2016 HR Tech Conference & Expo

Chicago, IL  |   Oct 4-7, 2016

The 19th HR Technology Conference & Expo will be taking place in Chicago,  October 4-7. With 5000+ attendees, HR Tech is the world´s leading conference and exposition on technology for HR executives and professionals. 

HR Tech is the most important event on how software, technology and collaborative tools are bringing significant change in the way people and organizations work. For two days, you will be able to learn from the world’s most exciting leaders and disrupters on topics covering HR, technology, talent & recruitment, social enterprise, learning, mobile, trends, strategy and big data opportunities.

Come and visit the DaXtra team at booth 959! Our team will be there to show you the latest Daxtra Technology helping you to streamline your workflow and reduce time spent on data entry. Ask for a Demo and learn how to cut down on menial tasks and concentrate on one-on-one personal contact with candidates.

GRMSearch is one of Asia Pacific’s leading recruiters in the areas of legal and compliance, and the firm also has growing practices in the asset management, insurance and front office banking sectors.

Headquartered in Hong Kong and founded by Londoner and CEO Rob Green in 2009, GRMSearch in its current incarnation officially came to life in 2013, after Green purchased and rebranded a firm he co-founded called CML Recruitment. In just a few years’ time, GRM has expanded rapidly beyond Hong Kong, and now has offices in Melbourne, Johannesburg, and Tokyo.

The firm has also maintained a high profile across the region by regularly winning industry awards and accolades, including:

• 2015 Asia HR Awards – Voted by HR leaders as the #2 Agency in Hong Kong
• 2014 Global Recruiter Awards –Winner of Best Recruitment Consultant and Commended Winner in the Best Specialist Recruitment Business category

GRMSearch works on both a contingent and retainer basis, and offers its clients a range of research, advisory and talent intelligence services in addition to traditional placements.

The firm prides itself on placing ‘candidates’ as opposed to ‘job seekers, ’ given that its database and networks consist primarily of professionals who are already performing at the very top of their respective fields.

What is more, GRM’s recruiters not only have established sector expertise in their focus areas – whether legal, compliance, insurance or finance - but also a strong passion for the career development of the professionals they place.

“Our methodology has always been that we are a headhunting firm, and not a standard recruiter,” Green says. ”We approach every engagement as a brand new executive search. What that means is we don’t rely on advertising -- we rely on the relationships that we build. At GRM, we develop real tangible relationships with professionals in the marketplace over a number of years, so when they are ready to move, they come to us. ”

Over the next few years GRMSearch aims to scale its business in other markets around the world and deepen its expertise in industries outside its traditional focus areas, such as private equity. To pull it off and remain at the top of a competitive market, Green is determined to remove any unnecessary inefficiencies from GRM’s business. This has created a crucial need for the introduction of improved data management practices and cutting edge search technologies into the firm’s daily workflow.

Daxtra’s Role

As CEO of GRMSearch, Green is a big believer in the power of technology to transform and maximise workflow efficiency, especially in a highly competitive market such as Hong Kong, which is home to several thousand recruitment agencies. The more he can eliminate – or at the very least minimise - mundane administration tasks for his staff, Green says, the more they can focus on the work that really matters, such as relationship building and closing deals.

In the immediate term, GRMSearch is grappling with legacy database challenges that stem from Green’s buyout and rebranding of his previous firm. All of the legacy candidate data needed to be seamlessly updated and transferred onto GRM’s new databases. To do this manually would not only have taken a huge amount of time, but would have also introduced a significant – and costly – margin of error.

That is where Daxtra came in.

“When I bought the firm in 2013, we had to migrate the data from the old system to the new one,” Green says. “The data was legally held by the old firm CML, so we had to migrate it over. We’re talking about 100,000 people – and there was a lot of missing information.”

GRMSearch was first introduced to Daxtra when Green met Daxtra’s Asia CEO, Sergei Makhmodov, at an industry trade fair in Singapore. The two hit it off over a conversation about minimising waste and maximising efficiency.

“My first conversation with Daxtra was ‘What can you do to help us clean up our database?’” Green says. “That means filling in personal details without error, and automatically putting information in the right columns. For me the thing that clenched it was the relationship Daxtra has with our database provider Bullhorn. Daxtra has a great relationship with Bullhorn, which is immensely helpful. Once the reprocess is finished, our database will be one of the cleanest in the market. ”

After a few months of consideration following the Singapore trade fair, GRMSearch signed up for a suite of Daxtra products - Daxtra Capture, Daxtra Search and Daxtra Magnet. Taken together, Green says all three are a powerful force that will help GRMSearch catapult to the next level in terms of productivity and stay ahead of its competition.

For its part, Daxtra Search will help GRM recruiters eliminate wasteful hours cross-checking candidates.

“What they’ve done with Search is quite clever,” says Luke Hawkins, a director in GRM’s Hong Kong office. “It’s intelligent search, so it will pull up a column and say ‘You searched accounting. What about accounting in banking?’ That means you can quickly refine and improve your search because Daxtra works out patterns and makes recommendations for you.”

At the same time, with Daxtra Capture in its arsenal, GRM can rest easy that any new CV data introduced into its systems will be correctly coded in the company’s massive database.

“Fundamentally, manual coding is never 100 percent reliable,” Hawkins says. “Unfortunately, when it comes to things like career history, very few people take the time to code these things properly. It's busy work that Daxtra has thankfully eliminated from our workflow.”

And lastly, Daxtra Magnet will help GRMSearch find candidates beyond its own database of elite professionals by arming the firm’s recruiters with a next-generation tool that gives them the power to seamlessly pull candidate data from any website they come across and add it to their databases.

“Ultimately, Daxtra’s services should help with new revenue generation,” Green says. “If they help us better manage our time and improve our search and placement results, then they will serve as a vital contributing factor to our growing success.”

The Future

Looking ahead, GRMSearch is doubling down on its expansion ambitions, and also reinforcing its commitment to one of the world’s most dynamic markets – Asia. The headhunting markets in Asia are more hotly contested than ever, given the region’s promising growth outlook relative to other parts of the world. According to Green, Daxtra is well positioned to assist GRMSearch as it opens offices in new territories and expands its already significant database of top-flight professionals.

“We’re on an exciting growth trajectory,” Green says. “The strategy that I wrote is the first five-year plan, and we’re ahead of schedule. We’ve continued to reinvest in technology and our own people. Our service will get tighter, and better, and Daxtra will hopefully play a big part in that. As our teams grow, our database will grow. Tokyo alone may double our database, and with Daxtra’s help, we just might be able to expand upon our success more quickly. ”

Career International is one of China’s leading recruitment firms. Established in 1996 and headquartered in Beijing, it employs over 1,000 professional recruitment consultants in 40 offices, and serves clients across 18 fields and industries. In addition to its many offices across mainland China, the company also has established operations in India and Singapore.

Career International has won a number of high-profile industry awards and accolades during its two-decade history. To name just three the firm has claimed in recent years:

• 2014 RPO APAC Overall Leaders, HRO Today Baker’s Dozen
• 2014 Best HR Outsourcing Services Firm of the Year in Greater China, HRoot
• 2013 Best HR Management Provider in Greater China, China Staff

The company is also in the middle of a period of rapid expansion. In the last twelve months alone, the firm successfully matched more than 20,000 permanent and dispatched workers with appropriate vacancies, including 16,000 senior management, professional and technical employees.

More than just a headhunting and placement agency, Career International offers its clients a full range of recruitment solutions that touch on nearly every aspect of the talent management lifecycle. The firm’s business spans multiple categories: executive search, recruitment process outsourcing, flexible staffing, sales and marketing outsourcing, campus recruitment and talent acquisition consulting. The company also runs a Career Management Institute, which offers specialised training programs designed to help talent managers develop the most effective hiring strategies for their organisations.

Over the long term, Career International aspires to become the dominant recruitment services provider in the world’s most populous country. The firm’s core values include maintaining a ‘client-oriented’ posture by always striving to predict important industry and market trends before they materialise. Career International also pursues the ideal of ‘continuous improvement’ – both in terms of client service, and also internally, working to institute efficiency and productivity gains across its various business units whenever possible.

Daxtra's Role

The massive and expanding pool of data that Career International has amassed - on potential candidates, clients and positions on offer - is both a source of competitive advantage and a challenge to manage.

On a quest to improve workflow efficiency, extract maximum value from unwieldy volumes of candidate data and ultimately protect – and improve – the company’s bottom line, Toni Liao, Career International’s Chief Information Officer, was briefed by Daxtra on the company’s suite of automated recruitment solutions and services, and felt they were a good fit.

“We’ve been on the lookout for services that could help the company improve its performance,” Liao says. “The major challenge for us is the internal implementation, and training all employees to use these new services. When we heard about Daxtra, we visited their site and learned more about their products, and thought they could meet our needs.”

Liao is a well-known figure in China’s recruitment and IT industries, and is often interviewed by local trade media for her take on the latest developments in both sectors, as well as her career trajectory as a high-profile female executive. She graduated from Shanghai Institute of Physical Education 1992 with an IT and computer science degree and joined Career International a few years later. In 2013, she was awarded the distinction of China’s ‘Most Valuable CIO’ by IT Value.

Liao now has more than 15 years of experience at Career International, and has seen the company steadily improve and refine its internal data management systems to address the rapidly changing trends reshaping the IT and recruitment industries.

Recently, for example, Liao deployed enterprise resource planning (ERP) software in an effort to more effectively manage and integrate the disparate threads of data spread across Career International’s separate businesses.

One of the key benefits of Daxtra’s product suite was that it could be integrated into Career International’s existing IT systems and assets, without disrupting established workflow processes.

“It took us a few months to integrate into our own systems, because of our own internal requirements,” says Liao. “We wanted to take our time to make sure we did it correctly and effectively.”

Though Career International is a relatively recent adopter, Daxtra already plays an integral part in Liao’s cutting-edge suite of data management tools. The company has deployed Daxtra Capture and Daxtra Parser in an effort to improve candidate searches, better manage candidate data extraction, maximise internal workflow efficiencies and above all, stay ahead of the competition.

Daxtra Capture is an integrated workflow tool that provides automatic email to database candidate data entry in seconds, eliminating for Career International the time and expenses associated with routine administrative tasks. It also helps Career International with resume and CV deduplication and updates in an entirely automated fashion, by tracking new data against existing customer relationship management (CRM) resources.

Using Daxtra’s advanced parsing technology, Career International is able to quickly and accurately turn raw CV and vacancy data into a structured XML format that fits seamlessly into existing databases – saving the firm crucial time, and ultimately, helping its bottom line.

At the same time, Career International is also benefitting from Daxtra’s unique Chinese language capabilities. These capabilities give companies like Career International the best of both worlds: resume management solutions built with cutting edge international standards that also have the ability to search, identify and categorise data in the language used by Career International’s mainly domestic candidate and client base.

“The Chinese language function is a challenging area,” Liao says. “The benefit of Daxtra is that it comes as part of a bigger package, which drives a broader set of efficiency gains across the organisation.”

Today, Daxtra Capture and Daxtra Parser are both fully integrated into Career International’s existing IT architecture, almost as if the solutions were tailor-made for the organisation. While the benefits of that integration are staring to materialise, Liao believes they have only just begun. “We need some time to see the full impact, but the internal feedback so far has been quite positive,” she says.

The Future

Although Career International is already among the top recruitment firms in China, the company is just getting started. As the world’s most populous country continues to evolve over the next decade – transforming from an export and infrastructure-led economy toward one built on services and domestic consumption – Career International is well positioned to capitalise on the transformation, by providing companies with the skilled workers that will power this shift.

Daxtra will be at Career International’s side as it travels this journey. Daxtra sees China as the future of recruitment in Asia, and is investing heavily in its local operation and support network, with its Asia offices in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. By combining global development capabilities and practices with solutions that are tailored for local needs, Daxtra will ensure Career International can continue to quickly extract candidate data and match it with customer needs, minimise labour-intensive administration processes, improve productivity, and control costs.

“We believe Daxtra will allow us to link all of our data together, and make sure our data is ‘active’ and organised,” Liao says. “For these reasons, I think Career International will be partnering with Daxtra for a long time to come”

Ji Weiguo: Daxtra’s CV parsing technology takes Beisen’s recruitment system up another notch

Founded in 2002, Beisen is the number one talent management brand in China and a creator of a SaaS talent management software. The company has a 70% market share of the Chinese talent evaluation market. Beisen started developing talent management software in 2010. By today, the company has become an undisputed leader in talent evaluation and recruitment management software with 600 employees and over 4,000 customers, including medium and large enterprises like Vanke and Country Garden.

For its recruitment management software, Beisen has chosen internationally renowned Daxtra Technologies as its technology partner to provide curriculum vitae (CV) parsing technology solutions that will elevate its products to new heights. Beisen and Daxtra share the same goals and passion in their commitment towards the talent business. We interviewed Mr. Ji Weiguo, CEO of Beisen, earlier who shared his insights on China’s talent management software market, future trends and the company’s partnership with Daxtra.

Q: Beisen is a top talent management brand in China and a pioneer developer of talent management software in the country. What was your vision when you founded Beisen?

Ji Weiguo: Beisen started out with talent evaluation. However, that only resolves one aspect of the problem for companies. In order to integrate talent evaluation into companies’ business processes, we started venturing into the talent management software business in 2010. We hope that by providing an integrated talent management platform, we can help Chinese companies find top level talent. Since then, we have grown to become a flagship company in domestic talent management software, employing over 600 people. Currently, our software solutions encompass the following modules: evaluation, recruitment, performance analysis, remuneration assessment, contract renewal and CoreHR.

Q: Which of these modules is the collaboration between Beisen and Daxtra based on?

Ji Weiguo: Beisen’s recruitment management systems assist companies in their recruitment operations. One core component of the recruitment exercise is the collection of CVs from different channels. We need to parse these CVs into formats that can be stored on the database. Daxtra’s technology is used in our recruitment management systems to parse CVs written in different languages.

Q: Why did Beisen decide to use Daxtra’s technology?

Ji Weiguo: Daxtra’s solution is capable of parsing in 26 different languages, including Chinese, English, French and Spanish. This is one of the reasons why we have decided to use their products. In addition, from a global perspective, Daxtra’s CV parsing solution is the best among similar service providers, particularly in their ability to parse Chinese CVs and in terms of software compatibility. That is why we decided to work with them.

Q: In your opinion, what is the market potential of Daxtra’s CV parsing products in the future?

Ji Weiguo: Daxtra’s CV parsing technology will have a bigger market share. Regardless of whether companies decide to develop their own recruitment systems or use solutions such as Beisen, they won’t be developing CV parsing technology, due to the cost, effort and resources involved. As competition becomes more intense, companies will invest more resources in creating their own talent pools. With CVs coming through different channels and in different formats, the demand for CV parsing technology will be increasing. Currently, CV parsing technology is at a stage of rapid growth. For Daxtra, this represents great market opportunities.

Q: In your opinion, in which areas does Daxtra’s CV parsing technology surpasses similar products in the market?

Ji Weiguo: The accuracy of Daxtra’s CV parsing technology is a result of the extensive ongoing effort and the knowledge base they possess. In terms of semantic parsing, searching and data classification, a massive knowledge base ensures greater accuracy. Daxtra is not merely a developer, the company’s products ensure continuous accumulation and optimization of CV content and format samples for its library so that the process becomes more mature and precise.

Q: What are your expectations for Beisen in the next few years?

Ji Weiguo: Beisen has positioned itself as an integrated cloud talent management service platform provider. The integration means that we have to be involved in every aspect of human resource management. Customers can perform additional development based on Beisen’s products. They can develop processes and modules that are suitable for their operations based on our products. Currently, Beisen is already the biggest HR SaaS company and we hope to continue to lead the industry forward in the future.

Q: What is the relationship between Beisen and its customer and what is the company’s business model?

Ji Weiguo: First of all, we hope to satisfy our customers’ operational needs at different human resource levels through different modules provided by Beisen’s integrated talent management platform.

Secondly, Beisen’s customers pay an annual fee. So essentially, it is a subscription-based service. Beisen is not merely selling a product. Our fundamental value lies in helping customers achieve business success. If we discover that our products cannot help a customer resolve their issues, we will not participate in a tender exercise. This is what distinguishes Beisen from other installation software providers.

Q: You mentioned that competition for talent recruitment in China is immense. What are your views on current talent recruitment practices in China?

Ji Weiguo: China’s has been seeing rapid speeds of economic development and growth in the number of companies created, so talent requirement is constantly on the rise. At the same time, 2015 will be a turning point for China’s human resource market, marked by a reduction in the amount of labor entering the market. From the beginning of 2015, the cost of labor in China has increased by at least 15%. At the same time, the frequency of people changing their jobs is a lot higher in China than, for example, in the US. These two factors will assert immense pressure on the recruitment efforts of Chinese companies.

Q: In your opinion, what new trends are developing in human resource management in China?

Ji Weiguo: The shortage of talent is a widespread problem that is faced by Chinese companies. Therefore, a very important task in terms of human resource management is to ensure internal and external talent supply. Beisen is committed to providing technological innovations to help companies resolve their talent shortage issues.

First of all, increased pressure on recruitment will drive companies to start building their own talent pools. However, it is not easy to manage a database containing hundreds of thousands of CVs. By analyzing and filtering CVs from applicants, we create a recommendation standard. After which, we utilize big data technology to perform intelligent mining of the entire CV database to select CVs that fulfil the requirements. This is a unique innovation amongst all the recruitment systems that are available in the world.

Secondly, Beisen has developed an internal referral system based on WeChat Moments. Social media platforms, such as Twitter and LinkedIn are not available in China and the internal referral aspect of Chinese companies is relatively weak. However, China has its very own WeChat Moments. Recently, we integrated WeChat Moments into our recruitment software to help customers create a complete internal referral system. Based on Beisen’s best practices, a successful internal referral system can account for 40%-48% of new hires. Such high ratio can help customers resolve their recruitment issues significantly.

Thirdly, Beisen has always been committed to the development of evaluation tools for talent potential. Companies often need talent for more than short cycle contracts, so there is a need for long-term training and succession planning for their staff. We hope that companies can use Beisen’s evaluation system at the start of the training process to uncover the potential of different employees. Beisen has nearly 10 years’ experience in talent-potential identification technology and will be introducing additional new innovations later this year. We hope to lead and change the industry through these innovative technologies.

Q: What are your expectations for the partnership between Beisen and Daxtra in the future?

Ji Weiguo: I hope that Daxtra can continue to optimize its CV parsing technology. Beisen is willing to work with them to optimize the algorithm and develop our partnership further. Of course, in addition to our existing collaboration on the CV parsing front, we also hope to strengthen our partnership in technologies such as candidate search and retrieval. That way, Beisen can focus on providing management systems for customers while working with professional companies on base-level technologies. This will be beneficial for both parties.

DaXtra is delighted to partner with the HR Think Tank Series

As a market leader in CV, job parsing and semantic CV search technologies, DaXtra believes in promoting best practice within the recruitment sector, ultimately to add real expertise to in-house HR and Talent Acquisition functions, staffing agencies, software providers and job boards. 

DaXtra provides solutions to over 1,000 organisations globally in over 28 languages, helping steam-line  CV workflows to enable recruiters to do what they do best – Engage with Candidates to bring on board the best talent, in the quickest time.

Partnering with HR Think Tank underpins DaXtra’s commitment to sharing knowledge within the recruitment sector and to the growth of technology and its’ effectiveness to secure the best Candidates.

DaXtra is also a proud member of APSCo as well as being ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 accredited, and as such strives not only for excellence within the HR and Talent Acquisition sector but also for excellence within our operations and for our employees across the Globe.