The right people make or break a company. If you’ve ever advertised a job, no doubt you’ve been inundated with irrelevant resumes. Trovix (www.trovix.com), a Mountain View startup, helps employers search resumes to select the best candidates with its Web-based job applicant tracking system, Trovix Recruit.
Remember how Google used software based on Stanford research to improve its Web site searching? Similarly, Trovix uses software based on MIT research to improve resume retrieval.
The Harvard Map for Human Resource Management, expounded by Professor Michael Beer in the 1980s, suggests that hiring focuses on employee competence, congruence, commitment and cost effectiveness. Trovix Recruit assesses competence and congruence by matching essential information extracted from resumes and job descriptions. It looks for commitment by calculating length of job tenure. Well-matched candidates tend to improve profitability. Pricing, based on company size, starts at an affordable $2,000 a month.
Quality, speed and simplicity of the job applicant matching process differentiate Trovix in a fiercely competitive environment. Applicant tracking vendors include IBM, SAP and Oracle, as well as specialized human capital management software companies like VCG Software (Roswell, Ga.), Kenexa (Wayne, Pa.), Authoria (Waltham, Mass.) and Workstream (Ottawa, Canada). The demise of once high-flying Resumix — subsequently acquired by Yahoo! — has also left an opportunity for Trovix.
A recruiter can cut a resume from a Web source like Craigslist.org and paste it into Trovix Recruit. A candidate can submit a resume on a hiring company’s Web site. Trovix does not scan paper resumes — employers must supply them online.
Trovix Recruit ranks applicants with a score and supports a five-star rating system. Resumes of candidates who rise to the top of the list can be sent around via e-mail. Hirers can rate both candidates and experience with stars. A manager looking for a search engine programmer might rate “worked at Google” five stars and “worked at Bank of America” zero stars.
How do you become a five-star candidate if you submit your resume to a Trovix customer, such as Salesforce.com, Palm, Linksys, Rambus or VMWare? Above all, describe your achievements with the utmost precision. Be brutally honest. Don’t fool the system — it knows the tricks that applicants pull to increase their chances. It can identify multiple resume submissions and eliminate duplicates. Long job tenure shows commitment, so give accurate employment dates. Your job title is crucial — don’t call yourself “Chief Inkslinger” if you’re a technical writer, because it won’t attract points. Increasing occurrences of the word “Java” in your resume won’t increase your chances of landing a programming job.
Also , don’t parrot the job description. If a recruiter is looking for a Web services expert, including a related term like “Ajax” can enhance your perceived competence.
Trovix Recruit is ideal for fast-growing, dynamic organizations that demand rapid hiring processes. Besides high-tech companies, pharmaceutical company Alexza (so named because it was started by ex-Alza employees) is using it. So is Stanford University, which, with venture capital firms 3i and US Venture Partners, participated in first-round funding of $5.25 million.
It will be many years before computers can understand documents as well as people, but Trovix has advanced the art by creating a brainy system to review, rank and match resumes. Potentially, Trovix could transform other imprecise documents — such as academic articles, company financial reports and customer support requests — into structured data that can be matched, ranked and rated. Personally, I hope Trovix can leverage its knowledge base to improve job seeker productivity by creating a public Web service that selects the perfect career opening.
Angela Hey lives on the Peninsula and helps ventures launch innovative technologies. Send comments to amhey@techviser.com.
