Case Study | Google Search Appliance
Global professional services firm Hudson expands its use of the Google Search Appliance
At a Glance What they wanted to do • Make it easier for recruitment consultants to find the information on candidates and clients through overhauling their search • Integrate data from US, European and Asia/Pacific websites to make it global job information available to local markets What they did • Implemented GSA in USA, Europe and Asia • Integrated search on the external and internal websites with the GSA What they accomplished • Improved the ability of Hudson’s recruitment consultants to find the right candidates for their clients’ needs, on a global scale • Made it easier for job seekers to find more career options on a global scale via the Hudson international websites
Business Hudson is a global professional services firm (NASDAQ: HHGP). A leading provider of services to improve clients’ performance, Hudson’s offerings include: recruitment, Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), talent management, and professional solutions requiring specialized talent such as eDiscovery process management. The company employs more than 2,000 professionals serving clients and candidates in approximately 20 countries. For their industry-leading recruitment services in particular, Hudson recruits candidates and sources clients using traditional search, advertising, database selection and innovative, web-based attraction and recruitment solutions. These approaches require a robust search solution. Challenge Hudson North America wanted to help its recruitment consultants to find candidates from its database in a faster and more efficient way.The company stores a vast amount of information including 300,000 client files and 1.9 million candidate records. These resources are constantly growing as more clients and candidates are added. It is vital to the success of the business for Hudson’s recruitment agents to be able to search through all of these internal documents quickly and effectively to match suitable candidates and jobs.
“The GSA’s ability to help us pinpoint the most appropriate candidates for our clients’ needs is a core part of our business. The speed at which our consultants can identify the best possible candidate for a job not only keeps us one step ahead of our competitors, but it ultimately keeps our clients satisfied and wanting to work with us.” —Arnaud Richard, Chief Architect Hudson’s North American database is run on browser-based application PeopleSoft, which uses an Oracle database to store all information on candidates and clients. These records, consisting mainly of candidate resumes in a mixture of formats including Word, PDFs and HTML, were becoming difficult to organize. Hudson had in place a search tool delivered out of the box which was a solution that Hudson was finding restrictive and inefficient. Re-indexing, which took place when a new custom search field needed to be added or when there was a known indexing issue, took 18 hours to complete. During this re-indexing period, the search system would be down and the business would therefore be greatly inconvenienced. “Re-indexing the database required the server to be taken offline, which meant not only was the IT system disrupted but that our recruitment consultants lost valuable time. In the recruitment sector, lost time means lost money so something had to be done and fast,” explains Jill Crabtree, Senior Director of Applications, Hudson North America.
About Google Search Appliance
With the Google Search Appliance (GSA), the search experience shared by millions across the globe can be harnessed by your individual company with specific enterprise enhancements that make searching easier, intuitive, and customizable. Ready to index most enterprise content right “out of the box,” the GSA turns your company’s intranet or website search engine into a system that is as relevant and reliable as Google’s - with the same ease of use. For more information visit: www.google.com/enterprise/search
Hudson USA also found it time-consuming to use its existing solution to add in new search fields. As the database constantly increases, the need to refine search criteria through multiple fields grows in importance. Not being able to quickly and easily add new search categories and run them alongside other criteria was therefore a major hindrance for progress. In an entirely separate global project, Hudson was facing a further challenge. It wanted to improve the search available to candidates via the Hudson network of websites. “We felt that by merging all job vacancies from across the globe into a single searchable database and improving the websites search capabilities, we could enable candidates to search more accurately for specific jobs anywhere in the world. This would make the lives of our recruitment consultants easier as more candidates would be putting themselves forward for positions,” explains Arnaud Richard, Chief Architect at Hudson. Solution While a number of search solutions were considered for Hudson North America, it became clear that the GSA was the answer to its challenges, based on the experience of Hudson Europe which deployed a similar solution connecting to its database powered by Microsoft SQL Server. “In Europe, the GSA crawls 5 million documents and performs 50-60,000 searches per day so we knew it could withstand heavy usage and high volumes of data,” explains Crabtree. The US was keen to refresh its search criteria and build out more search fields, and was encouraged by the successful way in which this had been achieved by the European division through customizing the GSA, adding filters and refining it. Given this tangible proof, it didn’t take much persuasion for Hudson North America to replace its search solution with the GSA. Hudson also chose to implement the GSA onto the pages of its global websites. “Due to the trust we had built up with the product, we decided to deploy the GSA onto our websites. By pooling our resources in this way we could bring our business resources more closely together and therefore expand opportunities in all our markets,” states Richard. Benefits Since completing the implementation of the GSA in North America, Hudson’s recruitment consultants have been able to pinpoint the most appropriate candidates for positions much more quickly. “The GSA has enabled us to make use of lists of candidates with specific skills which has enhanced our ability to deliver targeted candidate populations to our clients,” explains Crabtree. “This means that if a business is recruiting an IT developer, we can pull out a list of developers who are well suited for that role much more quickly that with the previous solution. Then our consultants can begin their process of evaluating, interviewing and performing all their proprietary analyses with candidates to ultimately deliver the desired end result to our clients.” To further enhance searching capabilities, Hudson North America wanted to improve the ability to search multiple fields simultaneously. “For example, a candidate could be stored in the system’s database with multiple skill codes that were stored in the same field. By adding additional fields to the search solution, Hudson employees could find a candidate with the precise skills needed for a specific role much more easily,” clarifies Crabtree. Working directly with Google to add more searchable fields also enabled Hudson employees to capture any potential applicants that were coming to the end of a contracting assignment and would be available for future roles. Hudson’s recruitment consultants have found using the search engine simple and intuitive due to their familiarity with Google.com. The company
implemented the “Search As You Type” function, where words are suggested as you type in a term to further reduce the time it takes to find information. It also has in place the “feeling lucky” option, where you can chose to go to the first suggested result instantly. “The great thing about the GSA is that it looks like a Google search box from an end user’s perspective, meaning that employees don’t need formal training. They love how simple it is to use,” comments Crabtree. “This database is searched 10,000 times a month by 150 users, a vast increase from the previous option so we know that uptake has been widespread,” she adds. Since deploying the GSA across multiple countries, Hudson has been able to search databases from different regions in a unified way. GSAs across the business have been synced to enable employees to search candidates and clients on a global scale delivering many more suggestions. The capability to search global information means that its consultants can find suitable candidates willing to relocate to another country. This experience proved useful when deploying the GSA onto the pages of Hudson’s websites. The IT department have also been able to relinquish the responsibility of maintaining the old search tool, which was previously managed internally. The improvements made to the website’s searchability have meant that candidates can now search for job vacancies from across the globe more quickly and accurately. “Candidates can log onto our website from anywhere in the world and search for a job by city, industry, title or salary range. They can include detailed search terms and find a specific role quickly, tailored to their exact requirements,” affirms Richard. “The GSA’s ability to help us pinpoint the most appropriate candidates for our clients’ needs is a core part of our business. The speed at which our consultants can identify the best possible candidate for a job not only keeps us one step ahead of our competitors, but it ultimately keeps our clients satisfied and wanting to work with us. The capabilities and speed of the GSA are therefore integral to the way we work. Its integration across our business is bringing our globally dispersed company even closer together, allowing us to share information, pool global resources, and, as a result, be stronger and more united business,” concludes Richard.
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