700 Resumes! Now What?

As the economy cycles, there are employment cycles as well. With economic highs, employers traditionally find it far more difficult to identify qualified job candidates. When we are facing a low in the economic cycle, there tends to be an abundance of job applicants.

In the past, attracting applicants could be accomplished by running newspaper ads. Today, most companies have resorted to advertising job openings on the major job boards. Access to information has resulted in much greater applicant flow for many employers, which ultimately results in an inability to efficiently process applicant data.

For example, there was an Ohio school that received over 700 applicants for one open janitorial position!  A common misconception is that because employers are receiving an enormous amount of job applicants that it makes it easier to find qualified candidates.

• Clear Job Description ~ Make sure that the experience required, minimum skills needed, and the salary range of the position are clearly defined.  Many job boards also allow you to add “screener” questions which will rank the applicants based on their questions and ultimately help you identify the most qualified candidates.
• “Thanks for Playing” Plan ~ Have a plan on how you are going to deal with the applicants that don’t meet your requirements.  I would recommend a standard email or letter thanking them for their interest, but also letting them know that he/she isn’t being considered for the job.  If you have ever been on the other side, it is much better to know you are no longer being considered than not to know!
• Interview Process ~ Clearly define the interview process once you have identified the stars.  Remember that the longer you drag out an interview process and the more steps you add, the more likely you are to lose a good candidate, and that is the last thing you want to do after picking them out of 700 resumes.

Those of us that were in human resources in 1999/2000 were dealing with an economy where running an ad, or posting a job resulted in little response and screening applicants was almost non-existent. Employers were increasing salaries, paying significant employee referral bonuses, and even paying sign-on bonuses to attract qualified candidates.

Now, employers will have to deal with the mixed blessing of an overwhelming response to open positions. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to address this. Human resource professionals will have to screen the applicant responses or hire someone to do it in order to fill open positions.  Most companies either have corporate recruiters to do this job, or they hire companies like ours to do it for them.

Delta Dallas offers a Contract Recruiters program as an area of specialty. Please contact us for more information if this is an issue for your company that is costing you time and money.