Vered Priti Feingold, Elbit System’s recruitment director, tells of the concern experienced purchasing a new recruitment system, and explains why it is completely worth it.

By Shani Moshe
April 8, 2014
Labels: Niloosoft | employee recruitment system | placement agencies | sorting candidates | recruitment software |
Categories: employee recruitment | HR management |

Organizations know that their recruitment departments need a system that would assist them to overcome the huge amounts of CV’s sent to them every day. The thought, organization and operation required in order to select the best system, as well as the bueaurocratic saga experienced internally, cause us to delay the whole thing, because while implementing the new system, the recruitment department is still expected to continue its normal operation, provide service and meet targets.
Elbit Systems decided to accept the challenge and purchase an intelligent system that would screen and sort CV’s – Niloosoft’s EDGE. Vered Priti Feingold, Elbit System’s recruitment director, tells HRus in a special interview about the move her company has made.

What has made you think of buying a new recruitment system?
Vered Priti Feingold: at Elbit Systems we do everything to locate the best and most suitable people for the company – those who have added value on the personal level and would become an optimal part of our team. A large portion of our time is dedicated to locating engineers (hardware, software, system, mechanical and industrial), but we also recruit for other positions (marketing, purchasing, finances, production, administration, etc.). The special challenge we face is our geographic distribution – we have 15 offices throughout Israel. In order to achieve that, we need to take care of the masses of CV’s sent to us every day. The basic sorting of CV’s and inputting the candidates’ information onto the old system used to be done manually by several people. We decided that in order to cope with these challenges better, we needed an automatic tool capable of receiving the CV files automatically and then sorting and retrieving them.
Every month we had to take care of about 10,000 CV’s. The personnel locating and sorting CV’s had to manually examine two parameters: does the candidate work in our field, and does he already exist in our system. We realized we had been wasting long hours on basic work, and this led us to the decision to purchase an advanced, sophisticated system that would receive CV’s automatically and permit us to search for key words in order to retrieve relevant applicants.

What methods do you use to receive so many CV’s?
We received CV’s from every possible source: our member get member program, the company’s website, various Internet ads, social networks, academic institutions, placement agencies, etc. Of course the amount of CV’s is tremendous. The question is how many are actually relevant.

What has led you to choose Niloosoft’s system?
First, our entire staff held a meeting in order to brainstorm, and characterized the ultimate recruitment system. We specified a number of important parameters that related to several areas: a functional solution for our recruitment process, user friendliness, interface to our SAP system, quick response time, and the ability to directly interface to the candidate and placement agencies. After looking at several potential systems, we piloted four of them to find out if they fulfilled our requirements. We collected opinions and recommendations by users who reported about their use of the system and the quality of the company’s service and technical support. Finally we rated and graded each system based on our parameters, and selected the company that obtained the highest ratings.

Do you see an ROI after having invested in the new system?
It’s difficult to calculate an ROI, but I can definitely say several things after having worked with the system for 1.5 years: all CV’s are received automatically. The staff that formerly had to sort CV’s on our CV center is now free to perform other tasks and become more professional. Now they spend their time locating candidates who answer a particular profile, holding phone interviews, etc. The system allows us to directly update our placement agencies. When a placement agency types in a candidate’s ID number, they can immediately see the status of his recruitment process. So there has definitely been tremendous improvement in our recruitment process. As opposed to the past, it is now very easy to contact lots of people, and this helps us manage a database of over 100,000 candidates.

What advice do you have for recruitment directors who are considering purchasing recruitment software?
First, before you begin collecting information about different systems, it is important to describe your recruitment process and characterize the recruitment system that would be the most suitable for your organization. At the meeting we held, I asked the employees to imagine the recruitment system of their dreams – what it would make possible, what we feel it must provide, what our ultimate recruitment process would be like. We realized we could be flexible about some features but not about others. This is how we characterized the system that would best fit our company’s needs, and when meeting with the different vendors, we were prepared. We could examine their systems and see which of them better answers our needs and which do not do it so well.
Another piece of advice is to pilot some systems before making the final decision, and give your team the opportunity to experience them and be part of the decision. At the end of the day, they will be the system’s main users.
My last suggestion is to optimize existing databases prior to launching the new system: delete duplicate CV’s, update keywords, etc. In our company this stage took 3 months, and then for one additional month we used both systems simultaneously. At the end of the process, when everything was ready, we began working with the new system.
I would like to emphasize that for us it was very important to connect the new system to our internal system, because Elbit is a security company and its information security is very important. So switching to a new system is not an obvious matter.
We are still learning, and the system is constantly updated and upgraded, but there is no doubt that we have significantly improved our capability to handle a large amount of CV’s and preserve an active candidate database.