One of the most repetitive elements of recruiting are the emails. Out of your pool of candidates, you’ll always have one offs, but then there are the emails you find yourself sending over and over and over again. Word processors brought seeming salvation with their templates and mail merges, but that still involved a lot of manual work each time you wanted to actually send out those communications. Miss one field and you end up calling your ideal candidate by the wrong name or informing them verbatim that “PositionTitle at CompanyName is currently on hold.”
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Topics:
Applicant Tracking System,
Recruiting & Hiring
The resources and time that it takes to hire even just one quality employee can be sky-high; imagine what it would look like if you were trying to hire twenty (or more) excellent, talented candidates all at once? Although the prospect can seem intimidating, there will likely be a time in your company’s existence that this potential nightmare may become a reality. Why sit and wait anxiously when you could be preparing to facilitate a successful, mind-blowingly awesome hiring event? Here are some tips to help guide you along your way:
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Topics:
Applicant Tracking System,
Recruiting & Hiring
By: Don Kim
So you’ve made the decision to go with a paperless applicant tracking system (ATS). You’re researching vendors and throwing out your now unnecessary file cabinets. Good for you, but that doesn’t mean you can go on autopilot now. Although a paperless system will reduce your workload, you will have to put in some effort to make a smooth transitioning from paper to paperless. Always here to help you, the HRM Direct team has compiled a list of tips and pointers to keep in mind when making the transition.
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Topics:
Onboarding,
Applicant Tracking System
I have picked the
occasional bone
with
John Sumser
but as I hope I've made clear, I kid out of respect. Which is why I was flattered to receive this response
to my
recent critique
of one of his daily articles. John says,
While that is very entertaining, the point we were making is that Jobby represents a generational difference, not an overnight sensation.
On that I could't agree more. Resumes are problematic to say the least, a "legacy format" if ever there was. But before we get too excited, it's worth considering this excerpt from the
original article
The other day we visited a relatively new entrant to the recruiting software space. We tried to get them talking about Jobby. "Hmmm, this is very bad." They said. How do you control it? People could spam the system.
The more I think about this, the more I sympathize with the point of view given by the vendor.
The problem with resumes is that they are an unstructured document containing structured data. Unstructured data is the picture of a couple jogging on the front of the box of low-fat blueberry muffins. Structured data is the label on the back that tells you they replaced the fat with salt and sugar.
Tagging as implemented today is not that much different than the slogan on the front of the muffin box. They're keywords, with a little added salt and sugar. They are better in the one sense that you can search for ".NET programmer" and not have to worry about the hundred different ways those things might appear on a dead-tree resume. I like the way Jobby does search and refinement of results in terms of feel. Feel, as Steve Jobs has taught anyone who pays attention, is hugely important. But let's not get too distracted here. People long ago learned to "game" keywords to the point that they are remain useful only because there isn't anything much better at the moment.
The problem is in many ways precisely the one named by the anonymous vendor: spam. More precisely, it is the ability of the user to add unverified information to the system that defeats the purpose. The power of Wikipedia is not that anyone can write an article, but that anyone can edit it. For every person who wishes to inject junk, there is another who revels in flensing it out. This is the missing link in resumes, tagged or not.
Ultimately what we all want is honest information. The problem is that I don't see how we're going to get it. I've written before about how
reputation systems
play a critical role in the success of eBay. But eBay also has the benefit of running a dominant closed market where they can get away with forcing everyone to play the game their way. Recruiting currently enjoys nothing like this. Good people may set up profiles that expose them as they are, but mediocre or dishonest ones will probably not. No one with a brain will voluntarily air their dirty laundry. And various layers of government regulation (which are bound to get worse) will likely conspire against the more creative ideas that might force people to do so.
Perhaps pushing the good people up higher will be sufficient. But part of me thinks that would constitute a niche resource rather than a general solution.
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Topics:
Applicant Tracking System,
Recruiting & Hiring
One of my favorite industry bloggers at
Systematic HR
made a comment yesterday that's worth drilling down on. In his
review of a 2006 Tech Outlook piece
in
Benefits and Compensation Solutions
magazine, Dub Dubs writes,
[The author's] observation is right on until you start reading the detail. I'm not sure he knows what web services is. At the very least, it is not dependent on on-demand software.
This is 100% true, but it begs making a larger point about why these things matter to end users.
At their core, both web services and on demand are about shifting power from the aristocrats and clergy (vendors and IT departments) to the people (end users). Jeff Hunter illustrates this in
Web 2.0 to the Rescue
over at his blog
Talentism
:
I can't get a decent XML feed out of our ATS. So I use SimplyHired instead.
Just to recap, Jeff was able to:
1. Set up a new website and content management system (his blog)
2. Create a structured data feed of jobs from EA's website
3. Incorporate a real-time data feed into his website
What is most exciting is that (I'm assuming) Jeff did all this without involving his IT department or playing diplomat between the TypePad and SimplyHired professional services teams. You don't get much more user-driven than that. It's going to take a long time to develop the platforms to accomplish more intricate and valuable tasks (HR-XML
still strikes me as too complicated for instance) and more importantly to educate consumers. But the future clearly belongs to this approach, and On Demand delivery is a critical enabler.
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Topics:
Applicant Tracking System
