Type of Firm:

Recruiting – Permanent placement and staffing

Location:

Headquartered in Atlanta Georgia, 17 offices in the US, two in Germany

Industry:

Executive search division, military transition, accounting and finance division and a legal division

Size of Team:

400 recruiters

Lucas Group has successfully met the workforce needs of Fortune 1000 companies, regional businesses and entrepreneurial firms since 1970. Hands-on experience and expertise have made Lucas Group one of the nation's largest executive recruitment firms.

In 1997 Peter Lund joined Lucus Group as the IT and Telecom Director. With a rich background in recruiting and IT, Peter successfully project managed the implementation of a new applicant tracking system (ATS) that was state of the art for its day.

Need for Increased Recruiter Productivity

Lucas realized that their current ATS had not kept up with the times. By 2004, resume parsing technology was widely available and other vendors were offering simple Outlook® integration. Lucas’ recruiters were missing out on significant ATS productivity features.

“Importing the resume and adding a resume to our old system took too many clicks,” states Peter. When a user received a resume in MS® Outlook, the user had to save the resume to a local drive. The person then had to create a text version of the resume, open up the ATS and create a record by keying in all of the information. Then two versions of the resume had to be attached to the program: the MS® Word document became the presentation version that would be used for sendouts, and the text file became the document that was keyword searchable. Peter remarks, “Our recruiters needed a product that would make them more productive.”

Lucas began searching for a new ATS that would address their need for increased recruiter productivity.

Task Force Rigorously Shortlists ATS Vendors

In late 2005, Lucas began what was to turn into a one year search for a new ATS. Peter formed a task force consisting of representatives from four major divisions: executive search, military transition, accounting and finance and a legal division. There were initially eight vendors on the shortlist being seriously considered.

After choosing two finalists, the task force leaders invited other people in their group to put both finalists through their paces. A total of thirty people were now involved in testing both applications. “What drove the whole selection process was the user experience,” states Peter.

Smart Client Versus the Browser Interface and Other Technology Considerations…

The task force testing both applications quickly realized that they didn’t like working with a web-based user-interface. Peter explains, “If you are opening a web page and you want to move a calendar event to a different time, in a web browser application, you would have to open up the calendar event, edit it by changing the time and then save in the calendar and then likely refresh the page to get your calendar to update. But in MaxHire, with its installed Smart Client, you simply take your calendar event and click and drag it to another time, similar to MS Outlook. Our task force really like these simple but important productivity enhancing features.”

Peter was also concerned about end-user’s discomfort in using a browser based user-interface, and explains his concern at a more technical level, “One of the big things about N-tiered architecture and software as a service is that Internet Explorer is becoming the interface, but I think people are going to find this interface a little frustrating. IE was designed to be a tool to display paperless documents, basically a document display tool, not a database interface tool. Obviously, there have been some innovations and it gets better with time, but I think there is no substitute for the client installation and a GUI that is more in tune to database functionality using Microsoft® Smart Client technology such as what MaxHire offers.”

Top Competing Vendor Removed From the Running

Peter comments, “A top vendor competing against MaxHire lost the battle to become our mission-critical ATS mainly because they didn’t have an Outlook integration piece and their application was browser based. The vendor had their own built-in email client, but then we would have ended up with two email systems. Our Outlook is running on an Microsoft® Exchange Server and it is tightly integrated with Active Directory and all our distribution lists. Having to manage two email systems would be really problematic for us. MaxHire offered real-time, automatic integration with MS Outlook so we did not have to change the way we were handling our email,” explains Peter.

Proofing the Solution

“When we selected MaxHire as the best ATS solution, we still needed to pilot the software,” explains Peter. The pilot took about three months and MaxHire went live in February 2007. “The pilot time enabled us to map out all of our integration points, create the reports we needed and to see how the data conversion worked,” Peter adds.

Lucas was given VPN access to the MaxHire database so that they could query the data. The fact that MaxHire was on MS SQL Server 2005 and Lucas was also on SQL Server made integration that much easier. Peter explains, “If we went with some of the other vendors who either weren’t SQL Server database solutions or it wasn’t their preferred database for performance, it would have been more difficult to meet our integration requirements.”

During the initial MaxHire implementation, Lucas brought close to half a million candidate records and 300,000 resumes into MaxHire. Lucas now has over 350 recruiters, all accessing one MaxHire database, and is continuing to rapidly expand their staff. “Using MaxHire has resulted in our recruiting staff being significantly more productive. We take comfort that MaxHire is responsive and nimble enough to continually develop innovative features that translate into productivity gains for our staff,” remarks Peter.

back to case studies