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Hudson and the Google Search Appliance

Overview
Hudson is a large, global recruitment firm and a division of Hudson Highland Group. Hudson has three main divisions: professional services recruitment, talent management and managed solutions.

The recruitment industry is an extremely competitive sector. Market share is won on the ability to match the most suitable candidates with clients quickly and effectively. Time is literally money in the recruitment sector, so anything providers can do to improve speed to market or deliver a better quality of service to clients will reap dividends.

Challenge
Hudson holds three million candidates' CVs on its European database. Being a high touch recruitment business, Hudson gathers a lot of valuable information on its candidates through out the recruitment cycle during conversations and interviews. This vast knowledge base is one of the primary sources Hudson uses to find a candidate, but the recruitment provider was struggling to find the most productive way for consultants to take advantage of it and find the right talent quickly and effectively. “It is sometimes like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” says Laurent Chen, chief operating officer (COO) of Hudson Europe.

At the same time, Hudson was rolling out a new Web-based front-office system called TalentDesk, which consultants use to create new client assignments, attract and assess candidates, and send out invoices. While implementing TalentDesk, the IT team began to consider how they could improve the candidate knowledge base to make it easier for consultants to find the right talent each and every time.

Solution
“We looked at the way consultants were working to see what type of tool would be universally adopted,” explains Chen. “Google's Search Appliance interested us because people know how to use Google's search engine, and the speed and performance of the engine is second to none. When you have a database of three million candidates, you cannot afford to wait 15 seconds for a search to deliver results.”

Chen decided to trial the Google Search Appliance with a group of consultants in the UK in November 2005. “The feedback was overwhelmingly positive,” he says. “They loved the speed and the result, so we decided to push it forward as a core component in our front-office system.”

Google's Search Appliance wasn't the only technology Hudson investigated as a solution to its problem. “We did a couple of trials with some other search and matching solutions,” explains Chen. “However, they did not hold up to their promise when trying to scale to the magnitude of data and utilisation we required. We needed an appliance that was fast, reliable and resilient for thousands of concurrent users.”

Although the UK trial group liked the Google Search Appliance, the version they tested did not meet all of Hudson's requirements. “We wanted a system that could not only search candidates' CVs but also the other information consultants enter about candidates into TalentDesk,” he explains. “We are not CV pushers, it is important that we match the right position for the right Talent, so we use a coding system that helps to qualify the candidates and clients requirements, with this we can see in a matter of seconds if a candidate would be willing to relocate to Kiev, for instance.

It is the type of important information people tend not to include in their CV but which might be mentioned during an interview with one of Hudson's consultants. “So we went back to Google with our comments and they said the 4.6 release would have the functionality to conduct a structured search through its external meta-data indexing facility.

Once Chen found out that the Google Search Appliance more than met the company's needs, especially with the innovative meta-data indexing functionality, Hudson began the deployment of three Google Search Appliances in its datacentre, where the rest of its IT equipment is housed.

“The Google Search Appliance was extremely simple to install on our network,” says Chen. Slightly more complicated was customising the system for Hudson's needs and merging candidate profiles with CVs into one giant source of data for Google to index and search. Yet with the help of Google's engineers and a few late nights for the development team, the system was soon up and running.

Next came the pan-European rollout, which began in Central Europe with the Ukraine and Hungary. Hudson plans to roll the Google Search Appliance to one country a month, finishing with the UK in April 2007.

Results
Although it is too early to see the benefits of the system, Chen expects the ability for consultants to search the candidate database quickly and more effectively will vastly improve productivity amongst consultants. They will now be able to use the tool to search more specifically for the right candidate, for example, a project manager in London who has worked in the FMCG industry and been interviewed recently by Hudson. “In less than one second you will receive a list of all the relevant candidates,” enthuses Chen. “It is an extremely powerful tool for consultants.”

“The speed of retrieving documents is substantially faster than the traditional legacy system we had,” adds Chen.

For Hudson, the Google Search Appliance will become a critical business tool. “If we cannot search our knowledge base we do not have a business,” he states simply. Indeed, Hudson is already looking at how the tool can be applied to” further maximise the information contained within the candidate database. “With the multiple views of the Search Appliance, you can search for a candidate with particular skills, but you can also cross search for positions that this candidate would fit as well or find similar Talent skill set.” explains Chen.

It is just one more feature that Chen hopes will make it easier for consultants to perform a better job. “If it helps our consultants find the right candidate, it helps our clients as well,” he says.

About the Google Search Appliance
The Google Search Appliance is an integrated corporate search solution that extends Google's award-winning search technology to intranets and websites. The Google Search Appliance is available in three models: the GB-1001 for departments and mid-sized companies; the GB-5005 for dedicated, high-priority search services such as customer-facing websites and company-wide intranet applications; and the GB-8008 for centralized deployments supporting global business units. For more information, visit http://www.google.co.uk/enterprise/.