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Ira S Wolfe is president of and author of : Workforce Trends That Will Change the Way You Do Business. He is considered one of the nation's authorities [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] on hiring the right [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] people, managing the generations and workforce trends.
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An overabundance of resumes is prompting employers to change the way they review applications and interview candidates. For individuals in search of a new job or career, it is as easy as Copy, Paste, and Submit.
No longer do [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] managers receive a dozen or two resumes mailed or faxed from a single ad in the Sunday classifieds. They are greeted daily with hundreds, even thousands, of emails clogging inboxes from Internet job postings. Cancer Treatment Centers of America Inc. received 19,000 applicants for 100 jobs at a new hospital near Phoenix. The Palm Beach County School District (FL) received more than 1,000 applications for fewer than 100 driver positions. A recent posting for a Family [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] Dollar Store New York City store manager drew 700 applications in two days.
But more resumes isn't necessarily better. Few managers, human resource professionals and assistants have the time to screen the applications, call the candidates, do the voice mail dance, complete phone interviews, schedule face-to-face interviews, check references, complete background checks and so on.
It is fair to say that reviewing and processing these resumes is like having eight lanes of traffic exiting onto a two-lane side-street. This translates into a resu-mess bottlenock at the hiring tollgate.
Management is at a crossroads. Business just wasn't as complex as it is today. But many organizations still insist on using the techniques of yester-year to solve today's problems. Candidates hire professional resume writers. They search the Internet for information about your company. They download dozens and dozens [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] of answers to the most common interview questions.
Yet managers [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] are still doing interviews on the fly, relying on gut instinct and an exaggerated resume to make the final hiring decisions. What can an organization do to attract more candidates and simplify the complex process of recruiting and hiring?
Simplify the application process.
To first attract and then actually hire the best talent, making the entire application process as convenient as possible is critical. Prospective employees should be able to fill out an application online 24/7. Immediately upon submitting their resumes, these candidates should be asked to complete an automated online interview. This screening interview includes job specific filter questions (from as basic as "Are you [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] available to work weekends including Saturdays and Sundays?" or "Have you completed a two-year or four year degree?" to [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] "Describe why you feel [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] you are an effective leader and provide an example"). You can also pre-qualify by asking skill and competency based questions ("Indicate your proficiency using Microsoft Excel"), allowing candidates to self-qualify or disqualify themselves. For the hiring manager, this means fewer phone calls to unqualified, unmotivated and uninterested candidates and faster access to [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] the [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] qualified candidates.
A well-designed applicant processing system is like the EZ-Pass [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] of [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] human resources. It can help organizations filter and process résumés quickly and [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] provide a central repository for potential candidates. When the system aligns with business processes, it's possible to identify talent more quickly and reduce hiring time. The net result is [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] that you can snatch talented individuals before your competitors do.
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