Recruiters and HR pros sure are an interesting lot.
While every competitive Web site on the Info Superhighway is working hard to increase traffic, sign-ups, sales and customer loyalty, most corporate career centers take another route.
Most corporate career centers might as well have a sign out front saying "Wow, you finally found our jobs. Now get comfortable and good luck applying."
If you want the best-of-the-best to apply to your company, you’ll need to do better.
Unfortunately, employers can’t put hurdle after hurdle up for job seekers to find their listings, then require them to spend ample time filling out a lengthy resume submission form, and justify it as "it’ll weed out the undesirables."
Well, guess what? Such an online recruitment tactic will also keep out the most desirable candidates.
Amazon does everything it can to get visitors to the products they want to buy as quickly and easily as possible. Then they make buying – and buying again and again – as effortless as possible. Google has become crazy-successful in great part to its simplicity.
If you feel inclined to waste an hour of your life, checkout Key Bank’s job search and application process. Once you actually get to a job you desire, there are nine steps before submitting a resume. Nine steps!
Sadly, I’ve found this to be the norm far more than the exception.
Don’t make finding your jobs a hassle. Don’t make applying a chore. Managing resumes and communicating with your candidates (customers) is easier and cheaper than it’s ever been.
Not opening your front door to all candidates, and not making your application process as intuitive and easy as possible is being lazy, incompetent, or both.
Popularity: 1% [?]
June 7th, 2005 at 1:16 pm
Résu-mess is well known and worldwide. It is the result of (1) not pro-actively discouraging the under-qualified and the under-motivated from submitting their résumé and (2) the employer having to determine the reciprocal relationships between each candidate’s résumé and the job being applied for. Employers determine these reciprocal relationships in two ways:
(1) Stare and Compare – This results in a highly subjective decision taking less than one minute to put the résumé into a yes, no, or maybe pile.
(2) Résumé Parsing – Software applications that scan and parse résumé data or use a blend of machine learning, case-based reasoning, explicit semantic analysis and other high-level mathematical models to create an associative, almost human-like résumé.
The garbage in – garbage out principle applies to either method above and, in fact, any method as the résumé is:
1. Inherently untrustworthy
2. Lacking sufficient information to identify a quality candidate
3. Not measurable
Even though no one respects résumés, millions of them circulate daily and worldwide. They do a poor job representing candidates and employers find it difficult to quickly and accurately identify quality candidates among the hundreds of résumés they receive.
A solution addressing the above can be reviewed at http://www.resumefit.com.
June 8th, 2005 at 3:26 pm
Great article. We recently released a white paper describing the 15 best practices for corporate employment sites. In one page per practice, we define each practice, indicate why it is important, and provide an example of an actual corporate employment site that is making good use of the practice. I’m happy to email a copy to whoever wants it. Just email me at Steven@CollegeRecruiter.com.
Steven Rothberg
CollegeRecruiter.com job board
800-835-4989