Snow removal company manages avalanche of applicants in cloud

When he started his business five years ago, Chris Marino, owner of Xtreme Snow Pros in Mahwah, N.J., vowed to keep the administrative burden as light on his family as possible. Along the way, he has employed a variety of cloud application services that integrate closely with GoogleApps to automate various processes, including the task of recruiting between 40 and 70 employees per season to handle snow removal at malls, hospitals, and corporate office parks.

"We're always looking for new individuals and this quickly became the biggest burden of the company when we were getting started," Marino said. In any given storm, Xtreme Snow might have between 30 and 40 pieces of equipment out clearing parking lots.

Instead of hiring a recruiter to take on the job of finding and screening drivers, Xtreme Snow turned to Recruiterbox, a service for tracking applicants and resumes. The application basically sits behinds every job advertisement that Xtreme Snow posts and in the jobs section on his company's Web site, collecting the detailed information that Marino requires to consider candidates.

Each application is added to a central database where he and his wife can evaluate and categorize them during the late summer and early autumn when Xtreme Snow draws up its staffing strategy for the coming winter season.

Previously, it was using spreadsheets to do much the same thing, often juggling information for hundreds of applicants. "It has given me far more time to focus on other things," Marino said. If the company winds up needing more drivers than anticipated, the service acts as a database of potential contacts.

What's more, the process of collecting information digitally also gives Xtreme Snow an idea of how well candidates can follow certain processes as well as whether or not they are tech-savvy. (All of the company's recruitment outreach is digital.) "It's impressing people that we are an organized company and we can come across as more professional," he said.

The free version of Recruiterbox can be used to recruit for one opening, up to a maximum of 200 candidates and five users who can collaborate during the evaluation and interview process. The Startup edition of the software is $90 per month for up to four opening and an unlimited number of candidates.