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FILEFINDER on the Web

Search professionals can use the Internet to their advantage, by employing FILEFINDER as a tool for:

• Interacting with Candidates
• Interacting with Clients
• Facilitating Remote Access for Staff

An increasing number of Search Firms are now listing a selection of current assignments on their Web site. New utilities within FILEFINDER allow your system administrators to upload quickly, easily and seamlessly any current assignments with the click of a button. Internet application forms can then be integrated with the list of assignments, allowing candidates to apply on-line to one of the uploaded assignments, thus greatly reducing your administration costs. You may decide not to list assignments at all, but to include a form on your Web site for candidates who wish to be considered for assignments, without applying for any one in particular (‘write-ins’). Besides saving your administration costs, this will also aid in building up your database.

Perhaps the most important factor in allowing candidates to apply on-line is proper validation of the information. Any research based Search Firm will have made a significant investment in building up a database of information on companies and people. Enabling candidates, to add their details to the database without strict quality control procedures, would be extremely dangerous. Therefore, we have added a validation tool to FILEFINDER designed to enable your administrator to compare quickly and easily information entered by the candidate with information already inside the database. This combination of technical and human validation avoids unsuitable applications and the danger of duplication.

An extra opportunity would be to keep track of your candidates’ career development. To this end, you can enable candidates to revisit your Web site, to log on and to update their employment information.

Interacting with Clients

Retained Search Firms generally make assignment and research reports available to clients. Previously, this type of document was created manually and then mailed out or faxed to the client. You now have the opportunity to develop Extranet facilities, which will allow your clients to view designated parts of your FILEFINDER database via the Web. Naturally, you can select the type and extent of information that you want your clients to access.

This type of service can only be made available if you constantly keep the connection between your FILEFINDER database and the Web Server open. It is a relatively simple task to connect a Web page to the database to provide on-line real-time reports, provided your Search Firm has already set up a constant Internet connection and an adequate firewall protection is in place.

Unfortunately, the expense of setting up a suitable infrastructure and allocating the management time required to support it, makes this option unfeasible for many Search Firms.

For these firms, Dillistone Systems offers an outsourcing service using a technology known as ‘replication’. This involves setting up a copy of your FILEFINDER database on one of our secure servers. This ‘hosted’ database would regularly receive updated information from your ‘live’ database, thus creating a secure source of data from which on-line information can be provided to clients.

In both cases the content, layout and accessibility of reports, that are made available to clients via the Internet, are entirely dependent on clients’ individual requirements as set by your Search Firm.

Remote Access for Your Staff

One of the major benefits of the Internet is that it has hugely reduced the cost of data communication. For instance, it is now possible for a consultant in New York to log on to a database hosted in Hong Kong for the cost of a local call (and in some cases, at no cost at all!).

FILEFINDER offers direct Internet communication.

This option is primarily used by consultants or support staff who either work from home or travel with a laptop. The FILEFINDER client software is installed on the local machine and is able to communicate with the central server over a TCP/IP Internet protocol. For remote users to connect at any time, the central server will need a constantly open Internet connection. If this wouldn’t be practical for your Search Firm, Dillistone Systems could host this central server, using replication technology to exchange updates with the main server(s) at your office(s).

Learn more about FILEFINDER Executive Search Software or contact us to discuss how FILEFINDER could help you maximize the benefits of Web technology, please contact our Sales Team at: sales@dillistone.com