For individuals in search of a new job career, it is as easy as Copy, Paste, and Submit. Job opportunties abound for skilled workers. Internet recruiting has progressing from simple resume emailing to candidates submitting video resumes and podcasts. But as with many technologies, convenience often drags along complexity.
Just like the neighbor attending an open house just to get a peek how the people on the other side of the street live, an increasing number of job candidates are just "shopping". Add those to the serious candidates looking for better opportunities and hiring managers are receiving a massive influx of resumes - an HR administrative nightmare I call the "resu-mess".
No longer do managers just receive a dozen or so of resumes mailed or faxed from a single classified ad in the Sunday classifieds. They are greeted daily with hundreds of emails clogging inboxes from Internet job postings. After years of cutting back on the size of human resource departments or just adding more and more responsibilities on the shoulder of the HR generalists and recruiters, it is fair to say that reviewing and processing these resumes is like having eight lanes of traffic exiting onto a two-lane side-street. This translates into a bottleneck at the hiring tollgate.
The bottleneck leads to two devastating business mistakes - cutting back on advertising and poor response time
In order to manage the resu-mess, successful recruitment marketing strategies are being derailed by the voluminous response of applicants. Managers reduce the number of job boards and other media outlets on which they advertise to better manage the number applications. This strategy is tantamount to HR suicide. Considering today's challenge of finding the right candidate in a shrinking talent pool, throwing out the widest net possible, not cutting back, is in the best interest of employers.
But more resumes isn't necessarily better without automating the process. Few managers, human resource professionals and assistants have the time to screen the applications, call the candidates, do the the voice mail dance, complete phone interviews, schedule face-to-face interviews, check references, complete background checks and so on.
This leads to the second mistake. While managers and HR staff are attempting to weed out the unqualified or disinterested applicants, high-demand qualified candidates are being overlooked and turned off by slow response times, cumbersome hiring hurdles, and inexperienced interviewers.
If first impressions skew a top candidate's opinion of your company, then the reputation of many organizations is abysmal. Administrative overload is creating backlogs and feeding the chief complaint of job seekers - poor communication and follow-up. Based on the 2007 Staffing.org survey of nearly 500,000 job seekers, ratings for communication and follow-up after applying for a job was a pitiful "1" (poor) out of a 5-point scale.
Managers are at a crossroads. Business wasn't always as complex as it is today. But many organizations still insist on using the techniques of yester-year to solve today's problem. Candidates hire professional resume writers. They search the Internet for information about your company. They download dozens and dozens of answers to the most comment interview questions, just like fraternities and sororities "prepped" their brothers and sisters for term papers and final exams. Yet managers are still doing interviews on the fly, relying on gut instinct and a suspicious resume to make the final hiring decisions. What can an organization do to attract more candidates and simplify the complexity of recruiting and hiring?
Simplify the application process.
Streamlining recruitment, hiring quickly, and selecting the right people are no longer options but key growth strategies.
An effective applicant solution has many pieces, including applicant tracking, screening, testing, interviewing, and background checks. All of these components must mesh with business processes and create an end-to-end solution.
To first attract and then actually hire the best talent, making the entire application process as convenient as possible is critical. Prospective employees should be able to fill out an application at a Web site, and any tests or profiling tools should be available through the Web or by phone.
Clients of Success Performance Solutions have been using Total-APS, an online applicant processing system, comparable to those used by the Fortune 1000s but now affordable and easy-to-use for even the small business owner.
Total APS allows managers to create job specific filter questions (such as "are you available to work weekends including Saturdays and Sundays and have you completed a 2-year or four year degree) as well as behavioral and competency based questions, allowing candidates to self-qualify or disqualify themselves, avoiding many needless phone calls to unqualified, unmotivated and uninterested candidates.
Total APS also automates follow-up responses to candidates who are disqualified and reminders to qualified candidates who need to complete personality assessments or provide additional information.
A well-designed applicant processing system is like the EZ-Pass of human resources. It can help organizations filter and process résumés quickly and provide a central repository for potential candidates. When the system aligns with business processes, it's possible to identify talent more quickly and reduce hiring time. The net result is that you can snatch talented individuals before your competitors do.
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