As you could guess, this would be very slow, especially with MS Outlook. MS Outlook is by far the most common email system in use today by recruiters. The recruiting database would have to keep track of each recruiter’s own personal email system for email addresses to the database. Even with Microsoft Exchange this would be almost impossible to keep the database responsive enough for recruiters who are always up against the desire for a very fast response time to their needs.

A fourth solution getting closer to success would be to bring in all the “IN” and “OUT” emails for applicants and clients to the recruiting database and leave the individual recruiter email systems intact. This method requires a conversation between the independent email system and the recruiting system that tells each what the other is doing. It would be tricky but doable. This method still needs to solve three issues that would bring down any recruiting system if they were ignored.

The first issue is all the back and forth replies you see in MS Outlook. Each reply gets longer and more redundant from previous replies. The recruiting database does not need to see the redundancy. It needs only the whole conversation once. If it did carry the conversation like MS Outlook the recruiting database would get very big and slow very fast. The second issue is the question of the email marketing of the recruiting database. Can you imagine the size of the recruiting database if it kept a copy of each email blast to 5,000 people? Not to mention the danger of getting blacklisted. This is a whole other area when working with email within a recruiting system. The third issue is how to handle all the attachments to those emails!

In summary, I think the fourth solution is best but the recruiting software must solve the three issues. I think Gopher has a pretty good solution to those three issues.

Recruiting Software Support

I think recruiting software deserves a little more attention to support and the help than most software. Many recruiters using commercially developed recruitment software are using it all day long. In fact, they never leave it except for lunch, coffee breaks and naps. Other software applications are come and go like drive by’s. However, even if it is “drive by” software the customer can still have a serious problem that demands fast customer support. I am only trying to point out that continuous use software should have a more in depth and responsive support program. The continuous use customer naturally has more dire problems when the continuous use software is failing vs. “drive by” software.

Several things we consider when looking at recruiting software support are:

• How quickly can the customer reach someone?
  
• How much knowledge does the support person have of the recruiting software and of the recruiting industry?
  
• How much empathy does the support person have for the recruiter’s problem?
  
• How much confidence does the recruiter have after the support call?
  
• How much time has elapsed between problem and resolution?
  
• How many people did the recruiter with the problem have to talk to before the problem was resolved?
  
• Is there a quality check initiative in the customer support program?
  
  

I am not going to say too much about the above when it applies to both “drive by’s” and “continuous use software” but I will rant and rave about industry knowledge, empathy and confidence.

How quickly can the customer reach someone?

I think a good standard response time is about 4 business hours for the recruiting industry. If the problem is “The recruiting software is down and I am going to lose my family, house and eldest child.” than the response should be immediate. I also think it is a good idea for the recruiting software vendor to “put his/her money where his/her mouth is”. If response is not made within 4 business hours the customer should receive some kind of monetary credit. I do not believe that a recruiter who depends on the recruiting software for his/her livelihood can trust the words without some sort of monetary penalty if the support is not available in time.

Notice that I have not asked you to consider whether or not you get a live person on the phone. This comes up often at our firm. I believe there is a problem with live coverage. Have you ever called your health insurance carrier, phone company, federal government or Dell? Chances are that you may get a live person after much patience and you have pressed all the correct buttons as directed by the prompts. The person you have reached is clueless. He/she can’t help you but may direct you to someone who can. I would much prefer to dial a number and leave a message regarding my problem and have the confidence and comfort that someone will call me back within 4 hours that can actually solve my problem.

How much knowledge does the support person have of the recruiting software and of the recruiting industry?

This is a “biggie” for recruiting software. I absolutely hate calling someone like Dell or EarthLink and getting transferred to someone in India who answers with a robot like voice and gives me scripted answers to scripted questions. I feel that recruiting software problems are more dynamic, complex and derive more from humanity than pre-programmed responses.

I cannot believe that any recruiting software vendor can be proud of, or even claim to have, a support program if the support person has not been thoroughly schooled in the profession of recruiting. Unfortunately, I have to admit that our company can do much better in this area. I am seriously considering have all support people who have contact with recruiting customers spend one month with one of our recruiting customers as a trainee. I just cannot figure out how to absorb the time and money to follow through with this.

How much empathy does the support person have for the recruiter’s problem?

This has happened to all of us. You make the call to get help and you actually get your answer but you are still troubled, confused and you wish you could have talked to someone who had more empathy for your rather human problem.

Recruiters are getting beat up all day by clients, and applicants and other recruiters. When they make a call for help they usually need a shoulder to cry on and sometimes patience because they are angry, frustrated and even scared. Empathy is an absolute must from any customer support person.

How much confidence does the recruiter have after the support call?

Like I said above, supporting a person whose very livelihood depends on the functioning of recruiting software is more than simply answering questions. This person must have confidence in the software. All software has bugs and does not always work the way we wish. The support group has the challenge of helping the recruiter be a better recruiter rather than fix the bug. In fact, if the recruiter walks away happy and with more confidence of our support and the bugs remain unfixed than the support person has done their job.

How much time has elapsed between problem and resolution?

Don’t know, but the customer must know that they are not being ignored or treated from a pre-written script.

How many people did the recruiter with the problem have to talk to before the problem was resolved?

It is really nice to say “you will always get a real person on the phone when you call”. Call me weird but if I have to go through “phone button hell” and then have a real person who “records the incident”, please shoot me!

Is there a quality check initiative the customer support program?

If the recruiting software vendor does not have a continuous program to ask candid questions about “how we are doing” and is willing to publish them then the vendor does not have a good support program.

Recruiting software – Is it different?

Of course it is! All software is different. But what are the unique characteristics of recruiting software that make it different from MS Outlook, an accounting system, banking software, computer design, graphics design, marketing, etc.?

All of these applications have uniqueness and characteristics that allow them to be defined as a group. What are the characteristics of recruiting software applications that allow them to be identified? Of course, this could be just another sneaky way of asking the question, “What do you look for when selecting recruiting software?”. Every recruiting software vendor has one of those documents including BlackDog Recruiting Software.

But really that is not what this article is about. I am trying to get to higher ground here. I do not want this article to become a document that says “recruiting software must do this and if it doesn’t pick ours because it does”.

All professionals have tools they use to do their job. A surgeon uses a vast array of very special instruments and specialized computers to perform her work. An artist has his brushes and special paint mixes. A carpenter uses saws, ladders, leveling devices, etc. An accountant has accounting systems.

All of these professionals share a common characteristic in that they use a variety of tools to perform their work.

Recruiting software as a tool for a recruiter is unique from the above examples in that it is designed to be the only tool a recruiter will need besides a telephone, and even that is under assault by recruiting software vendors!

Wow! Think about it. Recruiting software just put mankind back 30,000 years where the only tool he used to stay alive was a sharp stone and his brain!

Of course recruiting software systems are not exactly sharp stones, but some are close. J

In all seriousness now, the more that an applicant tracking/executive search/ recruiting software system can do for a recruiter the better the tool. It is an all in one tool because of the characteristics of the recruiting industry.

Most of us recruiting software vendors are driven by incorporating or interfacing any new technologies that help a recruiter into their own software, i.e. phone and video conferencing, PDA’s and video resumes.

Staffing or recruiting software vendors are like the Wal-Mart of the software world, meaning we would like to be the one stop shop for all your recruiting needs by bringing everything a recruiter needs under one roof.

But there is a dilemma for us vendors. The profession of recruiting is, for the most part, a niche oriented business. A recruiter specializes in medical device sales, helicopter pilots, hospital staffing, etc.

Recruiting software has to be more specialized than a contact management system or a CRM system because these tools are too general. Recruiters need more preciseness than this, or they find themselves spending too much time finding the people they need. Consider, for example, the difference between a table saw for a finished carpenter and one for a fine furniture maker. Both tools would get the table made but the one made by the finished carpenter would have taken longer and would not look as good.

The dilemma is how to make recruiting software be an all in one tool for the recruiter and still be specialized enough to serve the unique characteristics of their recruiting niche?

Some recruiting software goes too far and works only for a specific recruiting niche, i.e. nursing, attorneys, etc. For a recruiting software vendor they are too specialized and can’t evolve quickly enough as the environment changes so they become extinct and leave their customers in a very desperate situation.

These systems are just a hair above custom software. I may write a future article about custom software, but generally I think it is a bad idea for any recruiting firm.

Recruiting Software – Ten worst ways of using

I talk to a lot of recruiters and recruiting firm owners Monday through Friday. I have been on this schedule for almost 20 years now. We talk a lot about recruiting software. As I sit here and reflect upon what I have heard over the years, I try to make sense of all those conversations. I am looking for a nugget of wisdom that I can write about that would be helpful to recruiters.

I am tired of all the sanctimoniousness sound bytes for selecting recruiting software:
• ‘I am the best because … and we have …’
• ‘We have on site support …’
• ‘We are user friendly …’
• ‘We are state of the art ...’
• ‘Our software is totally automatic just turn it on and watch the money roll…’
• ‘All our competitors are stupid and have inferior products …’
• ‘We are easy to use …’

Why not flip this analysis of recruitment software to the other side? How is the recruiting software firm planning to use and implement a recruiting software system once they have made the agonizing purchase? Out of the mouths of customers and potential customers I have heard incredulous strategies that still to this day make me chuckle. I have been told I have ‘dark humor’, along the lines of ‘The Far Side’ material. Perhaps that is just a polite way of saying I have no humor at all. So you won’t hurt my feelings if you think these strategies are more sad than funny.

Here we go with my pick of the 10 most stupid uses of recruiting software tools.

1. “We are going to buy the most expensive recruiter software package available because we believe if you pay top dollar you get the best product. But since we are paying so much we are going to buy only one license and let all 20 recruiters take turns using it.”
2. “We are going to buy some cheap contact management software and install it on each recruiter’s PC. Each recruiter will have their own private database.”
3. “We are going to make a fresh start because the last three recruiter systems we bought did not work out.”
4. “We are going to buy a recruiting system for the recruiters, but we are going to let the sales people either buy something else or continue with their present system.”
5. “We are going to buy recruiting software that we can customize to our own very special way of recruiting.”
6. “We just hired a ‘Super Star big biller’ recruiter who wants us to switch to the recruiting software that he/she is used to using.”
7. “We have purchased some good recruiting software but we only use it for searching resumes.” “We have purchased some good recruiting software but we only use for finding phone numbers.” “We have purchased some good recruiting software but we only use for writing notes.”
8. “We have purchased recruiting software and we are making a lot of the information private for each recruiter or for management eyes only.”
9. “We can’t find any recruiting software that suits our needs so we are going to write our own.”
10. “We want our recruiting software to be able to delete or purge out undesirables.”

Taking turns using the recruiting software.

This is by far the most ridiculous use of recruiting software and is therefore number one on my list. What do the other recruiters do while the one recruiter has the floor? I suppose they are working off of printouts from when they had the computer time. Trust me when I say that recruiting software used like this is more trouble than it is worth. Too much administration and none of the recruiters have up to date information when they are talking to clients and applicants. If I say any more I run the risk of being put in the same bucket as the owner by bothering to make a comment.

Each recruiter has their own recruiting software.

This is close to number one but at least the recruiter’s own desk has access to organized information to applicants and/or clients. It is still pretty bad however because of the overlap, redundancy and the inability of the firm to take advantage of collaboration. Collaboration makes two and two more than four because of the shared knowledge and experiences. The recruiting firm who thinks that recruiters should be treated as independent cells is dead wrong even if the firm is successful. Collaboration would make them more successful.

Making a fresh start because the last recruiting system did not work out.

This is like the tennis player blaming the tennis racquet for losing. Do you remember Billie Jean King playing Bobby Riggs? Maybe not, but Bobby Riggs used to beat guys with a broom. I wouldn’t be surprised if Federer could beat most amateurs with a ping pong paddle.

I am always very hesitant when a recruiting software prospect comes to us complaining that his current recruiting software is no good. I will listen harder if the maker of the software is out of business, quite common, or if they complain about a lack of support. But if they start complaining to the effect that they do not like the way it works and it doesn’t do this and doesn’t do that, then I am scared to death. It is not the software, my dear recruiting friend, it is you! Stop looking for someone to blame and try to gain some introspection.

Separate but equal systems for recruiters and sales.

There is no such thing as separate but equal. History has proved that over a million times. A corporation, partnership or privately held recruiting firm has more than one person for a reason. As a group of recruiters and sales recruiters they are more individually productive than they would be as individuals. It makes absolutely no sense to separate data between clients and applicants and keep recruiters in the dark. It is also terribly redundant and makes it necessary to do many things twice (redundancy, yes?).

Heavy customization of commercial recruiting software.

This locks you into a point in time and you will soon have outdated software with no easy way to take advantage of new technology.

We just hired a ‘Super Star Big Biller’ recruiter and we are going to follow his/her lead on recruiting software.

This is a classic case of “the tail wagging the dog”. If he or she was such a super star why aren’t they out on their own or building a company of their own? I really don’t believe you can employ hired guns in the recruiting business as they are too disruptive. It never works, they leave and you end up worse than you were before, but with a smaller savings account. Sounds like a divorce, doesn’t it?

We only use our recruiting software to search resumes.

All good recruiting software is designed to be a complete system for any recruiter. If a piece of it is doing something you don’t like, then learn to like it! To circumvent what it can do starts a chain of events that just begets more confusion and work. These people, I believe, give rise to the “we need a fresh start syndrome”.

In my opinion, using only a limited portion of recruiting software is like buying a grand piano and then only learning how to play “Mary had a little lamb”, because you are too dumb or lazy or both.

Private information in recruiting software.

If you read the above you already know how I feel about this. This concept can only hurt the recruitment effort. If your recruiting firm succeeds with this policy in place than it is succeeding in spite of privatization, not because of it.

We are writing our own recruiting software.

This way is the same as five, only worse. Now the recruiting firm not only has to pay attention to recruiting but recruiting software. Their biggest issue is how they can keep up with evolving technology. How can they ever hope to keep the same programmers working on the same code they created over the years? You cannot expect programmers/software engineers to be loyal to a small recruiting firm. It is very similar to a doctor trying to be his own physician.

Purge the database of undesirables.

How can a recruiting firm keep another recruiter at the same company from making the same mistake if the database does not have road signs for danger?

This is the end of my nuggets of wisdom.