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BSI People Group recently upgraded to ISYS Search Software's ISYS:web 8, the latest offering from the global supplier of enterprise search solutions for business and government.

In doing so, BSI experienced first-hand the added value of ISYS -- not only is the software feature-rich and effective, but its sales and support staff get a leg up on understanding each customer's business needs.

About BSI People Group

BSI People Group is a recruitment firm and HR consultancy that specializes in staff recruitment, training and retention, and building the overall strength of an organization's employment offering. The company has four different services: BSI People focuses on executive search and selection; BSI Consulting provides corporate consulting and training services; BSI Learned Friends focuses on recruitment for the legal marketplace; and BSI's Employment Value Proposition Diagnostic (EVPd) paints a detailed picture of factors affecting staff retention. Together, these four arms deliver a comprehensive range of human resource and staffing services.

As a part of its recruitment business, BSI People tracks about 4,000 resumes per month. Over the years, the company has retained more than 231,000 resumes and cover letters.

The Challenge

BSI People found it challenging to keep up with the constant flow of incoming resumes, CVs, and other candidate information. The company's customer relationship management (CRM) system needed assistance to keep track of this information effectively, and it did not want consultants to ever sift manually through these documents. It was essential for this growing organization to have an effective "filing system" that ensured a candidate wasn't missed during a job search process. In 2000, the company began to look for technology that could help it search, sort, sift, and organize its candidate data.

Selecting the Right Tool

To begin its search for a solution that would effectively manage its vast repositories of internal documents, BSI People started evaluating recruitment-specific CRM systems. Unfortunately, the evaluation team discovered that the majority of recruitment CRM vendors had limited search capabilities as the data retrieved was only as good as the data entered (and consultants were adverse to administration). Plus, CRM systems most were too expensive.

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"We found that even though many of the recruitment CRMs have a 'resume database search technology,' they still require a person or persons to manage the database," said Dugald McCulloch, group operations and talent acquisition manager, BSI People. "By our calculations, we would have needed to hire a few full-time employees to manage our database, input the right information and ensure accurate results. To us, this was unacceptable, especially with the high cost of these CRM systems."

BSI People then turned to enterprise search vendors. An employee had used ISYS Search Software's search technology previously, so the evaluation team gave ISYS:web a test drive.

"We didn't need to look at any other search vendors," said McCulloch. "ISYS has it all -- it's flexible, affordable, feature-rich and very conducive to customization. We looked at a lot of recruitment software, but none of it had the capability of ISYS."

Selecting the Right Tool, Again

BSI People originally implemented the ISYS:web 5 back in 2000. In the fall of 2006, ISYS:web 8 was launched, and BSI People decided to upgrade to take advantage of the software's new features and capabilities.

In addition, the company's growing database had begun to encounter a large number of duplicate files. For example, candidates often apply for several different jobs with the same resume, creating multiple copies of that file in the system. Leveraging ISYS:web 8's flexibility, the company tackled this problem by way of internal development work and some assistance from a systems integration (SI) partner.

ISYS' sales and support staff collaborated with this SI partner and the tech team at BSI to create a solution that eliminated the duplication issue. The problem was solved by re-working the results page and enabling an option to export the results list as a CSV (comma separated values) file. When the CSV is created, ISYS pulls only the most recent details (email address, phone number, etc.). BSI People took this capability even further to enable email-harvesting capabilities with ISYS.

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