Employers

Frequently Asked Questions

General Overview

Registration and Subscriptions

Candidate Searching

The Matching System

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General Overview

Q: What is eBullpen?
A: eBullpen is a new and different way to find employees to fill staffing needs. It is new because the system presents candidates to employers based on a match of not only job experience but includes dimensions of PERSONALITY traits in a job seeker that match those the employer defines as important to success in their specific job. Employers create candidate lists from their searches and contact candidates for further qualification. It's like having the best suited candidates brought straight to the top to interview and request resumes from.

Q: What's different about eBullpen?
A: eBullpen is a completely different way to find job seekers, based on who they are and their qualification level, enabling employers to start a candidate search at a more advanced stage. Because qualifications of personality can be defined early on, finding the candidate most appropriate for the job AND the workplace becomes much quicker and easier than ever before. eBullpen is not like an online classified community of posted jobs and banks of resumes. Our 'Bullpen' of registered job seekers may be active or - the more elusive - passive seekers, but all have paid to keep their membership current, and are invested in their employment search as well.

Q: Can I post a job on eBullpen?
A: No, you cannot. On eBullpen, employers have a different way to find the best job seekers. Sifting through hundreds of resumes and having to cast a wide net just to create a good interview pool is replaced with eBullpen's matching system that eliminates the need to post a job and hoping to find and draw good candidates to your posting. Employers take greater control of their candidate search with the matching system that locates the candidates best suited for success as employers define it, and brings them directly to the front of the candidate pool.

Q: Who should use eBullpen?
A: eBullpen is a great way to connect with job seekers and can be used by anyone who needs to find an employee or has an open position to fill. This includes large corporations, small companies, government, non-profit organizations, households, retail operations, recruiters, and both temporary and full-time employment agencies. Job seekers on eBullpen are looking for Full-Time, Part-Time, Temporary, Seasonal, and Internship positions, as well as Independent Contractor opportunities. eBullpen can locate job seekers locally, or around the U.S.

Q: Why is it called 'eBullpen', anyway?
A: In the world of Baseball, the 'bullpen' is a team's collection of pitchers - its prized possession, and it's where the manager turns when he needs top performance. A team's management selectively chooses its bullpen of pitchers based on their performance abilities and their character. Employers, wherever they are, should have a place to turn to when they need just the right combination of talent and character. We wanted to build a system that allows hiring managers to find employees using personality traits, rather than having to infer them from an impersonal resume. Our Bullpen is our prized possession, and we're pretty sure that employers will value it just as much. The 'e' seemed appropriate to the Internet application of the idea.

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Registration and Subscriptions

Q: What does it cost to use eBullpen?
A: For employers, there is a registration fee that enables access to a private candidate search area called 'My eBullpen' for 12 months. Once an employer creates an account and pays the registration fee, they have access to this console during their active registration period. Employer registrations are renewable annually. To create candidate searches, a search package must be purchased that corresponds to the number of positions that need filling along with the time period. For as little as $99 (U.S.D.) employers can be registered and performing a candidate search in a matter of minutes!

Q: Can I register now and come back later to pick my search package
A: No. You can, however, choose the lowest subscription for least cost, and upgrade later, as needed.

Q: What types of payment do you accept?
A: Currently we accept payment by Visa, Mastercard, American Express and the Discover Card. Please be aware, however, that we have a no refunds policy, because our subscriptions are relatively inexpensive. So, please be sure of the subscription you want before selecting it. The good news is that if you choose a lower subscription, and subsequently go beyond the selected number of searches, the system offers upgrades .

Q: How can I sell using eBullpen to my boss?
A: Sometimes a simple example is the best way to explain things. How many times have resume searches yielded promising looking candidates for the boss, with all the right qualifications, only to find that when you interview them, the fit with the job, the team and the company is just not there. Personality testing does give you a better chance of interviewing people who are going to be able to fit in. The downside might be that the final hiring choice may be a little harder to make with eBullpen.

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Candidate Searching

Q: How can I search candidates without resumes?
A: The fact is that you are not going to make a hiring decision without seeing a resume, interviewing a candidate face to face, and doing any other checks you do. We are not asking or suggesting you to hire a candidate without using a resume, just search for a job seeker without it, and put that resume on hold for just a little while. If it makes you feel better, there is no reason you can't ask a job seeker to E-mail you his resume as part of your invitation to the Interview Room. He or she will at least feel that an actual person is looking at it, and may be thrilled with that thought alone. eBullpen does give you a bare bones profile as part of the search, with both candidates and you selecting Industry, department, level, rate of pay, and type of work, so you should be finding people in the right area.

Q: What does the personality survey look like?
A: For Job Seekers, the survey is a series of statements with a row of 5 buttons beside it and a scale of "not like me" to "very like me". The job seeker chooses which of the 5 choices best applies. We do not permit the candidate to skip questions. We ask them to take the test when they are in a settled frame of mind for the best possible and most accurate results, and avoid times when distractions or personal problems might taint the results. We also tell them that the path to happiness is to be honest and open and not to over-analyze the statements, because there are NO RIGHT OR WRONG ANSWERS in this survey. The job seekers are given a personalized feedback report of their results, which they can view online or by downloading a pdf file of it. It gives them insight to themselves and most times, people say that it describes them just right. In the situation where a job seeker may think "this just isn't me", we allow them to take the survey one more time. For employers, the survey has a similar scaled format, but with different statements, illustrating behaviors. Once submitted, the search is run based on the system giving equal weight to each of the Big 5 personality traits.
Then, from within the employer control console, you can assign different weights to different traits and get results according to those assigned weights.

Q: How does the system perform multiple candidate searches and multiple candidates for each search?
A: The system has a very simple control console that, at the top level, when you log in, tells you how many job searches you have in progress, the names you have assigned those searches, and how many new job searches you have left on your current subscription. Some people will run one search at a time, especially if it is their first time here. However, it is possible to have multiple searches running at once. You click on the search you want to see more about, and you get to see the most current matches to that search, because all the open searches re-ran themselves when you logged in. It will let you see anybody from previous searches that you transferred to your candidate list, but did not invite to an interview, and also show you anybody that you are currently interviewing, with any new activity in the interview room flagged by flashing beacons. You will also be able to see if anybody else has shown up from the refreshed search.

Q: What’s so good about "refine and refresh" on the search?
A: Refine and Refresh are two different features, and they both deliver unique benefits. Refining your search means that you can change the relative importance of personality traits and qualifications to get the system to pull different candidates from the bullpen for you. If Sociability is more important to you than adaptability, then you can make the system understand that and search on that basis. You can refine as much as you like, as often as you like, for the lifetime of your search subscription. Refresh is fully automatic. Each time you come to your eBullpen page, all your current searches re-run themselves, based on your current refinements. That means you pick up any new job seekers that we have had join us since your last visit, so you get full access to the entire bullpen for the entire life of your search. Remember, though, to keep moving those job seekers you are interested in to your candidate list, so that your refine and refresh features don't lose them.

Q: The Candidates I look for require very specific skills, which I would find in a RESUME! How do I get that information?
A: That should be simple. If you don't want to interview people that don't have a specific qualification, you can ask for it in your opening invitation to the Online Interview Room. You should of course specify all the other information you need in there, company, position, etc., but there is no reason you could not ask for that qualification in the first exchange. It should be a pretty fast filtering mechanism.

Q: Can I rate candidates as the process unfolds?
A: You can. We have a very simple pull down box where you can rate the people you are interviewing. You also have the conversation itself saved for you by the system. We recommend that you should keep notes as well.

Q: Can I find employees for Part-time, Temporary or Independent Contractor positions?
A: Absolutely. There is a specific Pull down for Job Seekers, asking for their preference of type of work. They can select individual types, or express no preference. You have the same pull-down.

Q: Could I Hire from the site, without actually reading a resume?
A: We don't recommend it. You should use your regular hiring process on all the people you invite to apply for a job. More information about job applicants

Q: Will this save me time?
A: We believe it will, and that is the driving force behind eBullpen. Certainly, the current way of searching through resumes for workers takes a great deal of time. We believe that if you go with personality and our straightforward experience profile, you will get to the right type of job seekers quickly, and having read fewer resumes.

Q: How does eBullpen measure its success?
A: We measure ourselves in terms of the number of interviews going on, compared to the number of members we have. We don't and cannot measure how many job offers result from our service, but what we aim to do is bring employers and job seekers together. That happens in the Interview rooms, so it seems to be a good metric to measure against our overall membership.

Q: How should I gauge my success with eBullpen?
A: We believe you must ask yourself if you are in contact with people who turn out to be as good or better prospects than the previous methods you used for finding candidates. If our method gets you to people who are as good or better matches for what you are looking for, then hopefully time savings and the immediacy of results make this a great tool for you.

Q: Do the people on my candidate list know I have searched them?
A: No. Job Seekers in the database may be searched many times and their profiles reviewed as you create a candidate pool. Currently, our system does not notify the job seeker that a search is performed on them.

Q: Are the people on my candidate list considered Job Applicants?
A: No. You decide the people you want to further explore the job application process with and use your regular application process. For more details on defining job applicants, click here.

Q. Can the people I am searching contact me?
A: No. You must initiate contact with the Job Seeker to start a dialog and enable the Job Seeker to contact you.

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The Matching System

Q: How does the system match the correct experience level?
A: Industry and department are absolute, which means that people will either match or not. Other experience factors are matched on proximity to the request. The principle of Euclidian distance is used, so if you are looking for a supervisor, somebody who has checked that will rank higher than someone else who did not check that level. Somebody who checked 'Team Leader' will rank equally with somebody who checked 'Manager', because those two points are the same distance away from the requested point. Each factor contributes to the overall matching score returned from the search.

Q: Can I avoid interviewing certain personality types?
A: Not specifically, because we don't ask the questions that way. We would say that if you answer the survey the way it is suggested, by defining the person you see as being most suited to the position, we don't believe you will have any problems.

Q: Will I know the gender/background/age bracket of the job seekers?
A: No you will not, because we do not ask. We work on the basis of a level playing field. If a job seeker volunteers this information to you in the course of their interview, then that is fine.

Q: Can I exercise affirmative action?
A: eBullpen, by its nature is as fair as we can possibly make it. We do not ask questions of gender, age, race, even for statistical purposes. We want to present job seekers with the fairest system on the Internet for making connections between employers and job seekers. We simply try to connect the right job seekers with the right employers.

Q: How do I use personality to really find the right kinds of people?
A: You have to think of a person doing the job, rather than a job itself. Of course, a job is a set of tasks and skills to do them, but it is also the person that does the tasks. How many times have you heard somebody say "I could teach somebody to do X, but I can't teach somebody to like to do it or want to do it."? If you are finding it difficult, we suggest thinking of somebody you know who has done the job well, or who could do it very well, and use that person as your model for filling out the survey. If that doesn't work for you - maybe only you have done the job - then use yourself as the model when you answer the questions. Think 'who', not 'what'.

Q: I have a resume reading fixation. How do I get my fix?
A: Well, you could make 'send me your resume if you are interested' one of the opening lines in your invitation to interview after identifying yourself to the job seeker you are interested in. You'll still get some good reading material. Alternatively, read this resume , and tell us whose it is by E-mail to marketing@ebullpen.com, and if you are right, we'll give you a promotion code for a reduced rate on one of our search packages.

Subscription Types eBullpen Matching System
Using Personality in Hiring
Create & Manage Searches in the 'My eBullpen' Console
Online Interviews' on eBullpen