A philanthropist and the CEO of RChilli, Vinay Johar has been listed among TAtech’s Top 100 HR Tech Thought Leaders.
An open job at a reputed company can easily attract the attention of nearly 200-plus candidates who carry the potential to be all-star performers. Ironically, many such talented candidates remain buried deep under the piles of resumes.
A significant pain point of ERP recruiters is to invest valuable time sifting through hundreds of resumes. HR managers have been using automation for quite some time now; however, they might not realize that screening the resume can be an integral part of the candidate selection process, and automating it could change their hiring game altogether.
Driven by a strong passion to introduce inventive solutions for the HR industry, this is one pain area of the recruiters that I believe has been ignored. While many synonymize offering a job letter as successful recruitment, they forget, it’s the competent resume screening that leads up to great hiring. This misconception is what drove me to delve into the topic in detail.
First, let’s talk about what automated resume screening means.
How Automated Resume Screening Works
Automated resume screening ascertains an extensive and fair resume evaluation for every applicant who applied to the job. To put it in simple terms, it means using an automation tool and speeding up the resume-screening process without compromising on quality.
Of course, we can’t take humans out of the candidate hiring process. But, if we delegate the tasks between hiring managers and automated tools, the workflow can be streamlined.
Here’s how automation works:
• The tool parses the content of the resumes, extracting relevant information such as contact details, work experience, education, skills and other key sections.
• The software allows employers to set specific criteria or filters to further refine the resume pool. For example, years of experience, education level, location or specific skills.
• It organizes and stores the parsed resume data in a structured database, making it easily searchable and accessible for future reference. The need for manual filing candidate data is eliminated.
• The hiring managers get a pre-populated list of talented and qualified candidates.
Why Else Automate The Resume Screening Process
Save a significant amount of resume screening time.
Reviewing any candidate to advance or reject them is a huge responsibility. Because it’s the most critical aspect of the recruitment process, investing hours and sometimes days screening a pile of resumes seems imperative. But when the team can save time, they can pay attention to other significant business aspects.
Keep qualified candidates successfully engaged.
Delay in application status response often encourages candidates to drift toward other opportunities. A study by Robert Half stating if a company takes more than 10 days to respond to the candidates, they no longer will prefer working with them, confirms this theory.
An automated resume screening process can assist organizations in preventing such a situation. Completing the resume screening process in a few seconds reduce the call-back time from days to hours.
Remove elements of bias.
Biases may creep into a recruitment process when screening resumes. AI tools can screen based on the fields selected by the hiring manager. The candidate database can be data-driven and free from any prejudice that the recruiter might hold toward any gender, race, ethnicity or age group.
Set a positive employer brand.
A poor candidate experience is when a candidate has to invest time applying to the job. They either leave the application midway or avoid applying altogether. While you fail to have great applications in your data set, your competitors may strengthen their hold. A great candidate experience and seamless hiring process can ensure yours is a brand that candidates want to work for.
Are automation tools error-free?
While automation can streamline the resume screening process and save time, this doesn’t mean it comes with zero flaws. There are challenges that can impact the quality of candidate selection. Here are a few that I believe hiring managers should know:
Lack Of Context
Automated tools may struggle to understand the nuanced context of a candidate’s experience, achievements and skills. Certain accomplishments might not be adequately captured or understood, leading to potentially qualified candidates being overlooked.
Keyword Overemphasis
Automated systems often rely on keyword matching to identify relevant resumes. The skilled candidates can be excluded if their resumes do not include keywords the system is programmed to look for.
Lack Of Personalization
Let’s accept it, there’s no match to the personalized experience that recruiters can offer as compared to automated tools. Candidates can feel disconnected when interacting with a machine rather than a person.
Lack Of Human Judgment
There are a few but important aspects of a candidate, such as cultural fit, interpersonal skills and potential for growth, that are difficult for automated systems to assess accurately.
Constant Monitoring And Updating
Automated systems, just like any other machine, require ongoing monitoring and refinement to ensure they remain effective and free from biases. This can be time-consuming and resource intensive.
How Can You Mitigate These Challenges?
Before you opt for automating the resume screening process, here are a few aspects worth considering:
• Define the selection criteria for the job opening to ensure only skilled candidates are shortlisted.
• Constantly update the screening algorithm to ensure it’s bias-free. It’s important to screen the shortlisted candidate resumes occasionally to ensure accuracy.
• Before you opt for automation technology, make sure that it is designed to accurately analyze the unstructured data of a resume.
• Lastly, it’s important to consider data security to guarantee that a candidate’s information is handled safely.
Final Words
An ideal resume screening process with the right tool in place can save an organization and hiring managers money and time. Engineered to help the recruiting managers hire the best candidates in the industry, it can streamline the hiring process giving it a perfect kick-start.
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