Hire.com Helps Keane Build Relationships

When intelligent companies seek the best of the crop of qualified job candidates, they’re not looking for a whirlwind romance. Once candidates are found, even if they don’t take the first job offered, the companies don’t want to lose them. They want to build an ongoing relationship with them.

That’s what Keane, Inc. wanted. The Boston-based provider of business consulting, application development and management, and e-commerce solutions for Fortune 500 companies knew that in order to attract the best and the brightest, they had to maintain relationships with applicants beyond the traditional recruitment and interview process.

“Things are changing rapidly in our business,” says Grant Sidney, recruiting analyst. “There’s more competition for less people and we saw the need to shift our recruiting tactics. Traditionally, recruiting has been a reactive situation, responding to today’s job requirements and filling them as they came up. We’re looking to a more proactive style of recruiting, more along the lines of e-commerce ideas as opposed to traditional HR functionality.

“We wanted to focus more on continuous sourcing, building long-term relationships with our candidates, building our talent pool so we have a really strong pipeline of both active people — people we can put in jobs immediately — and passive people who we may not hire today. But we can keep our company brand in front of them and put them into jobs a year or five years from now.”

Hire.com, the leading talent acquisition and retention application service provider, installed a Web-based HR application that allowed candidates interested in working for Keane — now or in the future — to profile and update their personal information, “which makes it really easy for a candidate to apply for a specific job or simply say they’re looking and remain anonymous,” says Sidney. “That allows us, using Hire.com’s technology, to know their broad areas of interest, personally and professionally, and get their e-mail addresses so we can begin a marketing campaign to them.”

The Hire.com technology, says Sidney, also eases the recruiters’ burden at Keane by taking care of much of the nuts and bolts of the recruitment process through automation, leaving recruiters free to concentrate on the all-important relationship-building aspect of their jobs.

As for the Hire.com personnel, Sidney says “they’ve been great. It’s incredible. They understand recruiting and our situation inherently and everyone who works for them shares the same feeling that recruiting needs to change and that they’ve got the answer. They’ve been totally committed to our success.”

Currently, Keane is in the first phase of implementation of Hire.com’s solution and is using it to recruit sales, recruiting, and management candidates. The candidates register on Keane’s Web site using Hire.com’s technology and provide information about their area of expertise, as well as their level of experience and their career paths — and can even include information about birthdays and personal interests.

“It’s an unfolding process,” says Sidney, “and it’s pretty exciting.”