I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I do not know
David Gee’s recent post about fake job ads solicited quite a few comments including one from a Carrie that I felt got to the heart of the biggest challenge in staffing today. She wrote:
I am from a small staffing company and i can guarantee you we post as few jobs as possible to avoid the influx of unqualified resumes. I would say for every job, 1 out of 50 resumes actually has the qualifications. Furthermore, we get more calls from, for example, a disgruntled career mail clerk that applied for an IT help desk position that requries 2 years help desk experience, for which the candidate does not have, but INSISTS he can do. No, you can’t, you do not qualify.
The problem Carrie describes doesn’t just vex recruiters, it also poses challenges for recruitment software developers. Sure that really cool iPad friendly applicant portal can draw in the candidates by the hundreds, but what good is 500 candidates when you only need ONE Bilingual Export Clerk?
The answer lies scattered among a set of tools from full-text index ranking to semantic matching algorithms that make the process at best 70% accurate.
The Economist delved into this in a fun post this last weekend.
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Parsing is where the solution is going to have to be found.
Often the online job boards have screening questions (Do you have XYZ degree?; How many years experience in ABC field do you have?; etc.) that, if the answers fit the job description will allow the resume/submission to go through.
Frequently, submissions make it through that do not have the base requirements. When confronted, the candidates explain that they thought their years as a cashier at the grocery store could be considered ‘accounting’ since it’s all dealing with numbers, or that since they have 4 years of experience in the marketing department, it was equivalent to a 4 year degree. The list goes on.
This isn’t a new problem: In the days of newspaper ads the lobby would fill up with candidates in response to an ad for a Commercial Driver with a minimum of 2 years experience. At least 1 or 2 would not even have a commercial license, “But I’m willing to get one!”. The problem is simply multiplied by the increased exposure an online ad gets and the simplicity of two or three clicks to apply.
In Staffing, until the ‘perfect parser’ comes about, it will still require a recruiter to sift through the resumes to find the best. It’s not that big of an inconvenience. A well written ad and a sharp recruiter can speed the process. You have to wonder though, at what point technology like the ‘perfect parser’ will start to devalue the role of the recruiter.
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Good points, Steve. Myself though, I will always want to have a professional recruiter write the job ads and job descriptions for me, and no parser will help deal with the result of poorly written ones.