Karen Jackson, President of Celerity, Technology Services (5:17) www.celerityts.com

I think we are a pretty early JobDiva user. We have been with the product for about 2½ years now. We really wanted the intelligence search and having come off another candidate, tracking system that took an awful lot of effort to find what you were looking for, we made the leap to JobDiva.

The tool itself has a ton of functionality. We took advantage of JobDiva training. Carolyn Palermo came in. She spent nearly a day holding hands of folks who are not necessarily very technically adept. We had a lot of training after the fact as well. She has been terrific as have the development team in helping us understanding just exactly how to work the searches, to work the excludes to understand what are our best strategies for going after the passive candidate database.

They have also been really wonderful at adding functionality or changing up look and field for something that didn’t quite work for us in terms for our own business process. We had to ask for a new feature and really didn’t have to stomp our feet hard, the team has really been wonderful.

We are not a high volume VMS shop. We actually have very few VMS in our client mix. The number of resumes that we submit to a client is certainly a lot less than the average staffing firm that is working with a VMS. JobDiva has really done for us is given us the ability to get the recruiters out of doing what I call, “stupid stuff”, which is working the job boards, digging around on searches particularly on boards that were wasting their time.

It was sort a kind of thing that an admin could almost do. It lets them really be recruiters. The harvesters are out bringing in the resumes that we need, populating the database and allows the recruiters to be recruiters and spend their time and energy in the right places.

One of the features that we use regularly is a feature that allows you to go back in your database to whatever year you want to set it. Let’s say you want to go back three years ago. We will actually look for candidates that are actually three years old in our database that are not currently on the boards and we have that contact information. Particularly, we know there is a lot of competition and a lot of staffing firms going after that same candidate pool that has just popped on career builder today. We are looking in the database for people who aren’t job hunting or have not yet put their resumes on the boards but their current position will be coming to an end. Those are tools within JobDiva that are hugely helpful to our going after that candidate pool.

Our PO is recruitment process outsourcing. Just like BPO (business process outsourcing) what’s happening is big, fast moving trend in the staffing business is to supplement recruiting teams with off shore resources to recruit for you. For various strategic business reasons, Celerity decided to go with a pretty big RPO presence verses trying to train up a staff here where we don’t have the ability to hire quickly enough. JobDiva has been an enormous help for us in that respect. We have a team in India who’s from another company but their dedicated to Celerity and they use JobDiva as any other Celerity recruiter would.

For all intent and purposes, they are Celerity recruiters. Candidates receive mail merges from those recruiters and it says (don’t know spelling Schweppa Pandi) technical recruiters, Celerity Technology Services, Stamford, Connecticut on her signature blog. All of the data that they compile using JobDiva is in JobDiva. They do full process recruitment. They work very closely with the account executives. They recruit a candidate using all the JobDiva tools. They put all of their notes, conversations and updates to resumes right in the system and the handoff is seamless for the account executives.

It has been wonderful a tool for the best in that respect. I can’t imagine how we would have pulled this off so successfully if we didn’t have a way to capture that data and have this team of people using exactly our business process and resources.