FROM JANUARY 2014's RECRUITER MAGAZINE

Broadbean is beta-testing a new platform that brings together its range of tools and puts sourcing directly at its heart. The Candidate Sourcing Platform (CSP) will be rolled out over the next 12 months and will continue to be developed during the next 24, if not 36 months. 

Dan Martin (pictured left), Broadbean managing director, told Recruiter that there are some tools and technologies it knows it will add to the platform in that time but says that there may be others it doesn’t yet know about that will emerge over the coming months and years. 

“We’ve defined it as a central place for sourcing but we haven’t defined everything it will ultimately do,” he explained. “It enables other tools to be added and we may work with third-party channels to add value for clients.”

The product introduction reflects the fragmentation of the recruitment advertising market thanks to a proliferation of channels, and aims to bring the candidate rather than the job advert to the front of the process. It brings all of a recruiter’s sourcing channels and tools together in one place so they can work much more efficiently and effectively. Crucially, it can automatically carry out searches on a recruiter’s internal database and external channels, including social media, before they even come into the platform.

It will take a job requisition created within a candidate relationship management (CRM) or applicant tracking system (ATS) and extract key information from it, then run searches on all the channels to which the recruiter has access. “So before they post the job they will have some indication as to the effectiveness of those channels for that role. Broadbean will do all of this work for them,” said Martin, who adds that these ‘already-run’ searches are all one click away from the recruiter. “More and more people want to have a proactive strategy to sourcing and the CSP is designed to make it as easy as possible to combine all of those activities into one workflow.” 

The platform is aimed at Broadbean’s multi-product clients, which are seeking more than advertisement distribution and for whom the workflow tools will be most suited. Broadbean has upgraded many of the tools within the platform including internal and external searching. It features an extraction engine that pulls out the key information from a job description such as job title, salary and location, as well as content that the system identifies as relevant to carry out a search and match. “We also have access to a structured taxonomy, which will enable us to add value to those terms,” he said. “So if we’ve pulled out a particular job title or skill, then the technology understands that there are other words that equate to the same thing that we can use to increase the number of candidates you might find.” This facility will be added to the product over the first few months. 

The platform also makes use of the third-party referral tool Social Referral, which enables a recruiter to see the number of potential matches within the networks of their employees and can then push that job out to them. Reporting and analytics tools built into the system allow recruiters to assess the effectiveness of all of their channels.

While clearly there are elements of the system, such as the referral tool, that are well suited to in-house recruiters, Martin believes the workflow benefits are relevant to agencies as well. “They are relatively better at exploiting the data they hold and relatively better at using external channels to proactively source candidates and this is designed to make it even easier for them to do this,” he said. “It’s a huge benefit for an agency with a high volume of candidates that they touch on a daily basis. There’s also still a perception that external channels are always best and this platform allows us to challenge this.”