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.
