Searching For The OneSearching For The One

With so many job candidates in the market, finding the right one almost qualifies as detective work for Kate MacLean, an Internet recruitment specialist with office-supplies retail chain Staples Inc.

MacLean relies on an arsenal of search tools to identify candidates and gather background information on them. One of those tools is a 12 million-person database built using proprietary Internet-search software from Eliyon Technologies Corp. Eliyon's software acts as a research agent, gathering public data about people from sources such as corporate Web sites, news articles, and government filings. The data is gathered into profiles, and recruiters can query the resulting database a number of ways -- by job title, company, gender, or ethnicity -- to find candidates. A recent search for male Latino CIOs, for example, produced 178 results across 36 regions worldwide.

Using Eliyon's database has let Staples significantly reduce its recruiting costs over the past year. "We used to pay a number of external research agents $100 per hour to create lists of candidates for us," says Carl Lopes, VP of employment at Staples. Staples spends $9,000 to $10,000 per year for its Eliyon database license and rarely uses external researchers anymore.

Use of such databases may mean job seekers with a public black spot in their history never get a chance to explain themselves. MacLean says she found that one potential candidate was involved in a lawsuit related to a past employer, and she decided not to pursue the candidate.

It's far from a perfect system. Though the database has expanded MacLean's access to candidates, the cached data it provides would be more useful if it were updated more often. "Sometimes the data is cached from a year ago," MacLean says. When that happens, she searches using Google, Hoover's, or other services to find more recent data.

The 4-year-old Eliyon is seeking a larger audience with a partnership reached last week with online recruiter Monster.com to sell access to its database to Monster's professional recruiting customers. It's the first time Monster has offered this kind of candidate research, says Troy Hatlevig, North American VP of employer products for Monster. Monster could use the lift. While its sales fell just 13% in the last quarter of the year amid a fierce job-listing slump, its margins got clobbered. Operating profit fell 53%.