Sunday, February 11, 2007, 06:47 PM
The Resume Direct 2.1 upgrade has been compeleted on schedule. Recruiter access was restored by approximately 5pm ET on Sunday and all queued applications have completed processing. Client career websites remained online throughout the upgrade so as to prevent the loss of critical hours of candidate attention during the prime weekend hours.
This upgrade comes two years to the day since the launch of Resume Direct in 2005. In this time we have rolled out eight major releases and at least a dozen smaller ones, every one of which was deployed seamlessly with limited or no downtime to all clients. With these we have added over 20 major new features and hundreds of little tweaks and enhancements to maintain our category-leading ease of use.
We want to thank all of you, our valued clients, for your continuing support and constructive feedback. With over 60 clients added in the past twelve months, HRMDirect is rapidly on its way to joining the top tier of applicant tracking providers. While we don't ever want to forget our startup roots, growth provides access to additional resources which we look forward to putting to good use to continue enhancing the HRMDirect client experience.
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Tuesday, February 6, 2007, 10:54 PM
Last month many of you took part in our first Client Satisfaction Survey. And when we say a lot,we mean a lot: a stunning 46% of people responded. These surveys often get response rates in the 4-8% range and most of you took the time to fill out the whole long thing.
We will be talking more about the results over the coming months, but first, a few of the things which stuck out:
- 74% of you use Resume Direct at least once a day.
- 59% had never used an ATS before, while 22% considered themselves "ATS veterans"
- 84% consider our unique apply-by-email a "Must-Have Feature." Wow!
- 95% would recommend Resume Direct
What You Told Us
Above all you told us you want more documentation. We'll write it if you promise to read it! Second, you want more speed and power! No surprise there, and we are gearing up to deliver some big performance upgrades. People now expect web applications to be as responsive as desktop programs and we aim to satisfy.
In terms of major new features, custom fields and enhanced application forms functionality were high scorers. Custom fields are coming out very soon, and we're working hard on some new enhancements for application forms. A sleeper surprise was options for additional email auto-responders, which are now on our radar screen.
Task and process management is something we've been drilling into since the start, and we've always approached this a little differently than everyone else. This was also a very popular area which we were already working on before the survey went out, and we were happily surprised to see something so abstract be recognized so widely.
Last, we were a little surprised to see integrated background checks and assessment tests score at 16 out of 18 possible new features. This remains a messy process and we expected it to be more popular, but that's what keeps elections interesting.
Still, even the lowest scoring ideas had multiple clients voting for them as critical/must-have features. This illustrated very well why most ATS vendors have becomes jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none. There is an audience for every feature you can imagine and it is not easy to resist the temptation to implement check-the-box features which only work in scripted demos.
We'll be writing more about our plans for 2007 and beyond but we wanted to once again thank everyone for taking the time to respond in such great detail. The feedback was eagerly anticipated and has already played a key part in many key decisions here.
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Tuesday, February 6, 2007, 10:21 PM
A note from Colin Kingsbury
I wanted to take a brief moment to introduce everyone to Justin Gallucci, who recently joined our Account Management team. In the coming weeks many of you will begin to get to know Justin as one of the new faces of HRMDirect's client service team.
Justin arrives as he's finishing up his degree in MIS having paid his way through school running his own IT consulting firm. This experience has given Justin an unusually advanced sense of the importance of providing great client service. In his interview he told me that while clients might initially buy you for your product, competitors would always copy it, but that customer service was something you could always choose to do better than everyone else.
No one could have possibly summarized our feelings better and we're greatly looking forward to seeing Justin grow with us. Our client list continues to grow rapidly and with Justin on board we are looking forward to continuing our tradition of dedicated, expert-level support for all clients.
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