As the spring recruitment season starts rolling in, recruiters must be busy prepping for their recruiting events and sharpening their eyes for potential candidates. For Rakuna’s veteran customers, our Rakuna Recruit app will soon work tirelessly again to support you in digitizing paper resumes at recruiting fairs and streamlining the post-event manual processes. For our first-time users, this is going to be an exciting transformation for you, as you will soon experience what it feels like to be 100% engaged with candidates while Rakuna collects required information at fingertips.

To help you understand in-depth our app’s best feature, “Resume Snapshot,” the technology behind it, as well as how to make the most use out of it at your offline recruiting events, we have compiled this Best Practice article with all the information you need. This Best Practice will first explain OCR Technology, the master behind resume parsing, and will then provide basic, yet fundamental, tips on how to capture the highest quality resume snapshots. Have your team read this Best Practice article to ensure a smooth, effective and error-free resume capturing process.   

Those who have used our Rakuna Recruit app must be familiar with the “Resume Snapshot” feature. Resume snapshot is the most popular feature, or for many who have shared with us directly, the best feature of the Rakuna Recruit app. It helps to remove all manual work required in collecting the candidates' information by utilizing Rakuna's proprietary OCR technology. 

OCR, also known as “Optical Character Recognition” or “Optical Character Reader,” is a technology that enables you to convert various types of handwritten or typed text-file such as scanned paper documents, PDF files or images captured by a digital camera into editable and searchable data. 

Rakuna uses OCR to parse out key information from the candidates' resumes and upload to Rakuna’s Recruiting Dashboard for your review and data analysis post-event.

The parsed information includes:

Most of the time, our OCR results are accurate. However, in certain circumstances where our OCR technology cannot detect and parse information properly due to low-quality snapshots, the system will alert our data quality team, and our data specialists will step in to review the alerted instances, make necessary edits, or inform your team of snapshots that need to be retaken for better OCR results.

At the moment, you cannot edit any of the parsed information. Thus, if you find inaccurate information that needs to be edited, you can inform us at customer_support@rakuna.co for assistance. However, for candidates’ information that was manually input into the system using the “Manual Input” feature, you can edit their information directly on the mobile app using the "Edit" button.

In order to get the most high-quality resume snapshots using the Rakuna Recruit mobile app, here are 5 basic best practices to follow: 

1.Prepare Suitable Smart Devices

Having a smart device is our number one requirement for you to capture resume snapshots. But just having any device isn’t enough, as getting the best snapshots requires you to prepare the suitable kind, with appropriate cameras, to perform the job well.

With the prospect’s resume snapshot capturing, we highly recommend you use any smart devices that have at least 8 megapixels, with abilities to manual-focus and turn flash off, to generate high-quality snapshots. Using devices with cameras with low configuration will hinder the OCR’s ability to parse accurate information and will waste your time in capturing the snapshots.  

2. Zoom Out When Taking Snapshot   

Our rule of thumb for resume snapshot capturing is it is better to zoom out and have the resume page fit entirely in the camera frame rather than to cut anything off. We have had users overlooking the resume header, which usually includes required information such as Full name and Email address, which prevents our system to process the resume properly

Below is an example of what to include in your snapshot: 

3. Keep Snapshots Bright and Upright  

Always take upright, not upside down, snapshots of the resume. Having the snapshots upside down will slow down our OCR’s process of parsing the required information as additional picture rotation is required.

In addition, just like taking a normal photo in which the subject’s face should be bright and sharp, avoid taking snapshots at areas with low lighting as this will also hinder the OCR’s ability to read and parse the required information. 

To make sure you have the bright and upright snapshot, after capturing, we allow you to review your snapshot before finally saving to your database. If you are not satisfied with what you have taken, you can delete the snapshot and use the “Retake” button to take a better one. 

Below are examples of taking the right snapshot with the correct orientation and appropriate lighting.

4. Utilize the Smart Capture feature:

Use the Smart Capture feature (Auto Capture on Android) when capturing resume snapshots to get the best result. Please always check again to see if the resume is properly captured in the Preview screen, and retake the snapshot using the "Retake" button in the Preview screen if needed.

5. Double Check Snapshot’s Text Readability 

Before saving the snapshots and moving onto the Evaluation Form on your mobile app, check if the texts on the snapshots are readable. Just like having snapshots that are upside down and dark, blurry ones will slow down the OCR’s parsing process. Sometimes, OCR will not be able to read absolutely low-quality snapshots, which results in you missing out on certain prospects in your list. 

To make sure you have a still and in-focus snapshot, after capturing, we allow you to review your snapshot before finally saving to your database. If the texts are blurry, you can delete the snapshot and use the “Retake” button to take a better one. 

6. Treat multiple-page resume as a single capture 

One of the most common questions we get from our customers l is: “Can Rakuna Recruit app capture a resume with multiple pages?” The answer is Yes! You can do this by utilizing our "Add More" button at the top of the screen to take snapshots of subsequent pages to capture all key information. 

Each candidate’s resume, whether one page long or multiple pages long, should be treated as one capture only. In addition, capturing multiple-page resumes altogether will allow our OCR to parse all required information and tail your evaluation form back to one prospect’s profile only. We do not recommend users to treat each page from the multiple-page resume as a separate capture. 

It is easy for the human to see an image and comprehend exactly what it means, but it isn’t as simple for the OCR technology. Thus, when capturing resume snapshots, always keep in mind the tips we have given you in this Best Practice to optimize our app and the technology that runs behind it. 

Can’t find your questions or concerns in this best practice? Worry not! Send us your questions to support_team@rakuna.co and we’ll respond right away.