Many organisations are now using recruiting software and applicant tracking systems to pre screen job candidates. These systems save you time and make the process easier the downside is that you may miss out on the best candidate due to terminology, formatting and length of resume.
Terminology
Terminology is a real challenge for recruiting software. You may be advertising for a Client Delivery role and one of your applicants has listed solid experience in a Professional Services role. The software may not recognise that these are similar roles. Therefore this candidate may be excluded from the next round.
Formatting
Recruiting software systems can struggle to read well formatted documents or ones with tables and graphs, meaning these systems simply miss this information. This presents a real problem for those candidates that are trying to make their resumes stand out from the crowd.
Length
In a twist of irony these systems may actually reward a candidate with a long, eight page resume over someone who has taken the time to build a concise three page document. This is due to the fact that these systems don’t place any value on length of document and may reward someone with more keywords from a junior role 15 years ago.
Recruiting software may initially save you time but the cost of missing out on the best candidate may impact you and your business long term. If you would like to know more about this topic or you would like to suggest a topic for me to write about then please contact me paul@paulgreening.com
