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One of the most frustrating activities for both employers and employees is the hiring process.  It is a process marred by stumbles, trips, and false impressions.  Just like going on a blind date, the hiring company wants to make a good impression to seduce the candidate to want to join the company and the prospective employee is focused on not talking themselves out of a good relationship that will last a long time.

Employer Perspective

Employers want to be certain that the time, energy, resources, and investment put into selecting new employees pays off with a return on those costs.  According to one study, the cost of hiring an employee can range from between 1.5 to 2.5 of their annual salary when search, interviewing, and other costs are tabulated!

Additionally, the skills required to maintain a skilled workforce are often beyond the experiences and insights of most business owners:

1. sourcing
2. inteviewing
3. selecting
4. on-boarding or orientation
5. training

So, what tended to happen (and often still does) is that the hiring manager chooses someone very similar to him or herself in personality, background, and experience with little regard to how that will actually “fit” with the needs of the organization. Companies looking to alleviate, automate, and formalize the process will often look to software solutions that try to evaluate the appropriateness of a candidate for a job by combing through the resume submitted and seeking specific facts, experiences, word choices, etc.

These tools are referred to as “talent management systems” (popular ones are Taleo, the Resumator, Talogix, Inc., and Worksimple) and ask candidates to complete profiles of their experience. In turn, the hiring company will have created “key words” or other indicators of success for the job and potentially only those candidates that “match” are given consideration.  This serves to eliminate poorly qualified candidates, reduce time spent interviewing to uncover skill gaps, or minimize the chance for a candidate to slip past important criterion needed to do the job by “fast talking” the hiring manager.

Software applications are designed to capture only the good candidates

Of course, the success of these tools are only as good as the input that went into the setup to determine what are the truly essential skills or experiences needed to succeed on the job.  If the job is for a salesperson and there is no mention of the need for ppeople skills, prospecting, closing, overcoming objections, etc.; then the “spider” that crawls across the resumes (the software application) may be so broad as to allow far too many applicants into the pool of potentials.  The opposite problem also exists.  If the salesperson position requires that the person have previous account management experience, and the applicant does not make reference to account management, but refers to it as client relationship skills – the application may not “know” that it is referring to the same skill.

Prospecitve Employee Perspective

For purposes of this post, I explored numerous job applications online through different websites devoted to jobseekers.  The level of frustration was extremely high as the following happened numerous times:

1. Site would ask for an uploaded resume and then also would seek to have me “fill in” my experience, thereby creating duplication.
2. Certain questions were required or mandatory, but did not provide an answer that represented my current situation (for instance, I am currently employed and the application forced me to choose an end date to my employment).
3. The open-ended responses had a limit on number of words, but did not provide a counter to let the applicant know they were coming up on the limit.  Only when the application was to be submitted to an error message pop up.
4. Formatting of documents cut and pasted into the text boxes was often skewed and rendered documents that were hard to read.
5. The gnawing feeling that there were certain words, years of experience, or other factors that were being searched for – and the resume did not include the “right” combination even though the skills were very much resident in the applicant.

Conclusion

The automation of resume reviewing can certainly aid the hiring manager (or delegate) in sifting through resumes, but it is a poor substitute for a human to read and assess the resume.  While companies contacted claimed that they do not rely solely on the software to make decisions about which candidates to extend an interview to or not; the automated rejection letters received came far too quickly to indicate that anything but an electronic review of capabilities had been done.  Candidates should be forewarned to include all relevant and appropriate facts, skills, data as pertinent to avoid being unnecessarily shut out of opportunities and employers should give careful consideration to what factors they consider essential for the job.