Candidate glut: swimming in a sea of resumes, HR stays afloat by tweaking recruiting and hiring practices - Employment & Staffing Agenda

HR Magazine, August, 2003 by Martha Frase-Blunt

A few months ago, Mark Matthews, employee relations manager at Associated Grocers Inc. (AG) in Seattle, ran an employment ad for a generalist computer operator with basic skills and a small amount of experience. The ad generated more than 700 applications, and Matthews had to hire a temp just to log the resumes. "It was overwhelming," he marvels. "Just a couple of years ago you could barely find candidates for a job like this--and when you did, they wanted huge salaries and stock options."

How things have changed, in the past two years, the talent market has gone from famine to feast, with staffing specialists working to match a flood of applicants to fewer positions. In this transformed climate, many HR departments are amending their recruiting and screening processes to find the best hire among hoards of out-of-work applicants.

Matthews reports that his company, which supplies grocery and retail services to independent retailers in the Northwest, Alaska, Hawaii and the Pacific Rim, receives 150 to 160 responses a week to its general job postings, in addition to more than 100 "walk-ins" each month.

His experience tracks with employment figures showing a 6 percent jobless rate. The Conference Board's Help-Wanted Index continues to fall, and currently stands at 36, down from 44 a year ago. The index tracks help-wanted advertising volume in 51 major newspapers across the country every month, providing a gauge of change in the local, regional and national supply of jobs. Higher rates reflect more open positions.

Melissa Ackerman, a recruiter with the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio in Columbus, has seen firsthand the unbalanced ratio of applicants to positions. "There is a good percentage of applicants who are applying for anything of interest without doing research on the company beforehand. But who can blame them? The market has been tough, and, unlike the past, where candidates would take their time to research a company, its growth potential and benefits package, candidates are now trying to get a foot in the door."

Higher volumes of employment ad responses and unsolicited resumes are the most visible symptom--and the biggest HR headache--of this so-called employers' market.

Good recruiters are revamping their screening processes to find the gems in the stack of unqualified or overqualified job seekers. The best recruiters will already have these processes in place.

Mixed Blessing

The candidate glut is a mixed blessing: A down economy generates more unqualified applicants to sift through, but the higher volume of resumes means there could be more qualified people in the batch as well.

"In some aspects, the change in the market has made things better," says Kenda Bayer, a recruiting specialist at Linweld Inc., a retail/manufacturing company headquartered in Lincoln, Neb., that produces welding supplies and gases. "I've been able to find applicants at a reasonable 'price' since this may be their only option." But on the other hand, "It can be like picking through a basket of bad apples to see if any are salvageable."

But Bayer knows she can't count on the swelling ranks of laid-off local workers and unemployed college graduates to form a crop of talent, because even in today's market, she notes, "The best are snapped up almost immediately. Nothing's really changed there."

Because of that, smart companies have learned they can't rest on their laurels. "One change we've made is to be quicker on the initial resume screen," Matthews says, "because we know there's likely to be someone in there for us if we get to them quickly enough." And he knows that candidate may have contacted his company's competitors as well.

Yet many employers seem to think the candidate-rich climate offers an excuse to drag their heels. "The sense of urgency we saw a few years ago is gone," says Steve Callisher, who leads an executive search and staffing solutions practice for international accounting and consulting firm RSM McGladrey's Schaumburg, Ill., office. "Hiring companies seem to think because it's an employer's market, they have the luxury of spending more time qualifying or filtering candidates--or even waiting for a better prospect to come along."

Sometimes the hiring process stalls out completely as managers belatedly attempt to justify their staffing needs to higher-ups. "I am definitely seeing more of that now," Callisher reports.

Tweaking and Enhancing Practices

HR should carefully review its recruiting and hiring practices to buoy the good ones and tweak the poorer ones in response to the change in labor market demand. But experts do not recommend wholesale changes.

"I think there are some best practices that recruiters should follow no matter what the labor market may be like, the most important being the responsibility he or she has to find the most qualified candidate for a position," Ackerman says. "That means taking the time to truly evaluate the skill level of each candidate of interest."

Don't cut corners on screening, especially now, she cautions. "I think at one time or another we've all made a wrong decision on a candidate and wondered if we should have kept looking. That's not to say that as recruiters we can't consider new methods of reviewing resumes and weeding out those of no interest; anytime you have a large number of resumes to review, you have to make some adjustments to make sure each resume gets its due." Ackerman's company purchased a resume database system. "Now when resumes come in, they are scanned into this database, and we can do searches for qualified candidates. It has allowed us to be much more productive as well ms provide quicker service to our hiring managers."