I’ve been focused these last few months on providing things and ideas to recruiters that help them be more productive and spend less. For instance, we made our premium memberships at our recruiter network and our job board free. We started a LinkedIn group that shares information, ideas, and monthly on-demand classes from our Recruiter Training Center (RTC) for free. And, the rest of our trainings this year at the RTC are just $15; those are the same classes you’ll find elsewhere for over $100. And we’re not done yet…

Does anyone out there remember the movie Mr. Mom? I still laugh recalling that scene of a baby eating a can of chili, but this isn’t about getting the stink out of your house (or, maybe it is if that “stink” is what you spend for things). No, I’m recalling the Schooner Tuna campaign developed by Terri Garr’s character where the tuna company lowered its price per can to help people through challenging economic conditions. It was “the tuna with a heart.” I think many of us could use a little of that nowadays.

We posted a survey not long ago; completing it got you an on-demand training for free out of our Recruiter Training Center library. Well the results are in from that survey. I’d like to share them with you and then tell you another way that you can save some money using the things you already own.

The survey was on recruiter tools and activities. I’ll preface by saying that I’m not going to mention any brands of recruitment tools, and do not want to encourage a product frenzy with this post. In fact, while we asked recruiters what ATS they used, the results were across the board with absolutely no front-runners.

For email, more than 68% of you use MS Outlook on a PC, and 60% of you use some type of mobile device for recruiting (beyond sending and receiving telephone calls). And, those are the tools I’m focusing the rest of this post on.

You work an average of 10 jobs per week and receive just under 100 resumes per week. More than 75% of those resumes come to you by email. But only about 40% of those emailed resumes make it into any Applicant Tracking System (ATS). The result is that there are a bunch of resumes that sit in your email that you do not have a productive way to manage, search, or use. In the words of one recruiter who responded about how they used Outlook: “[I] put resumes into folders broken up by discipline. Difficult to search [though].”

The repercussions of this quandary are endless and costly. You hunt and peck through folders, emails, and attachments, opening each up and reading one at a time until you find the resume you want. It’s horribly time consuming and unproductive. Alternatively, you just spend more time and money to post and search again trying to catch that fish that you once had in your hands.

So you needed it, we built it, and we’re giving it to you now for free. It’s an add-on for Outlook. Installing it creates a menu option in Outlook called Parse Resume. From there, you can transform resumes in email attachments (or in desktop file folders) into searchable Outlook contacts singly or in bunches at a time. The candidates’ contact details are fielded in the Outlook contact (vCard) and the full resume is put in the comments field. You then put in any terms into Outlook’s search bar (e.g. “nurse practitioner” Philadelphia) to find matching candidates. Want to access those contacts remotely? Simply sync your mobile device with Outlook and you are good to go.

This is a free tool that you can use today to be more productive at a lower cost and we have some really great ideas for additional features that are in the works. While it won’t replace a robust ATS found at HR departments or staffing companies, it can certainly improve access to and the processing of data, and in doing so, it speeds time to hire. If you’re an independent or small shop who doesn’t have, or has had to eliminate, an ATS to save costs, then this tool helps you turn Outlook into an ATS.

So, how about that Schooner Tuna, the tuna with a heart? We’re taking a page from its playbook. I can’t promise you this tool will always be free. But for now – while many of us could use a boost – it is, up to 100 resumes per day. (That’s about 10 times the volume recruiters reported they needed in our survey). If you find you need more processing power than that, then you can buy it for what you can download an iTunes song for… That’s as low as $1. Check it out here. And please, give us your feedback.

If you’re interested in joining us for a live Q&A session on how you recruit more effectively with Outlook then I encourage you to attend a brief, free webinar this Thursday August 6th at 1pm EDT.