Feature Story

OCEANSIDE FIRM BRINGS ON SOFTWARE CLIENT

An Oceanside company that develops Internet-based staffing solutions for the staffing industry recently announced it had acquired an international software firm as a client.

The North American headquarters of the German software firm Gauss Interprise AG announced June 13 it has selected SmartSearch Online from Advanced Personnel Systems, Inc.

Gauss, headquartered in Hamburg, Germany and Irvine, California, has annual revenues of about $31 million and clients such as Agilent Technologies, Bayer, BMW, Daimler Chrysler Aerospace, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. Gauss has about 130 employees located in the company's Irvine office. Until recently, the company had been manually processing resumes, said George Young, a staffing manager for Gauss.

As the company began hiring additional employees, incoming resumes topped more than 1,200 each month.

"We went from hiring two people a month to five and had no internal tracking system," Young said. "We also had recently started an employee referral program that couldn't be managed without an automated system."

So the company began looking for a product to handle incoming resumes that could be added to the company's database. The product also had to manage Gauss's employee referral program, tying a name to a resume more easily, Young said.

The company investigated more than 60 products and conducted demos of eight systems before finally selecting SmartSearch Online, Young said.

Doug Coull, president of APS, was not surprised at being selected. APS helps organizations be more efficient in filing employment vacancies or conducting massive job searches that the employer would find difficult to take on, he said.

"When there's a new job that opens up…we have software that quickly goes through maybe 7,000 resumes, and you can do a search of that database in a couple of seconds. It will go through, and it will come back and rank people on how well they fit the requisition," he said.

The same program will assist people with the later steps in hiring, such as running background checks, conducting reference checks, scheduling interviews and more, Coull said.

APS got its start in 1985 developing software for the recruiting and staffing industry. Originally, they licensed their software for customers to run on their own computers.

Now, most of the clients, like Gauss, rely on APS as an "application service provider" - maintaining customers' human resources files over the Internet, Coull said.

The company has about a terabyte of storage space, and about four million to five million resumes on file. At any given moment, the company is likely to have about 5,000 users on the system, Coull said.

SmartSearch Online has been helpful in facilitating the hiring process, he said.

"Copper Mountain, for example…a year and a half ago, they were just inundated. They were posting jobs, and they were getting hundreds of responses every day," Coull said. "The lady in charge of the H.R. department was working 12-, 14-hour days just trying to distribute the resumes to the line managers."

Now that APS has assumed that function, the resumes instead get filtered through a database, streamlining Copper Mountain's search and making their work easier, he said.

Young said he had something similar through SmartSearch Online.

"I can track candidates effortlessly and a department as the ability to look at their own recruiting activity," he said. "We now have an effective staffing management tool."

Young added that the company might eventually use SmartSearch Online at its international headquarters, as well.

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