Caulfield quickly learned that the hard part of the business was not locating possible candidates but convincing corporations like Bell Atlantic, Federal Express, and Ikon Office Solutions that his one-man show could be one of their primary suppliers of employees. After months of hounding human resources officers, he finally started getting contracts--big ones. Suddenly, he was under intense pressure to screen candidates and move hundreds of résumés to eager clients. "It was time to make the investment and find the people to build and maintain a companywide system," says Caulfield.
His first priority was to stop the endless flow of hard-copy job applications and résumés that his company received. Assuming that all military personnel had access to computers with modems, he instituted a strict policy of only allowing candidates to register with Hire Quality electronically--either through the company's Web site or via E-mail. For those few without Web access, he had another plan. He developed a separate stand-alone software program called CareerQuest to guide them through a step-by-step registration process and show them how to E-mail the information to Hire Quality, send it through a direct dial-up connection, or simply mail in the CareerQuest disk.
The next step was to build a massive database that could store all the candidates' vital information, such as rank, skills, and job preferences. Even though Caulfield gained a solid understanding of computers while in the military, his knowledge ran thin when it came to the finer points of database management. So he enlisted help from Jim Cummiskey, a technology consultant who had been Caulfield's commanding officer in the Marine Corps. Through a combination of Borland International's Interbase, an off-the-shelf database engine, and a customized interface called HQNet, Cummiskey created a database product that now holds more than 200,000 candidates' files and can be searched by more than 150 possible fields. It's also accessible to anyone, anywhere, on the Web. In addition, résumés can be stored as Microsoft Word documents and can be electronically attached to a candidate's database file. Because searching such a sophisticated database involves learning the arcane structured query language, Caulfield volunteered to become a beta tester for Linguistic Technology's English Wizard, an application that lets users search databases by entering ordinary English sentences. The entire system runs off a Pentium Pro server running Windows NT.
When it's time to locate qualified job candidates, Hire Quality staffers search the database and then call prospective job applicants and ask a number of scripted questions. Enough correct answers and Hire Quality's human resource experts conduct a more in-depth interview with those candidates. The résumés of those who pass the second-interview phase are then electronically sent to the client via the Windows NT fax server, using RightFax software. Caulfield demands that the first interviews take no more than 5 to 10 minutes--the in-depth interviews usually run twice as long. All told, the firm screens about 35,000 candidates a month. To track his employees' productivity, Caulfield installed an automated phone system and electronically connected the phones to the computers. Using the system, Caulfield's employees can initiate phone calls with the click of a mouse.
But there was still another important process that had to be automated if Caulfield wanted to truly eliminate paper. Like most placement firms, Hire Quality posts job descriptions at electronic job banks to extend its net for referrals. Caulfield had Cummiskey design an application that, with a single keystroke, automatically sends job descriptions that the company has received (via E-mail) from the client to a number of the larger job banks.
Finally, Caulfield placed Visioneer's Paperport scanner on practically every employee's desk. In the event that paper somehow infiltrates the small office, it would take merely slipping it through the scanner to transform it into an electronic file. And to phase out paper schedule books and calendars, he issued Hewlett-Packard 200LX Palmtop PCs to employees who had been with the firm for more than six months. "I was confident that they had all the electronic tools needed to work without paper," says Caulfield.
Of course, Caulfield suspected that some naive employee might still resort to paper out of habit. So as a deterrent, he enacted a penalty system: a $1 fine for using the fax machine and 25 cents per page for printing any résumé. Caulfield set a glass collection jar by the printer as a small reminder that payment is due upon execution of the misdeed.
In true military fashion, Caulfield implemented an airtight defensive strategy aimed at sealing off all the potential cracks that paper might slip through. What he hadn't counted on was mutiny by the troops.
For starters, many clients refused to E-mail job descriptions and opted instead to use their fax machines to send copies to Hire Quality. Caulfield then had to try to use optical character recognition (OCR) software to transform the faxed documents into usable text documents--and while OCR technology is fine at most of its translating tasks, it fails miserably when confronted with the low-resolution, disintegrating text that fax machines spit out. That frequently left employees having to reformat and edit the documents. Indeed, many times it was easier just to re-fax the paper faxes to the job banks than to fool with the OCR software. "When you are working your ass off to put butts in seats, you don't have a lot of time to screw around with an imperfect system," says Trevor Darby, a former infantryman in the Australian armed forces, who recently left the company. And he goes on to admit: "Let's just say that I was losing a lot of my paycheck to the jar."
