IntroductionThe 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.
A good resume management system would integrate with your web site, allow applicants to easily upload their resume, handle resumes that come by e-mail and process them with zero manual intervention. How to Short List Best Applicants