Type of Firm:

Recruiting – Permanent placement

Location:

Tokyo, Japan

Industry:

All major industries and professions from mid to senior level management positions

Size of Team:

40 Members

Founded in 2002, Optia Partners is a Tokyo-based executive search firm. Their core business is to provide contingency and retained executive search services to multi-national firms seeking bilingual professionals in Japan while assisting candidates in identifying career opportunities within the world’s leading companies.

Optia Partners began their business with only a few employees, but their goal was to grow to a 50-60 person company within a short period of time. “With such ambitious growth goals, we knew we needed an applicant tracking system (ATS) with a powerful database underlying it from the get go. At the same time, we knew we couldn’t afford a dedicated full time IT team and programmer to build our own database,” states Nick Germantsis, Managing Director and Industry Partner, Technology Group.

Need for a Better ATS

Although Optia was already using an ATS, Nick began looking for a new one primarily because the technical support from their current vendor was not satisfactory. “Our ATS broke down about 4-5 times a week, and the support representative was never available or was too busy. An ATS vendor has to have really good technical support. We couldn’t wait around for six hours for someone to get back to us,” explains Nick.

Optia also needed their replacement ATS to be easy to use and have strong core functionality including powerful search, email and collaboration features.

A friend of Nick’s in the recruiting business in Japan told him to check out MaxHire. Nick states, “We gave MaxHire a call and the sales representative gave us a really good demo and let us do hands-on testing before we had to make a decision. We were allowed enough time to really play around with the software and see firsthand how powerful and easy it was to use. It didn’t take Optia long to see the real value that MaxHire had to offer. “ MaxHire was much better than the existing ATS that we were using at the time.“

Peace of Mind with MaxHire’s Technical Support

Optia chose MaxHire as their mission-critical ATS. A big part of that decision was due to MaxHire’s superior technical support. “A big advantage of MaxHire, but what is not obvious as users, is what the MaxHire network engineers are doing in the background: maintaining and balancing servers, keeping them up to date and backed up, all that backend server work we don’t have to worry about at all.” states Nick.

Powerful Search Capabilities

MaxHire’s search capabilities are very powerful. Nick explains, “You can tag people and organize them into folders. Search results are in an MS® Excel-like format. The fields can be sorted and arranged just like MS Excel. You can easily drag a column around or sort by any order. The free text, document and keyword matrix search features are really useful. We job code or keyword code people, but not everyone follows the same keyword codes. We can also find people typing words like CRM or ERP and get a word that is contained anywhere either in the database or the resume.”

Tapping into Lead Generation with Bulk Email

“Another distinguishing feature is MaxHire’s bulk email function and the ability to post newsletters on a monthly basis. It’s really helping our workflow in terms of generating new opportunities. The bulk email has been fantastic and is really easy to use,” exclaims Nick.

Excellent Collaboration and Monitoring Features

Optia works in groups. The ability to share information such as seeing other people’s folders and calendars is really important. Nick explains, “MaxHire is very good for collaborating and monitoring activity. A team manager has 5 people reporting to him. With MaxHire he is able to run detailed activity reports. We now know who is booked in and how many people and which people they have booked in etc… so everything is very visible to the whole team.”

Ease of Use and Scalability

“MaxHire‘s user menu is very nice and easy to navigate, and that is very important for training new employees going forward,” states Nick.

“Value for money, MaxHire is very cost effective and powerful. No annual contracts and we’ve seen competitors priced 5 times as much. We look forward to continually benefitting from MaxHire’s leading productivity innovations,” states Nick.

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