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Workforce
June 1, 2002
SMARTER SCREENING TAKES TECHNOLOGY AND HR SAVVY
There are fewer jobs now, but no fewer applicants. Here is how companies are staying ahead of the resume flood, and how they track, test, and screen applicants to find the best people.
Over the last few years, Armnon Geshuri has watched the labor market engage
in more contortions than an Olympic gymnast. During the peak of the economic
boom, attracting applicants was next to impossible. Then, when the labor market
went into a tumble and layoffs began to swell, the director of global staffing
at E*Trade Financial in Menlo Park, California, suddenly found himself taken to
the mat with a glut of applicants.
The one constant throughout the entire period: a sophisticated
applicant-tracking system and advanced screening methods have helped E*Trade
Financial score when it comes to finding new employees. The brokerage and
banking firm is finding better workers more quickly. "In any market, finding the
right talent is key," Geshuri says. "Today, effective applicant tracking and
screening is what differentiates companies and creates a competitive advantage."
As companies battle for talent and place a growing premium on human capital,
they're looking for more advanced ways to conduct applicant tracking,
recruiting, and screening. Many organizations are also concerned about the
fallout from the events of September 11. "Over the last few years, there have
been tremendous changes to the entire recruiting process. Organizations are
turning to applicant-tracking and screening systems to find qualified candidates
and make sure people's identities check out," says Jane Paradiso, recruiting
solutions practice leader at Watson Wyatt Worldwide.
First-generation applicant-tracking systems merely collected resumes and
offered rudimentary search capabilities. Current systems--whether they're used
in-house or through job boards--enable human resources and line managers to
oversee the entire recruitment and applicant-tracking process, from mining
resumes and spotting qualified candidates to conducting personality and skills
tests and handling background checks. In fact, some of these applications are
able to generate detailed profiles, which include education, background, skills,
behavioral attributes, work history, and salary requirements. In most cases, the
goal isn't merely to reduce costs but also to speed up the hiring process and
find people who fit an organization's success profile.
Finding diamonds in the coal mine
With millions of individuals posting resumes online, finding qualified
candidates can sometimes seem like a Herculean task. And while the current
economic downturn has alleviated the severe labor shortage that has wracked the
corporate world in recent years, finding the right person and ensuring that he
or she has the right skills for a particular job remains a daunting job--with or
without technology. "Too often' says Lou Adler, president of Power Hiring, Inc.,
a recruiting and consulting firm in Tustin, California, "excellent candidates
slip right under the radar while poor candidates wind up being interviewed and
sometimes hired."
Companies are turning to more sophisticated human resource management
systems from well-known companies such as PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, Oracle, SAP,
and Ultimate Software to manage applicant tracking and candidate screening in a
more centralized way. But these systems alone aren't enough to ensure success,
Adler says. It's essential for HR and line managers to have additional tools to
filter out unwanted resumes, search for candidates with particular skill sets,
and use other filtering techniques such as skills testing and psychological
testing.
That approach has worked at E (*) Trade Financial. A few years ago, the firm
found itself buried under faxes, e-mail, and old-fashioned paper resumes. That
slowed the hiring process to a crawl, Geshuri says. So, E (*) Trade Financial
opted to migrate from paper to pixels. It installed an applicant-tracking system
from Icarian, which connects to its Oracle HRMS.
Now when there's an opening, HR and line managers can pull the appropriate
job code from the Oracle database and send a detailed list of job requirements
to the Icarian applicant-tracking system. It's then possible to match resumes to
specific criteria and view a list of potential candidates. The system also
automates requisitions and can slot the appropriate new-hire data back into the
Oracle HRMS. That has provided an 80 percent decrease in data entry, reduced the
reliance on outside recruiting firms, and helped E (*) Trade Financial spot
better candidates.
The increasing use of keywords to screen and filter applicants can prove
dicey, however. Organizations that rely too heavily on software can find
themselves overlooking highly qualified candidates who do not match specific
criteria. "In some cases, the best candidate might not have a specific skill but
can learn it," says Terry Terhark, a senior vice president at Aon Consulting in
Findlay, Ohio. Other organizations don't spend enough time and resources
fine-tuning a system to uncover the best candidates. They pull up too many
resumes matching the desired keywords but too few that are outstanding.
As a result, applicant-tracking vendors are developing systems that not only
let recruiters search on keywords but also conduct analysis of the words and
weight them according to how often they're used and their relationship to one
another. Others, including Wonderlic and ePredix, have introduced "performance"
filters. Applicants fill out a brief questionnaire, and the system ranks them on
the basis of specific criteria, such as their past ability to reach quotas, win
awards, and earn a certain commission. At that point, a recruiter or HR
specialist can schedule a brief follow-up phone interview to ensure that the
information is accurate. Then the company interviews the finalists and makes a
selection.
Yet even this method has its limitations. The rankings are only as good as
the questions. "Sometimes, companies ask the wrong questions or focus on the
wrong issues," Adler says. In fact, the problem can carry over to conventional
job applications, whether paper or Web-based. For example, an employer might ask
applicants up front whether they're willing to relocate. Top candidates often
will say no to such a question in theory, but will agree to move when presented
with an excellent job opportunity, Adler points out.
Moving beyond mere automation of HR processes
As recruiting moves online, companies face a growing array of choices about
how to conduct applicant tracking. While some organizations choose to use their
own Web sites as the primary point of contact with job applicants, others are
turning to job boards such as Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, Hire.com, and
HotJobs.com, and more specialized job boards like Medzilla. Even in the digital
age, of course, paper resumes and faxes continue to stream in, though most
companies either scan the documents or file them electronically in their
applicant-tracking database.
At H&R Block Financial Advisors, a financial services firm headquartered in
Kansas City, Missouri (a wholly owned subsidiary of H&R Block), recruiting has
evolved from ads in the Sunday newspaper and HR staff sorting manually through
resumes to a highly automated applicant-tracking and screening system. Using
Hire.com, the company collects and segments resumes submitted through a
specialized recruiting Web site that appears as part of its own corporate site.
It also searches the Web for keywords on resumes posted at various sites and
then invites individuals to apply for certain positions. H&R Block often uses
specific keywords that apply to the industry, such as "certified financial
planner," "insurance license," competitors' names, and other industry-specific
terms, to find qualified candidates. That helps to ensure that all the data it
collects is consistent and makes searching for candidates simpler.
Although most of the company's hiring takes place at the branch level, the
firm has developed a national database to better track and screen applicants.
Equally important, it relies heavily on human resources to manage the
interviewing process, which serves as one of the best screening methods of all.
Improving processes is essential, says Scott Burton, a vice president at
Development Dimensions International, a consulting firm in Ridgeville,
Pennsylvania. "The goal isn't only to automate processes and collect resumes;
it's to find better candidates." Ultimately, organizations that succeed
streamline business processes so that they can conduct more effective filtering,
screening, testing, and simulations. Remarkably, less than 30 percent of
companies surveyed by DDI reported extensive use of testing and assessment
methods.
Ultimately, effective screening comes down to meshing new technology with
old-fashioned HR smarts. It's about using software to improve applicant tracking
and spot potential candidates, and then relying on solid interviewing techniques
to choose the right people. "A solid applicant-tracking system is a powerful
tool," says Arlene Klingaman, senior staffing consultant for Ingenix
Pharmaceutical Services in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. "But it cannot replace
human decision-making. Companies that use both effectively are likely to gain a
competitive advantage and achieve greater success."
Author - Samuel Greengard
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