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2. STAFFING
Mashup Just the Beginning
After 38 years in the IT staffing business, TAC Worldwide had cultivated a database of 150,000 résumés. That might sound impressive, but VP and CIO Steve Morin says the real magic happened after the firm launched its new Web-based recruitment toolkit, TACSource. Within three months, the TAC résumé count jumped to 3 million.
"We were blown away with how quickly we could build that kind of database," says Morin, who's been CIO at the 550-person staffing firm in Dedham, Mass., for nine years. "It widened our net twenty-fold."
Today about 400 TAC employees use the powerful search-and-match function that TACSource -- an application hosted by a third-party firm -- provides. The mashup technology does three things: it allows TAC Worldwide to connect directly to clients via the Web so that a company can submit a job description to a recruiter online in real time. It also allows TAC Worldwide to search external job postings in an automated way. Finally, its patent-pending algorithms allow recruiters to see automated displays of résumés that are good matches for job openings. "To be able to do that in an intelligent and automated way, that's very revolutionary," says Morin, who controls an IT budget of $7.5 million. Recruiters can also tweak the process with their own keywords to help thin 50 results down to, say, five.
"It's very unique," Morin says. "The document -- the résumé -- is the data. The technology is finely tuned to allow you to really pinpoint -- let's say, a matching of geographies, skill sets and experience -- the parameters that we need."
In June, TAC piloted an RSS feed. So a Dallas engineering firm could, for example, opt to receive an RSS feed that would tell it which sort of talent and skill sets are available in the area. Meanwhile, potential job candidates would opt to receive ticker-like updates of employment news in specific industries or regions.
"We know the technology works," Morin says, adding that he'd like to get validation from clients within the next quarter and possibly launch the feed in early 2008. "Web 2.0 is always on our minds."
Morin says the toolkit has changed his job as CIO, bringing him closer to the revenue side of the business. "Leveraging the Web through TACSource and other solutions opens up many opportunities to enhance value-added services to our clients," Morin says. "These initiatives are great examples of how IT is becoming embedded in our core internal- and external-facing processes."
As with many Web-based projects aimed at sharing coveted information between employees, there was some initial resistance to the system. Recruiters who had spent years developing industry contacts and information were concerned that they would lose their edge if everyone pooled information. But Morin says the results -- quicker placements across the board -- helped convince recruiters of the overall value.
TAC executives estimate that TACSource will easily produce a 25% across-the-board increase in the weekly performance of recruiters. Some tech-savvy recruiters have already doubled their performance, Morin says. Finally, TACSource clients know that time isn't being lost. "This is much more of a real-time, proactive process."
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