Lessons from the National Gallery | Working away from the office

Unforeseen events can disrupt anybody’s workday. Recruiters aren’t immune to surprise meetings, reporting requirements,  or other work they don’t bargain for when they start their day. And don’t forget about the consequences of the occasional snow day!

So when tasks can’t get done at the office but still need to be done, recruiters want remote access to their hiring management systems.

That’s one reason why Njoyn is a cloud-based applicant tracking system. In other words, it’s a secure, 100-percent Web-based application. This means recruiters can access Njoyn from any computer connected to the Internet, without installing software on the computing devices they use.

Bernardo Gallo knows this remote access feature gets used by recruiters who occasionally catch up on work outside the office. In the past, the human resources advisor for the National Gallery of Canada has finished reviews of candidates at home “because I didn’t have the time to do it at work,” he says. He has also checked the online recruitment solution on the weekend to see if anybody had applied to certain postings. “I was curious,” he admits. He wanted to “know what to expect on Monday when I get back to the office.”

Quickly matching candidates and jobs

Consider the following two situations:

• Recruiters regularly receive applications from job candidates who are qualified for jobs other than the one they apply for.
• Applicants may want to apply for jobs that aren’t available when they visit a given organization’s career site.

If the recruiter’s hiring management system can match open jobs to applications already in the system, candidates can more quickly find the jobs they want and recruiters spend less time filling open positions.

Limits of non-automated hiring solutions
In a “paper-based” organization:

• matching old applications to recently opened positions would oblige recruiters to search through those applications. Their store of applications may be incomplete if they regularly cull old applications.
• candidates would have to repeatedly check back with the organization to find out whether the positions they want are available.

Both recruiters and candidates undergo inconvenience in the above situation. But that doesn’t happen at the National Gallery of Canada.

Automated applicant job notifications
“Let’s say you’re looking for a job in the Visitor Services department but there’s nothing today,” says Bernardo Gallo, a human resources advisor with the Gallery. “When you create your profile, you can choose to be notified when there’s a job in the categories that interest you – Multimedia, Visitor Services, Special Events, Education, Public Programs, and so forth.”

“You choose your categories, and whenever a job gets posted in one of your chosen categories, the system automatically sends you an alert.”

That system is Njoyn, the cloud applicant tracking solution used by the Gallery. It alerts candidates to new positions that closely match their profile details, saving them the burden of repeatedly checking the career site.

“It benefits the National Gallery as well,” Gallo notes, since this tool helps the Gallery find good candidates “It helps both the employer and the job seeker.”

Résumé searching
Résumés reside in the National Gallery of Canada’s Njoyn database regardless of whether the applicants who submitted them were hired. These people showed interest in working for the Gallery, so the database is a great place to start looking for candidates when new positions become available.

“We can search all résumés in our database by keyword,” Gallo says. “If we’re searching for somebody who has human resources experience plus labor relations and customer service experience, we can do a Boolean search.”

Njoyn handles the types of searches recruiters commonly want to perform, including selection by skills, searching by region (or regions) or even proximity to a specific postal code should local candidates be preferred.

To save even more time, keywords used in the search are highlighted on candidate résumés when reviewing their profile.

“Keyword searching lets you filter résumés, and the system will send you matching résumés,” Gallo says. “It’s better than going through a pile of résumés highlighting things with a marker.”

“Njoyn finds people among submitted résumés in the system that meet your requirements in a couple of clicks.”