1. Emails sent from Zoho Recruit end up in JUNK.

2. Formatted resume feature DOESN't work.

1. Sign up for a FREE Office365 trial or Google Apps for Work trial. (AND NO - NOT ON ZOHO MAIL PLEASE) 
   
2. Setup a domain & mailbox on there. 
   
3. Setup your FREE Zoho Evaluation account. 
   
4. Setup email integration with ANY of your Zoho Products (POP)
   
5. Set up your DKIM or SPF or whatever else. 
   
6. Send some bulk / test emails to 3rd parties on various platforms that are widely used (no - that doesn't include Zoho Mail) to people using Office 365 or Exchange Servers or Exchange Online or Gmail for Work.
   
7. See for yourself what people are complaining about and then, 
   
8. Sack the clown that is responsible for email deliverability in Zoho. 
   
9. Then publish the results or the FIX or an update, if/and when this issue is fixed! Lets hope for 2020 - that should give you enough time and then you can relaunch this beta feature in all your products. 
   

Screenshot of Formatted / Branded Resume settings options

Now lets look at how / why each setting is either useless or just doesn't work. 

SETTING A -  Save Formatted Resume as .doc .docx or .pdf

D1. Original Resume Format with Branding - Totally useless, the word Branding is misnomer here.

This should actually be called: Original Resume with your Logo Stamped somewhere at the top and thats while doing so, it will arbitrarily change (read: mess-up) the formatting, margins of the original CV and save it a formatted resume. 

The point is, you're gonna have to edit the formatted resume, to remove contact details from it ANYWAY, so you can add your logo the same time it takes 10 seconds more but at-least you don't mess-up the layout/margins of the candidates original resume! 

So thats Original Resume with "Branding" rendered useless. 

D2. Create your own resume format

The WYSIWYG editor is an old technology and Zoho just cant get it right. This proves the point mentioned above about interns/amateurs. 

The HTML editor in this option, doesn't work. You add your HTML and click save but it doesn't work! You then check the saved HTML only to find out that the HTML editor has arbitrarily stripped away parts of your HTML code.

We sent the code to Zoho Recruit support, on Monday and still no response its Saturday today!!

Tried this HTML in the 2 different trial instances of Zoho Recruit - IT DOES NOT WORK. 

Tried the same HTML code in Zoho CRM template editor works perfectly. 

Additionally, there is no clarification ANYWHERE whether this would allow saving the Formatted Resume as MS Word document. Chances are it wont because Word is not good at the way it handles HTML and this option is only for saving resume as PDF. And PDF is useless, because you still need to remove contact details manually. 

So thats Create Your own resume format rendered useless. 

D3. Upload your Formatted/Branded Resume template document: 

This one works - but ONLY up to a point. And it has MAJOR limitations that render it useless altogether. 

So, you design your resume template in Ms Word and add all the merge fields, your company header and footer, lock the sections to prevent changes to header and footer design/layout. And then upload your template into Zoho Recruit. It generates a decent formatted resume, but it has 2 major limitations:

LIMITATION 1:

If you use one of the Merge Fields (provided by Zoho Recruit) for embedding candidates original resume into your formatted template document, it basically messes up the template layout, margins, header and footer. And all this despite you locking the header and footer sections of your template! 

What's happening here is that when you try to merge a source word document (i.e. original resume in this case) into a section in your destination word document (i.e. the template in this case), using mail merge method, the destination document's formatting is overwritten by source word document. And this is a known limitation of MS Word.

Clearly the team putting this together has,

1. NO CLUE about how this works because unlike the rest of the world who use MS Word, they use ZohoDocs.
   
2. Done a shoddy job and not even tested this feature out. 
   

LIMITATION 2: 

Lets say, you don't use the merge field "Original Candidate Resume" described in Limitation 1 above and decide to use just the candidate records fields in ZohoRecruit. This option fails miserably. 

Before we get into more details, here's a quick LESSON for ZohoRecruit product team on how a Formatted Resume looks like in recruitment industry and what is the need for formatted resume.  

When you send a few resumes to a client, you want to present the candidate information in a clear coherent and consistent manner, so the client can get a clear understanding of each candidate as quickly as possible. To do this, typically recruiters use a coversheet that includes a 1 page overview of the candidates basic details, work experiences, education etc, IN 1 PAGE! And appended to this cover sheet there is usually the original resume of the candidate minus the personal contact details of the candidate.

So here's, 2 MAIN Reasons why this doesn't work and it is more of a gimmick, poorly put together by someone who has neither worked in nor understands recruitment industry. 

REASON 1 - 

The candidates work experience and education details are stored in what ZohoRecruit calls a "tabular". A tabular for work experience, another for education and any other custom tabular you may create. Each tabular is available as a merge field for the formatted resume.

Again, 2 huge limitations here:

A - This merge filed when used on a formatted resume, comes with its own styling:

• Table with borders
  
• Lots of empty space and line gaps
  

None of this styling can be changes or manipulated in any way. And as a result, you have poorly formatted resume and badly presented. 

B - The merge field for each tabular in an entire block containing all of candidate's work experience or all of education history. Meaning you cannot pick and choose what you want to display on your formatted resume. It all or nothing. In case of work experience it contains the following fields for each job:

• Job Title
  
• Company Name 
  
• Summary (which is usually long blocks of text, where candidate adds all their work duties on their original CV)
  
• Dates (Start and End dates)  
  

And NO you cannot choose remove any one of the above fields from your formatted resume. 

So if a candidate's works experience contains his work history for last 6 jobs he worked at, with all the above fields per job x times 6, what you get with a single merge field is an awfully long formatted resume with a poorly designed table / tabular with lots of line gaps and empty space and may be 6 pages long!

If you want to give a snapshot summary of a candidate on 1 page - FOR GET ABOUT IT - IT IS NOT POSSIBLE. Send a client 10 candidates, each with 6 page long CV - it goes straight to the bin. No one has that attention span or time to read all LONG blocks and tables of text. This basically equals potential revenue loss.

REASON 2 - 

Even if you're OKAY with endless pages and tabulars on your formatted resume, you're hit with another limitation that makes this option a no-go in the first place! 

The tabulars you use is basically data sitting in the candidate record in your ZohoRecruit database. The data that was parsed by a 3rd party tool called Daxtra.

KEY FACT : Daxtra is probably the best parser out there and they themselves advertise an accuracy rate of "up-to" 80% in their parser technology. This is Up-To.

We had mixed results in parsing and highly doubt this number. But anyway, even if its 80%, it basically means that you need to check each candidate resume in your database, compare it to original CV of the candidate and check if the parser did its job well. Then you need to spend time correcting the other 20% that it missed. The epitome of counter-productivity . 

 

For this option to be useable, you need to spend time comparing original CV with what was parsed into Zoho and carefully read it to find out what was missed by the parser. This increased the lead time it takes to get the formatted resume out to the client. And delays in this highly competitive recruitment industry, where there is no shortage of recruitment agencies, equals revenue loss.