November 8, 2023
7 min
Building an HR SaaS company requires you to create features for so many different aspects of the department. You have to worry about payroll, onboarding process, internal dispute resolution, and countless other facets.
Adding a CV reader into the mix is just another thing you have to worry about. This begs the question, “How can I find a reliable CV reader for my HR SaaS solution?”
One way is to build a custom solution that you know performs well. Another option is to integrate an external CV reader.
Discover which option is better for you.
Building vs Buying a CV Reader: Which Is Better?
Either option can work depending on your needs, but here’s what you should consider before making your choice:
Building Your Own CV Reader
Building your own CV reader for your HR SaaS company is an extensive operation. Don't go down this route unless you are prepared for a significant resource investment. You would need a dedicated team, and quite a bit of time and money to invest into that development. The downside - the result may not be worth the wait and investment.
Sure, the allure of autonomy and customisation is tempting. Still, there are several crucial considerations you must assess before making the commitment to build your own solution:
● Multi-Tenant Architecture: Multi-tenant architecture, where a single application instance serves diverse customers, considers significant planning. You have to think about how to manage data and configure your databases. Additionally, you need to consider how your chosen technology stack will affect functionality, scalability, and up-time.
● IaaS Providers: Your Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider plays a vital role in keeping your software performing at a suitable level.
● Security & Support: Encrypting data traffic and safeguarding sensitive information are vital aspects. Your clients trust you to keep it safe.
Additionally, there are regulations that you must meet to avoid legal action. You’ll also need to establish a strong support system. Issues are inevitable when customers use a new solution.
● Updates, Improvements, and Bug Fixes: You’ll need to continually update the capabilities of your CV reader to stay competitive. You’ll also need procedures in place to fix bugs and ship updates without significant downtime.
● UI and UX Excellence: You must thoughtfully craft your user interface and user experience to ensure seamless interaction. his requires user research alongside following proven information architecture guidelines. Your CV reader needs to work well with your existing applicant tracking systems to truly improve your HR department processes.
However, this just scratches the surface of what the day-to-day execution will look like as you build a CV reader.
Investing in an External CV Reader
If you choose to use a CV reader that already exists on the market, you have two viable options:
- customise an open-source CV reader
- use a paid resume parser
Open-Source CV Readers
You can shortcut the tedious development process by using existing open-source CV readers from platforms like GitHub. However, they often fall short when it comes to performance and accuracy.
As an HR SaaS company, you cannot rely on these subpar tools to stay competitive in your marketplace. Their performance depends on basic optical character recognition (OCR) technology which tends to be fraught with errors. Not to mention they typically aren’t smart enough to adapt to varied resume formats. Since resume formatting isn't uniform, especially on a global market, this can turn out to be quite a downside.
This would result in you having to create countless rule sets to parse each CV format. Your other option is to build additional functionality on top of the basic OCR.
Again, this requires you to spend significant resources to create a CV reader. Moreover, you'll still end up with a reader that performs as well as the ones already available. This task would exhaust the time and resources you can put towards your main goal. While building an HR SaaS company, a CV reader implementation is just one feature among many others.
That’s why many HR SaaS companies prefer to invest in paid external CV reading solutions.
Paid CV Readers
Integrating a paid CV reader offers benefits that can significantly improve your company’s efficiency. One of the biggest advantages is the confidence you gain from a CV reader with well-documented accuracy. It would likely take you many working hours to create a reader with similar capabilities.
Investing into a CV reader upfront might be a cheaper option in the long run. You would save the resources, otherwise spent on: creation, debugging, maintenance, and future updates. This frees up more budget to put towards other critical aspects of your HR SaaS.
Additionally, external CV reading solutions are often specialists at what they do. This means they’re always improving their products and integrating the latest innovations. One such technology is AI resume screening. It has already improved the accuracy far beyond what you’ll find in an open-source solution.
All this leads to better outcomes in CV data extraction which equals more happy customers and subsequent company growth.
Now, there is one thing you should consider before relying on an external partner. Always focus on their reliability and commitment to excellence.
Partnering with a company has a history of reliable CV parsing but also offers tailored solutions is essential. They should cater to the specific requirements of your HR SaaS company. Additionally, they should be integrating cutting-edge CV reading technologies to help you stay ahead of your competitors.
This is how you mitigate the risks of relying on an external partner for a core part of your business.
Reasons Why an Existing CV Reader Solution Is a Smart Choice
When building an HR SaaS platform there are numerous responsibilities that demand your attention beyond CV parsing. An HR SaaS also includes:
- managing payroll
- recruiting and benefits administration
- employee performance and engagement
- day-to-day operations
- training
- shift planning
- leave management
- analytics
The list goes on. Invest in an external CV reading solution to save time instead of developing it in-house. Your end-goal should be to improve the overall functionality of your SaaS platform. An external, high-quality, easy-to-implement CV reader would do just that.
Affinda's resume parser does precisely that - helps HR SaaS companies build a better platform. Affinda offers an industry-leading CV reader that can easily integrate into your HR SaaS product.
Case Study: How Aqore Benefits from Affinda's Resume Parser
Aqore is a SaaS dealing with comprehensive staffing software solutions, catering to a variety of needs. These include recruitment, employee management, and more. Their platform, processing over 120,000 resumes annually, empowers clients in efficiently shortlisting candidates for diverse job opportunities.
The key challenge for Aqore was managing the high volume of resumes while maintaining a user-friendly experience. They were looking for an automated solution for their recruitment platform. They expected the solution to simplify profile population and provide automatic job match suggestions. The ideal solution needed to be accurate, fast, affordable, and seamlessly integrable with their existing platform.
After a thorough evaluation, Aqore chose Affinda's Resume Parsing and Search & Match solutions for their platform. Using Affinda's resume parser for a long time, adding these new abilities was fast and smooth. The users were already familiar with the interface. Therefore, the training was minimal and the transition was smooth.
According to Samar Basnet, Co-Founder and Chief Software Architect at Aqore, Affinda's API was straightforward, well-documented, and more reliable than competing solutions. This, coupled with their responsive support team, positioned Affinda as the ideal choice for Aqore's needs.
The integration of Affinda’s Search & Match solution brought immediate and significant improvements to Aqore’s staffing software. Significantly, they increased the speed of applicant screening and shortlisting, which allowed for same-day placements in many cases.
Additionally, the intuitive design of the search and match functionality improved the overall user experience on the Aqore platform. Another critical benefit was the increased accuracy in candidate matching and placement, thanks to Affinda's advanced data extraction methods.
Basnet highlights the vital role of this functionality in enhancing productivity for their clients. Aqore's platform, now powered by Affinda's features, allows recruiters to quickly identify suitable candidates, significantly accelerating the role-filling process.
This study shows how Aqore used Affinda's CV reader to improve their recruitment software and make a big difference. AI resume parsing solutions can help businesses improve recruitment by making integration easier, enhancing user experience, and increasing efficiency.
We build our resume parser with performance and accuracy in mind. It leverages the latest advancements in AI technology such as deep learning and neural networks. These features ensure that your clients can enjoy efficient and accurate data extraction with every document parsed.
Our resume parser is capable of extracting 100s of CV fields. This includes work experience, personal details, certifications, skills, and more. We also offer support for over 50 languages, making it a versatile solution no matter where your customers reside.
However, it doesn’t stop there. Our AI Recruitment Solution Suite offers a host of other capabilities such as search & match functions, job description parsers, and a resume redactor. This way you don’t have to juggle multiple vendors and instead have everything you need in one tidy platform.
Don’t take our word for it, though. Try Affinda’s Resume Parser with a free trial. Take your first step towards exploring our suite of HR tools that can help you compete in your marketplace.
