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Posted by Steve Weston, Group Technology Director at Hays Recruitment

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Steve Weston, Group Technology Director at Hays Recruitment, which is a leading global expert in qualified, professional and skilled recruitment. Hays is an international recruitment agency with 7,800 staff in 245 offices across 33 countries, and has recently expanded into Chile, Colombia and Malaysia. See what other organizations that use the Google Search Appliance have to say.

The recruitment industry is incredibly competitive. Often we win business when our recruitment consultants are able to get the best CVs to our clients faster than our competitors. We rely heavily on our contact databases so that we can match the best candidates to job vacancies.

At Hays, we have over 20 million archived documents and we receive 30,000 new CVs a day. With our old search system, CVs had to be categorised into databases and manually tagged. This held up the process of them entering the system, so our consultants couldn’t access them straight away. Consultants also had to learn specific codes to return the results they wanted, which made the whole process very time consuming.

To fix this problem we chose to implement the Google Search Appliance 7.0 (GSA). Not only does it integrate seamlessly with our internal database, but it also automatically indexes CVs. This means that our recruitment consultants have access to the most up to date candidates at all times and our IT team no longer has to spend hours manually indexing information. Since adopting GSA, our IT team have reduced the time they spend on search by 90%. Our recruitment consultants have also become more efficient because they're able to search across multiple databases in a second's time. Since the GSA is intuitive for a young workforce that is used to seamless consumer search, we also now save hours and thousands of pounds in training every year.

GSA 7.0 gives us the ability to automatically translate CVs and job specs through Google Translate. It is easier for us to compete in global markets, finding the best candidates within a global talent pool who may have previously been missed in the sea of information. For example, roles within the oil and gas industry are typically scattered around the world so it's far easier for us to match relevant candidates now that we have access to the Translate tool.

The global search capabilities of the GSA have also led to a cultural shift. Whereas previously there was a tendency to hoard the best candidates within specific databases, which only select recruitment consultants would be searching, now the candidate database is completely open so no single recruitment agent ‘owns’ the candidates within it.

These benefits have meant we’re now looking to use the GSA across all of our websites globally, making it easier and quicker for job seekers to find the right roles. After rolling this out in the UK and Ireland we found bounce rates have been dramatically reduced, meaning more people are finding the jobs they need from the site.

Google Enterprise’s search technology has fundamentally improved our business. It has put us firmly ahead of our competitors, making us more profitable and allowing us to expand internationally into new markets.