Data Cleansing

Data Cleansing Options with Colleague

Data Cleansing Options

On numerous occasions we have worked with clients to cleanse their data based on agreed criteria.

These cleansing exercises are normally targeting the removal of records due to their inactivity or irrelevance to the database.

Examples of this can include:

• Records missing mandatory field data
• Documents older than a certain period of time
• Records that haven’t been contacted in a certain period of time
• A cleanse of history data older than a certain period of time
• Skills analysis to understand their use against records, and merge where necessary
• Candidates which have been on the CRM for X years and not been Longlisted to a Requirement or Placed

The rules are set by the client and Colleague will run scripts to give you the numbers that fit the criteria before performing any archives or deletions.

Email Verification

There are services which perform validation checks on emails in bulk, although they do charge for this service, so it is worth getting several quotes.

Example providers include:

https://breadcrumbs.io/email-verification/#/

https://bulksitechecker.com/email-validator

https://proofy.io/bulk-email-verification-service/

https://emailable.com/

Experience from a client who went through this exercise with a provider a few years ago and they had this to say:

“Some of the bigger companies like Hotmail and Gmail were not brilliant at confirming if the address was still live and some big corporations will accept all emails and then dump the old ones without giving a failure notice. A lot of it relied on using an SMTP header to check the address validity and many mail scanning services will accept all of these and then process them afterwards so you don’t get a true reading. Having said all that, it did clean up thousands of old records for us, so for the ones it does work on it’s worth doing provided the cost per query is reasonable.”

SendGrid

With regards to Campaign management, Colleague does offer a Campaign solution to track the engagement of an email campaign (i.e. whether it was delivered, who opened the email, who replied).

However, this solution sends the emails using Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft will sometimes black list accounts if they are seen to be widespread spamming through their platform.

If you are planning to send a large number of bulk emails (to validate whether the Candidates are still relevant), there is a risk that a large number of invalid email addresses might not be appropriate to use through Microsoft Exchange to send the emails. You would not want to endanger your company domain.

In this scenario (and to accommodate clients who send large volumes), we have an integration with SendGrid - https://sendgrid.com/

SendGrid specialise in managing large email volumes without endangering your Exchange status. There are a few hoops to jump through and you’ll need an account with SendGrid, but the option is there to use them if you wish.

See details for pricing: https://sendgrid.com/pricing/ - You would need an email API plan under the ‘For Developers’ section.

In this scenario, the email is sent from a Colleague Search Result, using the email form in Colleague but it is processed through the SendGrid exchange. There is also a setting to send all emails sent from Colleague (individual or bulk) through SendGrid.

SendGrid offer a portal login for users to review the outcome of email campaigns (similar to MailChimp, but more appropriate for higher volumes / email validation management).

Apollo.io

Colleague has an integration with Apollo.io.

Apollo offer a ‘data enrichment’ API query. This is only useful for Contacts and Companies, but this integration will enable a client to perform a data mining check on their contact records (via the Company/Contact record).

It will search and bring back the details it finds relevant to the Contact (i.e. email, contact number, job title, social media)

This requires an Apollo account. The pricing is on their website: https://www.apollo.io/

Postcode Verification

Another healthy step to validating data is postcode verification to ensure your address data is valid.

An example service provider that offers this is below (but similar to Email verification, there are quite a few vendors that do this):

https://www.postgrid.co.uk/bulk-batch-address-validation-verification/

For more information regarding data cleansing with Colleague, please contact the Support Team.

Email: support@colleaguesoftware.com

Telephone: (+44) 01603 735930