Filed under: Technical Strategy | Enter your password to view comments
Tags: recruiting software, resume parsing
Filed under: Technical Strategy | Enter your password to view comments
Tags: recruiting software, resume parsing
Branding InQuest (Part I)
A great product deserves a great image. Some of technology’s most recent branding successes include Apple, Google and Skype.
Is InQuest a great brand? Only time can answer a perennial question. What I can say with absolute confidence is that I gave the branding process the time, respect and effort I think it deserves. This post explores some of what went into that effort. You may find this interesting if there is a branding initiative on your horizon.
The branding process spawns from a deep understanding of who our audience is. We use this insight to to create a brand that connects with them. My audience happens to be recruiters. With all due respect, recruiters are typically not the most avant-garde folks around. They are a very conservative group which is a big reason why the majority of the recruiting software available today is so uninspiring. Recruiters simply don’t demand more — yet.
I digress, the point being that in branding InQuest, I wasn’t going to have much success convincing recruiters to embrace a product called Snazzle. Or some other overly ambitious manifestation of the left side of the brain. Therefore, the focus never was to come up with a high concept name. Instead, the focus was on how to incorporate the problem the software solves into the brand.
So what is the main obstacle that stands between a recruiter and success? Finding who they are looking for!
In other words, the quest.
a search or pursuit made in order to find or obtain something
This is the key activity a recruiter engages in between getting a search assignment and closing a deal. Once this activity has started it is ‘in’ process. That is, the process of being in quest of something. It is this painstaking process that my software facilitates. So my branding objective was to create a brand recruiters would instantly recognize and associate with as a remedy for easing that pain.
The concept of ‘pain’ should not be taken lightly or humorously. The process of searching today is indeed an often agonizing undertaking. Not because recruiters don’t like to search or feel they shouldn’t have to. But because of the way the industry has changed in response to technology advancement. Technology like the internet has created a new breed of frustrations for recruiters who now are not only competing against more recruiters (most of which are unskilled sourcers) but against they very candidates they want to represent.
Again, I digress. The whole point being that if the search process is considered painful the brand I want to create should communicate pain relief.
As a writer, I have a true appreciation for the beauty of words and how they can manipulate emotions. Not just in just a contextual sense, but in an auditory and visual sense. Are they pretty to look at in their structure and balance? Do they have graphic design potential? To they roll off the tongue elegantly?
I felt with inquest (formatted as InQuest), I had found the perfect brand.
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The Impetus Behind the Software
Anybody who earns a living recruiting knows that recruiting is an activity which lends itself well to inadvertently wasting time on activities that don’t translate into revenue. Successful recruiters know that impeccable time management is the number one reason for their success. Big billers are master time optimizers. They spend the majority of their time engaged in revenue generating activities like qualifying job orders, arranging send outs, developing clients and candidates and managing those relationships. Big billers do not spend time bogged down in unfruitful searches or manually performing a multitude of repetitive tasks associated with the job.
In a recruiter’s typical day, the following activities account for the largest percentage of time squandered which most negatively impact billing potential.
- Administrative tasks (invoicing, budgeting, accounting etc)
- Redundant manual processes (e-mails, job posting,
- Poor search skills (inability to perform fast and effective searches)
Effective time management is achieved by delegating these time intensive activities to a smart system that automates them.
Instinctively, I turned to software for answers. My quest for the world’s greatest recruiting software began in 2005. Surely, a profession that values the importance of time as a commodity like recruiting does would be teeming with productivity software for recruiters, right? Well, not exactly. While the industry certainly had an abundance of software to choose from, it was a challenge finding anything actually worth ‘choosing’.
I felt that recruiting software as a whole left much to be desired. And I still do. Consequently, I took the initiative to empower myself with the tools I envisioned by developing them myself. That initiative became InQuest recruiting software.
So, what are my major gripes about today’s recruiting software anyway? I am glad you asked.
Filed under: Business Strategy, Recruiting | Leave a Comment
Tags: recruiting software
About Me
My name is Kevin Jenkins. As a software entrepreneur, my vision with InQuest recruiting software is to transform the recruiting industry by redefining the way software serves it. My goal is to not only help recruiting professionals be more productive by empowering them with innovative software tools, but to be significantly more resourceful via revolutionary resume sharing and real-time recruiting and networking technology that infinitely broadens their professional contact base.
E-mail: kevin[at]InQsw[dot]com
Phone:(818) 206-8217
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