The goal of hiring is to get best candidate for job. The challenge is finding that best candidate. How do you reach them? In present economic times each open position brings in 100’s of resumes. How do you handle them? It is also to be expected that 95% of resumes received are not appropriate for particular job. How do you identify best? Recruiting cost which includes publicity, your time and recruiting commissions for 3rd party search firms add up. How do you reduce them? This article provides answers to above questions.

How to Reach Candidates

Traditionally, companies used referrals, networking, advertised in local newspapers or went to a search firm. Referrals and networking are still lowest cost options. That failing, companies now have numerous options.

Internet job boards are a good place to start. Companies such as Monster (www.monster.com), Hotjobs (www.hotjobs.com) and CareerBuilder (www.careerbuilder.com) spend a lot of money advertising to prospective job seeker. In 2003, Monster’s advertising budget was $115 million. This attracts sizable traffic – 1.6 million daily visitors and about 36 million resumes in their database. This is not a pitch for Monster.com but these numbers are indicators of reach of online job boards. Monster.com, HotJobs.com, CareerBuilder.com and numerous other job boards are a strong source of applicants for any job.

Your website can be a good source of applicants. The problem here is traffic. How many come to your site looking for jobs. Publicizing jobs on your website costs you nothing, so go ahead but you may not be able to generate enough applicant volume from your website alone. To paraphrase Willy Sutton’s famous answer, Why do you go to job boards Willy? Cause that’s were jobs are.

The best way to build a sizable applicant volume for sure is to advertise not just in 1 job board but on multiple boards. You can choose 2 big boards and one niche board like your local newspaper (in Atlanta, you can use www.ajcjobs.com ) or specialty boards like emplawyer.com (for lawyers), jobsinthemoney.com (finance), engineerjobs.com (engineers) etc. You should also publicize open position on your website. (Contact author for a free, categorized listing of popular job boards using Alexa Traffic Rank)

How to Handle Resume Volume

Automatically! If you advertise in say 3 job boards and your website, you can expect at least 200 resumes. You do not want them coming to your e-mail box as this would require you to open each mail, save resume etc for each and every one of them. This becomes tedious and time consuming. You want them to be automatically routed to a database or a resume management system.

Your resume management system should be able to process incoming resumes, extract information from resume, and build a list of applicants with their name, contact information and a summary, so that you can glance at list to see how your publicity is working. Sophisticated resume management systems go a step forward and extract experience, education, summary and objectives from resume. This is especially useful in identifying best candidates without actually reading every resume.

If you're a regular reader of this column you know that my number one pet peeve is bad customer service. Nothing chaps my backside more than paying hard-earned money for a product or service only to have provider of said product or service become apathetic, obnoxious or just downright rude after transactional smoke has cleared.

The bottomline, my entrepreneurial friend, is this: it doesn't matter if your product is fast food, slow food, retail goods, computers, lawn mowers, books, real estate or automobiles, if a customer is willing to pay you good money in exchange for your product or service that customers deserves to be treated with gratitude and respect, before and after sale. Period.

I'm constantly amazed at how many business owners and frontline employees who represent them seem to forget this simple fact.

It's like old saying about getting a little respect in morning. If you court me before sale, you damn well better respect me afterward. Just because you have my money in your pocket and I have your product in my hand, that does not mean that my needs have been fully satisfied or that my expectations have ceased to exist. To contrary, our relationship is just getting started. It's up to you how well we will get along and how long our relationship will last.

Here's point: customer service should not stop after sale. In fact, customer support AFTER sale can have greater impact on success of your business than customer support before sale.

Nothing generates negative buzz about a business like bad customer service, and nothing will drive nails in a business' coffin faster. News of bad customer service travels like lightning and spreads like wildfire. Think back to last time you were on receiving end of bad customer service. I'd be willing to bet that you immediately went out into world and told everyone you met about experience. You probably also warned them to "never do business with those &^%$ or you'll get treated same!" As a business person, it should be your mission to make every customer a repeat customer, and one of best ways to do that is by delivering superior customer service every time that customer comes through your door. Superior customer service leads to increased customer satisfaction, which leads to repeat business, which leads to customer loyalty. It is also much cheaper to keep a customer than to obtain a new one.

The fast food industry is especially prone to customer service problems. This is due in large part to fact that every transaction is a face-to-face sale and average fast food worker is a disgruntled teenager who would rather be lying on a bed of nails than standing behind a fast food counter schlepping fries.

However, that doesn't always have to be case. This is not meant as an ad for Chic Filet or as a slam at Taco Bell, but difference in customer service between these two fast food titans is astounding.