Speed fishing
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Ad site fish4 takes the hassle out of job hunting.
Job hunting can be a labour intensive process – even in the information age. For those seeking a new opportunity, it can mean surfing through countless employment websites, only to find the same adverts posted by different agencies. For the recruiter, it can involve trying to match a set of requirements to a long list of candidates with ill-fitting qualifications.
fish4 has been trying to take the pain out of that process. As aggregation point for the tens of thousands of job ads that have traditionally appeared in different local newspapers around the country – as well as car and home ads – it was developed by four of the UK’s biggest regional print media groups – Newsquest, Northcliffe, Trinity Mirror and the Guardian Media Group.
Its current posting of 40,000 job ads attracts 1.6 million unique visitors a month, but to make it more appealing for recruiters Fish4 has tried to automate the match-making process through the use of advanced search technology.
Instead of having to type in Boolean key words when looking for a suitable candidate, its new castAnet system matches the CVs of registered jobseekers to job specifications and automatically emails recruiters with the 10 best candidate matches within minutes of a vacancy being posted.
Powering that matching service is the enterprise search platform, FAST, from the eponymous Norwegian software company – a product selected by fish4 CTO, Richard Yeo, after an extensive evaluation. “We chose FAST because its performance, scalability and functionality are so much richer than with other platforms,” says Yeo.
fish4 intends to extend the use of FAST across all its main online applications, including fish4homes, fish4cars and fish4lettings. “We plan to use FAST technology to power everything at fish4,“ enthuses Yeo. The FAST platform will also be used in the development of a range of new products being planned for delivery over the next two years. These include enhancing the search capabilities of its CV database to handle more than one million entries and the creation of a ‘60-second CV’ for candidates, allowing them to advertise their availability to recruiters who are urgently looking to fill job vacancies.
