Home » Solutions » Stop recruiting resumes first and start recruiting people first!

Our "Great Recession" has put a bonanza of talent on the market that would not otherwise be looking for a job. Talented, stable workers with very good skills. And yet we sometimes still have difficulty finding a good applicant for some jobs. We can't put all the blame on our educational institutions not training workers for today's requirements. When you step back and take an open-minded view of the process of attracting and vetting candidates, another major, major hurdle becomes evident - conventional processes offer more discouragement than encouragement to potential applicants. Anybody (I don't care who they are - actively seeking, passive, or not in the market at all) would like to be considered for a great career move. As if the thought of having to take a lifetime of experience and reduce it down to 2 pages while wondering what to keep in and what to take out, guessing at the right key words to be sure to include weren't discouraging enough, compound that process with the belief that this will just be an exercise in futility as the resume will go into a black hole never to be heard from again anyway. And we wonder why people don't apply for our openings!!!! The hot recruiting technique of the day, social networking, is all about building relationships, right? So after working on building these relationships, what's the culmination of the relationship - "Ah, dude, ya gotta send me a resume first before we can continue." "You don't have a current resume... oh, well do you know anyone like you that does?" Now how's that relationship thing working out for you?

All these tools, techniques, and technology will not significantly impact the recruiting process. If you want significant improvement, you must change the basic process - stop forcing candidates to jump through hoops, go through the agonizing exercise of creating or updating a resume, and instead whisk them through a good interview experience first (not last). Stop recruiting resumes and start recruiting people. Back to our original premise - "If you make it easy for people to be considered, every person for whom the opening would be a good career move would throw their hat in the ring." Offer them an immediate interview rather than a cold, flat resume request first - a world-class candidate experience - and watch your applicant flow, relationship building, and your employment brand soar. OK, so you don't have the staff to interview everyone, there's technology now that will do that for you. Really! It's our HRMC Acclaimsm software-as-a-service platform. View our Acclaim Logic flows to understand how much sense this makes, and download our white paper if you haven't seen a copy of it yet. Everyone appreciates good technology for its accuracy, convenience, and time savings; we invented Acclaim in 1993 and have been refining it ever since. So we've encountered and solved all the intricacies and flexibility needed to meet any situation, any challenge.