- Recruiting can be a very rough business, particularly when you are charged with posting a job, then are in charge of following up with the applicants.
- With any given position, you as a recruiter could be inundated with applicants.
- In fact such an inundation of candidates can in turn cost you valuable time and money, resulting in a less than stellar hiring experience.
- So what are the 3 systemic causes of a terrible hiring experience for recruiters? Keep reading to find out.
Ask anyone anywhere if it’s nice to be wanted, and invariably they will answer a resounding “Yes!”
Of course this “yes” doesn’t stop at the door of most recruiters. To the contrary that “yes” pounds on the door until eventually the door breaks from its hinges.
Even with a strong jobs market where it seems as if virtually everyone is employed in one way or the other, if you post a job opening for your company that job seekers find alluring, you are bound to be overwhelmed.
To that end, the overwhelmed portion of this may present itself as a good problem – at least on paper. But in the real world overwhelmed recruiters are anything but a good problem.
As a consequence, recruiters who are overwhelmed due to one or more job openings they’ve posted suffer the following as they attempt to catch up with the sheer number of applicants:
- Time loss.
- Money loss due to time loss.
- And yes, burnout.
It’s not easy sifting through resume after resume after resume.
And even with artificial intelligence helping with the recruiting process, there’s a lot in human intuition toward candidates that AI misses.
This, invariably, can leave you under a pile of resumes that you will need to go through by hand.
So the question is how can such a recruiting dilemma be avoided in the future?
A recent article published by ERE Recruiting Intelligence outlines 3 main causes of a recruiter’s nightmare of going through a prohibitively high volume of resumes when really, in reality, it does not nor should not be that way once a job opening is posted.
- Time-related desperation.
With companies of all makes and sizes there will eventually come a time when a job opening will need to be filled not tomorrow or today, but yesterday. In short, that is the time period you have to work with to find the perfect fit for the job.
Well, good luck with that!
As the ERE Recruiting Intelligence article states, when a recruiter gets hundreds of applicants, only a sub segment get a real good look.
Because of time restraints, the recruiter will only be able to pull out the first handful of good or great candidates and the rest will inevitably be tossed in the round file (in other words, the trashcan).
In real desperate hiring situations:
- Experience won’t matter.
- Fit won’t matter.
- And sometimes pay won’t matter – say in the event that a job pays $40,000 per year but what you have in a candidate’s resume and job experience is no more than sub $30,000 material.
Having to deal with narrow time frames can surely blow a hole in your efforts at recruiting the best possible candidate(s) for the job(s) at hand. Yet for the hopefully rare occasions that these recruiting dilemmas come up they can more than likely be traced to:
- Hiring managers need candidates immediately.
- If they wait to call the first candidates, another company will have called, interviewed, and hired them already. Thus, the fear of missing out drives immediate action.
How do you avoid this inability to wait 15, 30, or even 60 days to catch up on all the applicants? You can’t unfortunately.
All you can really do is just hope your onboarding process can further filter this candidate as being a good addition or a not so good addition.
- Your open position has been advertised to too many people in too many places.
Holy moly, due to a desperate need to fill an open position within two weeks while competing with a constrained job market and look where you’re job posting is getting its candidates from:
- Zip Recruiter
- Indeed
- Glassdoor
- And yes, even Craigslist
By posting your job opening on these five or more job sites, you’ve just put yourself into an impossible position as far as rooting out the perfect candidate.
You have over 100, maybe 200 resumes, and you’re expected to go through all of them?
Again, good luck with that!
While there may be no remedy to being drowned with candidates when hiring employees on a shortened time period, there definitely is a remedy to over exposure of an open position on job boards.
What you need to do to avoid this scenario is deductively analyze the opening you currently have.
- Is it more of a technical job or a creative-type position?
- Is it more of a managerial opening or an associate’s opening?
Be critical and/or judgmental about what your job opening is and is not, and with that point the position to an appropriate source who will advertise it to the appropriate job seekers.
Only then can you save yourself the trouble of being inundated with resumes that have absolutely no synchronicity with the opening you have at hand.
If you take this approach, in most cases you may be able to utilize less time finding that perfect fit.
- Double check how the job opening is worded.
It’s hard to believe how many non-starter candidates recruiters receive simply due to how their job opening is worded.
Sifting through resumes that come from all over the map just because the job’s ad is not explanatory enough, or does not list all its requirements can be a horrific waste of your time and your company’s money.
Your best bet here is to take a preventative approach and re-read, rewrite or simply start from scratch the assembly of words that will perfectly describe your job opening.
Doing so will dramatically decrease the time you spend reading nonconsequential resumes from people who in no way have the skills or experience working in a similar position to what you are advertising.
You and your fellow recruiters will be thankful, your recruiting budget will be thankful, and even the job seekers will be thankful that this process potentially staved off any time lost in a job search that winds up being nonsensical simply because the job description was poorly written.
Conclusion
There’s no magic to job recruiting, which is a good thing. Job recruiting is instead a straightforward process that requires straightforward thought, planning and common sense.
Consider the wording of your open position, your time frame in which you will be hiring, and where and how often you will advertise the opening. If these aspects are given careful thought along with the honest realization of what your abilities are as a recruiter, avoiding the 3 causes of a terrible hiring experience should be a slam dunk on your part.
