BY Mark E. Berger,

ResumeGrabber™ Standard by eGrabber

Any Internet recruiter that has been around for more than a few years probably has a soft spot for the eGrabber company. Sure, nowadays all your ATS systems have some type of import and parsing feature. But way back when & in the early days of Internet recruiting (like 3 or 4 years ago) all there was available to us was a bunch of cutting and pasting and saving as . Try doing that 30 or 40 times in an evening. You get numb. Then, their flagship product, AddressGrabber came out and solved a lot of our problems. You still had to save the resume but you could capture the contact information and create lists on the fly. This product was standard issue to any Internet recruiter at that time.

The subject of this review, ResumeGrabber, is the next generation of their data-capture product line specifically designed to meet the needs of recruiters. ResumeGrabber™ Standard extracts name and address, and other details from the resume, creates a new contact in your contact manager and also enters all routine information into user fields, then renames the resume with candidate's name then saves and links the resume to the record, all with one click from the simplest of interfaces. ACT!™, GoldMine® and Outlook® power users, especially those that use these contact management systems as their main database, will get the most out of ResumeGrabber™ Standard as it works directly with these systems. Not to say it isn't a valuable tool for others as well. I am not an Outlook® power user and do use an ATS system (Sendouts) but I do use Outlook® as my email client and use it for most of my initial recruiting contacts so I decided to put ResumeGrabber™ Standard to use.

I am happy to report that ResumeGrabber™ Standard retains the ease of use of the AddressGrabber interface, while giving you complete resume management. After you download and install the product, you want to go to the Options tabs to set it up. The Document Setup allows you to choose the type of file format you want to save the resumes (Word or HTML) and the folder you want it saved into. Managers, note the ability to save resumes directly to a networked drive and directory of your choice meaning you can require all recruiters to save resumes into a common pool keeping the data centralized, secure and easy to back-up. The Destination Tab is critical for the power users. Not only is this where you select your contact manager software but you can also specify routine information you want added into any user-defined fields. Let's say in Outlook® you created new user-defined fields where you wanted to put the contacts skills, recruiter name, resume source, and the job applied for each contact. Since these values are going to be common for a particular opening you are trying to fill, on the Destinations Tab you are able to type in the default values to enter into these fields for each new record. This not only saves data entry time, but will also enable you to later search on that field. The Transfer Setup tab allows you to select the fields you would like to transfer to the new contact manager record. Lastly, the Miscellaneous Setup tab is just that, and most would use the default settings.

ResumeGrabber™ Standard resides on your computer screen as a simple, floating, always on top toolbar. First you run your Internet search and get your results page. Click on a resume to open. Swipe the name, address, telephone and email (and any other contact information available) to highlight, and then click the Go button on the toolbar. A few seconds later you are given the parsed results a preview of the contact record that will be created. Clicking on the Transfer button creates the new record with the resume text pasted into the new record and the resume plainly attached. This candidate is now in my Outlook® / Contacts folder. . Note that ResumeGrabber™ Standard can be used to import resumes from your email, word documents or any third party job sites.

If you want to add a personal contact or sales/marketing contact you can elect to transfer the contact information without attaching a resume. Duplication of records in your contact manager is eliminated as it checks while transferring based on combinations of name, company, email address, and zip. You can add links and notes (like job orders, reference letters) as attachments to any record.

Check out this excellent product at the ResumeGrabber™ Standard home page: http://www.egrabber.com/resumegrabber/index.html, where you can see a demo, download a free trial and get technical support. The list price is $249.95 per copy.

Published in December 2001 by http://www.fordyceletter.com