The best candidate is on your desk, but where?
What is the fastest way to find the best candidates in the thousands of resumes flowing into your inbox? There are plenty of articles on the internet helping candidates create a resume that will land an interview. There is very little help for staffing professionals and hiring managers to deal with the piles of resumes submitted to them.
An overload of resumes is not a new phenomenon. It continues through every phase of the economy. The hardest part is to quickly find the very few candidates that meet the requirements of the position. Too many candidates are hoping that you will find any place for them and are not working hard enough to obtain the right place along their career path to reach their ultimate goals.
The focus here is on the goals of the hiring manager or staffing professional who needs to find the right resumes quickly, worry less about eliminating the perfect candidate because they are moving too fast and manage the number of candidates that are applying for their open positions.
Quick Tips to sort resumes:
Whether you are using a sophisticated candidate tracking system or simple tools, eyeballs and a brain are still required to identify the best candidates. You are probably dealing with soft copies of resumes in Word or PDF format. But even if you are still working with paper copies, you can create categories that break resumes down for your searches.
Categories:
• Interview Now
• Possible Interview
• Requires further screening
• Consider for other positions
• Not a fit at for this company
Quick Resume Review:
• Education: If a degree is mandatory, then look at education first. If the candidate doesn’t have the necessary educational background you can put the resume aside.
• Experience: Look for the number of years or particular experience in their last three positions. It is important to look beyond their last position but not necessarily the entire resume.
• Skills: Check for the skills needed in the skills group or in the last three positions.
• Hard to Read Resumes: If your eyes are beginning to cross put any resume that is hard to read due to too many paragraphs and not enough bulleted information in a read later folder.
Don’t eliminate a resume for a typo or other arbitrary reason. We are constantly reviewing stacks of resumes and we understand the desire to put a resume in the rejection pile for a typo, because it means one less resume to read. However, you may be turning away the perfect candidate.
If you are not completely comfortable with evaluating the best candidates for interviews or if your hiring team works by consensus then consider putting together a hiring committee of two or three experts in the department that is hiring. Ask them for thirty minutes each week. Sit in a room together and pass the resumes around. If they are interested, have them initial the resumes. The ones that have everyone’s initials go in a pile to be interviewed. The ones that have some initials are put in a separate pile for later. If the resume has no initials it goes into the pile to be considered for other positions. If someone red flags a resume it goes into the pile that are not a fit for your company.
These are just some of the pointers I have found to be useful. Chime in and share your best tips with everyone. What's your most useful tip in quickly and effectively reviewing a resume?
Candidates always want to know what is going to get their resume reviewed and lead to an interview. In order to help all of us process resumes more quickly, I would love to write an article for candidates with your anonymous feedback to the following questions:
• What is the #1 no-no when reviewing a resume?
• How long do you actually spend assessing a resume? Is the 10 second rule that we've all heard about really REAL?
• Do you want to see an "Objective" on a resume?
• How long is too long? Should resumes really be kept to 1 page?
Let’s work together to make the process easier and more efficient for all of us! Comment on this article or send your answers to the editor.
