MCH

Hi Brenda.  Tell us about your role at MCH.

Brenda: I oversee our HR committee, which works with the typical HR stuff: benefits, employee moral issues, any kind of thing that comes up HR-wise.

How do you use ApplicantStack?

Brenda: Well, part of my role is to maintain all of our hiring processes.  I’ve been doing this for a couple of years as the HR director, but it’s been kind of crazy because we’ve never had an online application.  People would email and request them and I would have to send PDFs over all the time and it just got to be a real hassle.  So I got to thinking, all these companies have online applications so it can’t be that hard to do it.  So I searched for a product and found ApplicantStack and started using it.  We just really needed to get that online application to our website so we can see if it would make a difference

Has it made a difference?

Brenda: It’s been very, very helpful and it saves me a LOT of time.  And our applicant count is definitely up.  Now, to be honest, I’m not sure it’s all due to having the online application, because with the economy the way it is I would expect to have more applicants, so it’s hard to measure.  But my thought is that if you make it easier for people to apply you’re going to get more applicants.  So I think some of [the increase] is due to having the online application.

What was your process before you used ApplicantStack?

Brenda: We have affirmative action requirements because we have a government contract, and in the beginning we had to even number our applications.  So I would have to scan in an application for everyone who applied and send it to them.  In time it got a little better and I would just save a PDF of the application on my desktop and I would send it out per request, but I still had to send it out every time somebody wanted an application.

And what is your process now with ApplicantStack?

Brenda: Now, with ApplicantStack, I don’t have to do all that.  I get notified from the system when somebody has applied.  I still have to log it for our affirmative action but I don’t have to send something out to every applicant.  And the other thing is a lot of applicants would call and ask us what jobs we have available.  Previously I would literally go through each one of the positions over the phone, or email a list to them.  Now I just direct them to our website where they can see all our postings and then can even apply online.  So it’s been very helpful for us.  And the managers love it because they get everything at once, whereas before they would frequently get the application and resume separately.

What kind of jobs do you post through ApplicantStack?

Brenda: We post everything through ApplicantStack now.  Right now we have jobs posted for our IT, Sales, Marketing and Research departments, and its working great.  There was one position that I was a little leery of, because it was a lower level entry position and I wasn’t sure people would use the online application.  But I talked with the hiring manager and she was fine with trying it in the online system.  Well, since we posted the job online she’s had over 30 applications come through the online system and only 4 walk-ins.  So now all our jobs get posted online.

Where do you post your jobs?

Brenda: We post to our website, to LinkedIn, Craigslist, Monster, and some on Careerbuilder.  We also post to KCBMA, which is a direct marketing association, and to colleges and universities.

Last question, just for fun. If you could have any job in the world, what would you want to do?

Brenda: You know, I really like what I do.  I did work in the medical insurance field before this job and the constant change was a major headache.  HR changes too but I’m very happy in this field.

Hi Buddy.  Tell us a little about what Radix does.

Buddy: We’re a recruiting company for Information Technology positions.  We’ve been in the business since around 1982.  We originally started out as a consulting company and evolved into a placement agency because our clients kept asking us if we knew good people.  So we moved away from the consulting to the actual placement of candidates for our clients. 

What is your role at Radix Jobs?

Buddy: I take care of all the systems for our recruiters.  For example, we have systems for applicant tracking, marketing and mass emailing.  So I go out and do the research to select the new systems, test the new systems, and handle implementation including conversion of data from the old to new system.

Did you have an Applicant Tracking System before ApplicantStack?

Buddy: Yes, we had a system that was developed in house that worked fine.  But then the development staff decided to move on and I decided it was time to move to a commercial system.  We didn’t want to continue to go through the time and expense of supporting the system in house.  And we wanted to save money.  We wanted a commercial system where we wouldn’t have to worry about support and system problems.

How did you go about selecting an Applicant Tracking System

Buddy: The main thing we needed, of course, was to get qualified applicants.  I looked at 200 or more systems, whittling it down to about 25 systems which I detail tested and wound up selecting ApplicantStack based on its features and ease-of-use.  It has the ability to eliminate the wrong candidate and select the right candidates for my client.  For example, it saves us time by giving us the ability to ask questions of all applicants, which limits the number of resumes we need to read.  We only read those resumes of people who answer our questions correctly, most closely to our match.  This saves the recruiters time, it saves the applicants time, since we don’t have to call them to ask them questions that we can ask them online when they apply, and it saves our clients time, since we don’t send them resumes that don’t meet their needs.  One of our strongest criteria is the ability to save time.

How many people in your company use ApplicantStack and how many resumes are you tracking?

Buddy: Right now we have about 24,000 resumes in the system.  We’ve converted over our resumes from the old system to ApplicantStack, which was very easy to do and went smoothly.  We have 3 people who use the system at this point, but we’re hoping to expand on that.

Where do you post your job openings?

Buddy: We use Dice, and we also use Craigslist.  We’re basically IT, and most IT people reside with Dice.  We’ve used HotJobs and Monster, but didn’t have the same success we had with Dice.

Would you recommend ApplicantStack to other recruiters?

Buddy: Absolutely.  It was very easy to learn.  You don’t have to spend days and days learning and relearning the system.  It’s very well designed and documented well.  And I like the flexibility to add my own fields and questions.  It’s very handy both for me and the applicant end of things.  By the way, anyone who is planning to do the research I did, if they want to save time they can call me and I can talk with them directly.

That’s a generous offer!  OK, last question, and this one is kind of for fun, if you could have any job in the world what job would you want to do?

Buddy: That is an interesting question!  I would like to just spend time doing research on projects.  I’ve been doing it for what seems like a hundred years.  I started in data processing in 1959, and it’s really an addiction.  It’s fun.  I love the development end of it, putting the things together and seeing the satisfaction when it all comes to production.

Hi Bill. Tell us about First Bank and Trust and your role.

Bill: Here at First Bank & Trust, I’m in charge of customer service, customer convenience, customer satisfaction, and how we present ourselves to customers, which includes anybody who we want to recruit for a job opening.

What role do you have in hiring and recruiting?

Bill: I oversee our HR function. I have an HR director, who’s also in charge of our corporate values.

How do you use ApplicantStack?

Bill: Last year it was in our strategic plan to get to an automated process where potential applicants could access our website and apply directly to us from wherever they were without having to come to a location. We wanted to enable them to do it electronically. So we did a thorough analysis to determine the best software product for doing this and ApplicantStack was the product we chose.

What was your process before ApplicantStack?

Bill: Our process prior to going to the online application and evaluation process was that somebody had to print the application from our website, then either fax it to us or bring it to us.

And what is your process like now?

Bill: By going with ApplicantStack we’ve accomplished the online application process but in addition to that the real benefit that we’ve seen is the ease of tracking applicants and communication with those applicants. We can now generate an electronic response to them and keep track of communication, and narrow it down from the process of bulk applications down to qualified candidates and then proceed from there. And we do all this in a very efficient manner that keeps the applicants informed and gives us a clear record of how all that transpired.

What kind of people do you hire?

Bill: We hire the full gamut, entry level all the way up to management level positions, through this process. One of the advantages that we found was that the complete anonymity and confidentiality of people who want to apply through this process prevents them from having to physically make an appearance at the location, which does at times compromise their confidentiality.

Where do you post your jobs?

Bill: We post to external job boards and link them back to our ApplicantStack job board on our website to apply. We post to Lubbockonline, KCBD, and Monster. We also post to specialized sites when we’re looking for certain criteria. For example a mortgage underwriter will go to a mortgage underwriting site, or if we’re looking for a lender we’ll go to a bank lending recruitment site.

Would you recommend ApplicantStack to others?

Bill: After having evaluated all the different options that we had for going with an electronic online application process and analysis, we felt like ApplicantStack met all of our expectations and now is exceeding those.

OK, last question (and it’s important). If you could have any job in the world, besides of course your current one, what would you want to do?

Bill: I’d be the ranch manager for my ranch.