One of the biggest pain points recruiters face is populating their resume database with resumes from different sources like mail attachments, desktop folders, job portals etc. And with the web 2.0 wave, these sources have extended to social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn etc too. Recruiters typically spend anywhere between 60-90% of their time manually updating the resume database. Where as this time can be spent more usefully to connect with prospective candidates or improving their placement ratio.

Enter resume parsing tools and they play an important role in increasing the productivity of recruiters. Zoho People is now integrated with eGrabber's flagship product, resume parser tool -ResumeGrabber Pro. Entering resumes manually are a thing of the past now and Zoho People users can extract resumes directly from email attachments, folders, job portals, social sites, Google search results etc into their Zoho People account using this tool.

The salient features of this tool :

Powerful Search
Scans for resumes from search engine results, resume websites, e-mails and PC folders.

Smart Filter
Resume Identification Technology accurately recognizes and displays only resumes from a bunch of documents.

Intelligent Analyzer
Identifies candidate contact details in the resume and transfers it to your database.

Save Resumes
Save search results and labels ‘hot’ candidates for future reference.

Duplicate Check
Checks for duplicates against your Zoho People account before adding the resume. Saves time that you would otherwise spend on processing multiple records of the same candidate.

How to set up Zoho People and ResumeGrabber integration :

1. Download and install ResumeGrabber (10 days trial available).
2. Click 'Menu' on the ResumeGrabber toolbar and choose 'Options '.
3. From the left panel navigation, choose 'Destination setup' under 'Options' menu.
4. Choose Zoho People from the ‘Set destination application as’ and click 'Transfer Options'.
5. Provide your Zoho People account details, and click ‘Login’.
6. Duplicate check can be configured from 'Transfer Options'.
7. Map/Enter the default value related to Zoho People's resume form fields, click OK to close ‘Destination setup’ window
8. Now, choose your resume source (Selected folder, MS-Outlook, Google Search, Yahoo Search, ...) on the ‘From’ drop down on the ResumeGrabber tool bar.
9. If the source is ‘Selected folder‘, select the desired resumes or all resumes from your PC folders and click 'Grab' from ResumeGrabber Pro tool.
10. ResumeGrabber would capture all/selected resumes and display in its evaluation grid.
11. You can screen the resumes and select the desired ones (by choosing checkboxes) and click 'Transfer'.
12. Login to your Zoho People account in the browser to see the transferred resumes in the resume pool.

This demo video shows how to grab resumes from Microsoft Outlook using ResumeGrabber and make them available in Zoho People.

After our "Dummy Employee" update, we have done few updates and here are the highlights.

Leave Report

• You can enforce leave policy specifying the limit for different types of leave
• You can configure the time period for leave calculation in either days or hours and can exclude holidays from leave calculation
• You can manage accruals.
• Employees can now view their consolidated leave report and Managers can view their team members leave report
• You can enable approval process for leave requests wherein the manager can either allow or disallow team member's leave request. Hence improve employee productivity with automated workflows.

Filter based on approval status

Filter your view of requests for approval based on approval status, e.g., view the Leave application requests based on their approval status

Enhanced search
Search employees based on different criterion like on Last Name, First Name, Department ID etc

Integration with Zoho Sheet
You can now export your data as spreadsheet to Zoho Sheet. It has opened up a wide range of possibilities for you to process the data for reports, calculations etc

Added support for more doc types in upload
You can now upload docs of different formats like doc, rtf, html, pdf etc using the "upload doc" field.

SSL Support:
Zoho People is now more secure for paid users. SSL support is enabled for paid users. Paid users who have already embedded their forms in website need to re-embed the form to enable SSL support.

Online Subscription

You can subscribe to different user packs from your Zoho People account itself

Other Enhancements
You can now disable system fields too. From now on all the fields can be disabled.

Export view - You can now export only the data pertaining to the criteria set in customized view created by you instead of the whole data of the form.

Chat Integration
Zoho Chat is integrated right into Zoho People. You can now chat with all your Zoho Contacts without leaving the Zoho People application. This would tremendously increase your employee productivity with instant communication. Chat with your teammates using the chat bar on the bottom.

Test drive the latest features in Zoho People and let us know your feedback.

More often, a HR professional meets a situation where he/she wants to manage a temporary/contract employee's data in their HR system. But with most of the HR software pricing plans being based on number of employees, this becomes a delicate issue. Issue where the HR professional feels, "Why should I increase my cost by paying for a temporary employee? But it's necessary to maintain their data too, what should I do?". And they turn to a spreadsheet for help again. With Zoho People, you can overcome this problem using the "Dummy User" profile.

Employees who need not login to the system (Zoho People pricing is based on Employees who require login) can be added as dummy employees in Zoho People. Click on Organization -> Employee -> Add dummy employee or Settings -> Dummy employee -> Add dummy employee. These employees will not be considered for licensing fees and will be available for any business process like a normal employee inside the system and will appear in "Org chart", "Employee List", "Available as an interviewer","can be of any role" etc. But will not be able to login to the system and do not receive any mails from the system.

You can migrate Dummy Employees to Employees

Your temporary/contract employees can be migrated to regular employees, from Settings -> Dummy employee -> Migrate. Once migrated, they will receive invitation mails to join into the organization and they can login into the system.

Non-admin user can add Dummy Employees

Adding dummy employee is permission based and can be given to any role. To configure, Go to Settings -> Security -> Role of the person to whom you want to allow adding dummy employees -> Global permission -> Check Dummy Employee. Once configured, then the user can login and go to Self service -> All Forms -> Employee -> View (my/team/all) data -> Form Actions -> Add dummy user.

Hope you find this Zoho People feature useful. We will be happy to hear your comments.

Any recruiting / staffing firm may face problems like negotiating client deals, keeping the clients updated on the job opening status, sourcing appropriate candidates, pooling resources for interviews, tracking applicants, offering negotiations etc, which distract them from their focus of hiring an appropriate candidate. Zoho People helps automate the process of staffing with minimal effort and customization, thus allowing you to focus on your business goal. A screencast that explains how Zoho People, the affordable on-demand HRIS and recruitment solution, can be used by a staffing firm to meet its needs.

More on the above topic here. Let us know how you are using Zoho People and features that you would like to be added to it.

We are excited to announce a new addition to the Zoho Suite - Zoho People.

Zoho People is a Human Resource Management Application for HR team in an organization. This new business application joins our other business applications - Zoho CRM, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Projects and Zoho DB.

About Zoho People

Zoho People has several modules for HR Team (admins) and for Employees in an Organization. Let me briefly explain about the key modules...

Organization Module:

This module is used to define the structure of your organization including departments, designations/titles and also the Org Chart.

Recruitment Module:

The Recruitment module eases the hiring process in an organization. It automates the steps involved between searching a candidate from resume database to hiring him an employee. This module also lets managers raise job requirements and admins post openings on the website.

Forms Module:

The Forms module has a set of pre-created forms (mini-applications) for common tasks in an organization like filing expense reports, reporting leave etc. With Zoho Creator integration, this module lets admins create new forms or customize existing forms and make them available to all employees.

Checklist Module:

This module lets admin automate business processes and define the flow based on conditions. Tasks can automatically be assigned to users or groups based on defined flow.

Self Service Module:

This module acts as a self-service module for Employees and Managers. All the employees have access to this module. Managers can define job openings and organize their team structure. Employees can submit information to the HR department using the forms defined by the HR team (like submitting an Expense Report or informing about a leave etc).

Roles and Permissions :

This module is used by admin to define fine grained access for different roles based on permissions - which drill down to field level, action level and form level.

This explanation doesn't do justice to the capabilities of the application. The video below gives a quick overview of the key functionalities in the application.

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While all these capabilities make sense in a HR App, we understand that no two businesses operate the same way. Customization is the key for an application like this. So we made Zoho People completely customizable. Right from the top level tabs till the forms inside the application, everything is customizable. Infact, we have integrated Zoho Creator inside Zoho People allowing teams to customize every form in the application.Who Should use Zoho People?

Zoho People is really targeted at a level beyond the very small (say 50+ employee) businesses. Very small businesses can keep track of people in ad-hoc ways, (spreadsheets work!) but once a company reaches a certain size (even 25-30) keeping track of things like recruitment, IT resource allocation, benefits, vacations, skill management etc. becomes time consuming. In fact, that is the level at which a business typically gets a dedicated HR person. That is where Zoho People steps in.Big PictureAs we often say, we want to be the IT Department for SMBs. Just offering a set of productivity applications doesn't meet the needs of businesses. There needs to be a suite of business applications addressing those business needs. With Zoho People, we are taking another step towards offering a complete online solution for businesses. As always, we cannot wait to hear your feedback on this new release.