Posted on: Monday, August 30, 2004
Résumé overload poses big risks
| • | Errors to avoid in résumé screening |
By Andrea Coombes
CBS MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO — Unemployed Americans are no doubt cheering this year's hiring uptick, but managers rushing to flesh out skeleton crews are apt to make mistakes as they sort through reams of résumés. The economy has created about 1.2 million jobs so far this year, but there are still millions of unemployed Americans eager to fill new positions.
The largest corporations get hit with up to 25,000 résumés per week, according to Alice Snell, vice president of iLogos Research, a division of Taleo, a staffing-management company in San Francisco. "You are talking about a tremendous quantity," she said. "The issue is how to find the quality out of that quantity."
Small and midsize companies face a similarly daunting task: "Hiring managers are being bombarded with ... up to 1,200 or 1,300 résumés per job," said Jason Krumwiede, a founder of PeopleBonus, a résumé-management technology company in Chicago. Choice is certainly better than dearth, but about 80 percent of people who apply don't meet the minimum requirements of the job, added Krumwiede, citing a study of job-ad responses that his company conducted two years ago.
Given the sheer magnitude of the task, managers often overlook good candidates, even as hiring the wrong person has costly consequences.
Replacement costs run about two times that employee's annual salary because of recruiting, training and administrative expenses, said Roberta Chinsky Matuson, principal of Human Resource Solutions, a consulting firm in Northampton, Mass.
Plus, firing workers impinges on employee morale and customer relationships, she noted.
Hiring choices also affect productivity.
"When you're looking at the difference, for instance, in what a high-performing sales executive can produce for a company versus an average or low performer, that crystallizes (the cost) for companies of every size," Snell said.
To manage résumé stacks, companies are turning to tools that eliminate unqualified applicants — from keyword-search software to online applications that force people to fill in the company's requested information, creating a candidate profile that's standardized and easier to sort. Software by PeopleBonus conducts contextual searches that can differentiate between "Java" the programming language and "java," as in coffee, to weed out job applicants that worked at, say, a cafe called Java Joe's.
It's "keyword search on steroids," said Krumwiede of PeopleBonus.
Still, he acknowledged that any technology that sorts applicants has its drawbacks.
"No technology is perfect," he added. It's "a means to prioritize candidates. You may want to look at these candidates first because given what you have in your job description and what they've sent in their résumé, there's a high likelihood that this person's going to be good." Not all keyword searches are so pumped up, requiring instead that managers enter any relevant words, which comes with problems of its own.
"There are so many ways to phrase things, you can't possibly incorporate everything into the search," said Heather Hartmann, a contract recruiter for Accenture, noting that one applicant's "call center" might be another's "customer service center."
"Keywords help in narrowing down the pack, but if you rely too heavily on them, you risk losing out on candidates," she warned.
Given today's job market, some screening is essential, some argue.
"When you're in an employer's market and there are so many résumés to be looked at, you have to start somewhere," said Jill Silman, vice president of Meador Staffing, in Houston.
"When the worm turns and there are more jobs then there are candidates, this job would be different," she said. "It's starting to turn." • • • The following are the eight mistakes managers most often make as they go through résumés, according to human-resource experts. 1. Résumé rush: The current résumé overload leads many hiring managers to rush through them, but spending too little time is the most common mistake cited by experts. 2. The name game: Don't let a well-known company or college, or impeccable credentials fool you into hiring the wrong person. 3. Résumé inflation: Assuming that whatever is on a résumé is true is dangerous because job applicants sometimes resort to lying. Although some résumés are inflated, others are deflated. 5. Job hoppers: Managers who see job stints lasting just one or two years on résumés often disqualify those candidates as job-hoppers — and that may be a misperception. 6. Getting help: It's tempting to let assistants screen résumés, but some say that's not advisable. Others, however, say you should get help in screening. 7. Being subjective: Reading a résumé is inherently a subjective process, and managers too often don't take that into account. Carve out some time to focus on the activity. 8. The right description: Finding great candidates entails knowing exactly what skills and experience are needed for the job, but too often managers skip the step of realizing exactly what they need. Source: CBS Marketwatch interviews
Errors to avoid in résumé screening
. title confusion: Too often, managers scan for job titles that match their job description. Also, beware of inflated titles allotted during the economic boom, when college graduates demanded higher-level positions.
