Filtering Through Resumes
(February 16, 2010)—The environment has also made it clear that a lot of tools simply aren’t delivering. So what should you doSM For starters, companies should review current system capabilities.
Sean Bisceglia, chief executive officer of TalentDrive, a provider of resume sourcing technology, tells HRWire his firm conducted a survey that shows only 6 percent of recruiters in Fortune 1000 companies are fully leveraging applicant tracking system (ATS) functions.
Few companies have auto-emails turned on, and even fewer rely on the ATS for sourcing.
Despite investing in these systems, nobody is mining the data, Bisceglia says. The main reason is they don’t think the data in it is fresh enough. Bisceglia acknowledges in certain situations this may be true, but there are a lot of exceptions. “Once you’re a chemist, you’re always a chemist,” he says. “It kind of counters the freshness issue.”
Another issue is that a company may not have a really great search component within its ATS. Technology invalidates objections in this area, however; TalentDrive’s technology allows for searching within an ATS.
Finally, Bisceglia points out that there’s been a change going on in recruiting. Overall, on the part of recruiters, there’s a low adoption rate of searching a company’s available wealth of data. According to Bisceglia, this is in part because the tenure of a recruiter averages about 17 months. Add to this the fact that recruiters are generally trained on only one ATS system and the limitations become apparent.
To avoid dealing with a backlog of applications, employers often prefer to advertise open positions, with the intent of attracting talent at the time it’s needed. Unfortunately, such a strategy adds to the electronic pile. “The average posting, the average job, receives 6.5 applicants,” Bisceglia tells HRWire. “It may not sound like a lot, but sometimes a posting is getting 5,000 applicants and another time two.”
It all creates a massive overflow.
Recognizing the problem, employers seek alternatives. “Postings are down 45 percent year over year,” Bisceglia says. Granted, this can be attributed in part to the economy. Nevertheless, there is a shift in approach taking place among recruiters. “When the economy comes back, is posting going to come back the same waySM I say no. I think they’re all looking for new ways to leverage new media,” Bisceglia says.
Presently, recruiters seek to leverage connections through LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other online business and social networks. Cost, in part, is driving the shift. “I think posting on multiple boards doesn’t seem to be as effective as it used to be; the ROI isn’t there,” Bisceglia says.
He tells HRWire posting has to change in the way it currently brings people to the ATS. Companies get a lot of applicants, but it still leaves the problem of how to start filtering.
The talent is out there; it becomes a question of how to connect with the right candidates.
But systems and processes aren’t the only factors. Contributing to the volume of unqualified applicants is the job description. “One word can give an unqualified candidate false hope that they’re qualified for that job,” Bisceglia says. For example, a company may be seeking a senior sales executive with business-to-business experience, but a candidate lacking the specific experience may see “sales” and submit a resume.
This situation is fueled by the current high unemployment rate; as Bisceglia points out, to collect unemployment, a person has to show activity. Sales jobSM Send in a resume.
So what can a company do to avoid adding to its already enormous backlog of resumesSM
Sweep up. If an employer doesn’t want to sweep its own ATS for what’s already in there, it can use the public databases on the web. TalentDrive’s research shows that in 1996 there were 1 million resumes online. In 2008, that number hit 77.7 million. How many resumes does the number representSM More than nine times the total population of New York City.
Bisceglia views mining resume databases as an alternative to posting in some cases; in others, it should be a supplemental activity. “Continue to post for high volume positions or a very discrete purple squirrel, but supplement it with a sweep process of what is on the open web,” he says. Technology, like that offered by TalentDrive and others, allows for filtering using very specific parameters.
The process of filtering through resumes, whether it means going through the company’s own backlog or looking at what’s available on the web, is something more HR professionals are realizing must be addressed. “To me, it’s all education, it’s kind of a knowledge breakthrough,” Bisceglia says. And with that breakthrough has come a realignment of resources. “We’re seeing a trend; HR departments are definitely restructuring to focus a group of people on research/sourcing,” Bisceglia tells HRWire.
Separating the recruitment function from sourcing allows recruiters to concentrate on interviewing and other aspects of screening, where sourcers become almost database administrators.
Still, even with a separate research/sourcing function, the issue remains: how to manage the volume.
“The only way to solve this is technology,” Bisceglia says. “Even if unemployment goes down, you have the same problem, in good times and bad times. Manually doing it, you can’t scale it.”
