Only 10 years ago, the recruiting process was a tedious, inefficient exercise in paper shuffling. Candidates would barrage hiring companies with their résumés by fax, snail mail, express mail, courier, and personal delivery. When the waves of paper would arrive, companies would either attempt to manage it all or outsource the scanning and management of all that paper. Résumés could easily be scattered throughout the company with only a few getting to their intended recipients. As a consequence, word of mouth was one of the most efficient ways to get your foot in the door at a new company.

Enter Automation

Enter database and scanning technology and, later, the Internet. Equipped with the relatively new and increasingly affordable résumé scanning and database tools (from Personics, Restrac, and Resumix), online job portals and application service providers (ASPs), the recruiting process has gone partially paperless. These tools enable companies to manage literally hundreds of thousands of résumés from any source. After résumés arrive, the systems scan them, index them, assign properties to them, and store them, all without human intervention. Résumés can be categorized and filtered, and, after the preprocessing, can be searched either by a recruiter or by a trained manager. Algorithms rank résumés based upon the frequency of search terms appearing in a given document and attempt to find the best match given whatever criteria has been chosen. According to most reports, the bulk of Fortune 1000 companies use these résumé scanning or database systems.

Vendors give glowing testimonials about how these tools have revolutionized the recruiting process, improving efficiencies by 100 percent or more. But the dirty little secret the testimonials won’t tell you is how inefficient these systems are at helping your company find the right talent. Richard Bolles, author of the best-selling job search book What Color Is Your Parachute?, states that the Internet-based résumé databases are the least effective way for candidates and companies to find each other. Bolles estimates that only 10 percent of all technical job seekers and only 1 percent of all nontechnical job seekers will obtain employment by these systems.

Efficient Selection or Automated Exclusion?

Why don’t these systems work? Instead of streamlining the process of identifying skills and evaluating an applicant’s fitness on his individual merits and experience, these systems

evaluate the frequency of word patterns in résumés and whether previous job titles and college degrees match narrow search criteria. Given this “jackpot,” or lottery-style, system, it’s not surprising the recruitment “fill” rates are so low.

The problem with a keyword-based approach is obvious to anyone who has ever used an SQL query tool over an “unclean” data set: Dirty data yields unpredictable results. Unless a candidate’s résumé contains the keywords that the employer’s query seeks, he will be invisible to the employer, regardless of fitness, talent, or skill.

Another problem with keyword-indexed résumé databases is the failure to inform the applicants how they work. For example, every job search book has different recommendations for résumé style, keyword usage, and keyword content. Each Internet job search database that accepts résumés has different guidelines for content, format, and keywords. Much of the advice about keyword content is contradictory. Picking résumé keywords is like picking winning lottery numbers.

Yet another issue is the content of the keywords themselves. For example, if job titles and industry-specific terms are used as search keywords (and by the relevancy algorithms), many candidates will be omitted because they cannot truthfully use those keywords. Employees rarely have control over what job title their employers assign them. And, should the job seeker change his job title or degree name to use the new industry buzzwords, his résumé is unlikely to pass a rudimentary background check and can even be the basis for later termination.

The keyword-based system is nothing more than a form of job lottery: If your résumé contains the hot keywords, you’ll be entered in the drawing. If you are lucky enough to be selected, you can compete for a chance in the final spin—a job interview.

Search for Workable Solutions

Most employers use their Web sites to contribute to the “garbage collection” problem. Most company Web sites simply display a list of open opportunities and invite the public to apply for them with fill-in-the-blank résumé forms. Instead, the sites should offer Web-based tests and questionnaires that assess a candidate’s fitness for the open positions. The Web- screening application should ask detailed questions about education, experience, and interests so that a meaningful, relevant candidate profile can be built from the responses. Then, if a candidate meets threshold criteria, the site should reveal a listing of company opportunities and company contact information. Candidates who do not qualify will be told immediately that there are no present openings. New applicants sending in blind résumés should be directed to the company Web site for interactive screening.

An investment in the development of such systems will give your company an immeasurable strategic advantage: It will find top-quality employees who otherwise would be lost in a sea of keywords.