Screening for speedier selection: software can eliminate unqualified applicants, leaving recruiters with fewer worthless resumes

HR Magazine, Sept, 2004 by Drew Robb

Layne Buckley, PHR, and Eric Muller both need to hire engineers, and those engineers need to understand electricity. But the recruiters are looking for two very different types of candidates.

Buckley, staffing manager for communications headset manufacturer Plantronics Inc. in Santa Cruz, Calif., wants engineers who can design the electronics for audio equipment. Muller, on the other hand, is recruiting a team leader for the energy firm Southern Co., and that calls for an engineer to run nuclear, coal, natural gas and hydroelectric power plants. Both recruiters have one problem in common: Each has too many applicants to weed through.

"Our recruiters were overwhelmed and couldn't pinpoint who they should hire for a particular vacancy," says Muller. "They were victims of their own successful sourcing efforts."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Buckley had a similar experience. "Since we are near Silicon Valley, some [information technology] jobs have had 400 applicants," he says. "I have only a limited number of staff, and they can't be reading that many applications."

Both companies made some progress in paring back the number of resumes they receive by adding online questionnaires that screen applicants.

Sorting Through The 'Resu-mess'

Southern Co., which ranks 178 on the Fortune 500 list, has 26,000 employees operating 79 generating stations and overseeing 28,000 miles of transmission lines, as well as handling sales, clerical, financial and other administrative tasks. About one-third of them work in the greater Atlanta area, where the company is headquartered, but the rest are scattered throughout Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. To maintain the required staffing levels, the company must hire more than two thousand new permanent full-time employees each year, Muller says. But to do this, the recruiters have to sort through more than 100,000 applicants.

"Our recruiters were swimming under what they called the 'resu-mess,'" says Muller.

Southern Co. was doing online recruiting, but the process wasn't automated. Each recruiter would post their open positions on the company's web site with instructions for candidates to send an e-mail to a generic address with the job requisition code in the subject line. The system wasn't very workable.

"If that code was not in the subject line, the e-mail would go into a black hole," Muller explains.

But even when the e-mails wound up with the right recruiter, there were major problems. To begin with, some candidates would apply to every open job on the web site, some of which they were legitimately qualified for and some for which they were not. Then, the resumes wouldn't necessarily list the key information the recruiter needed, such as whether the applicant had worked on a particular piece of equipment. This meant that the recruiters would have to follow up with the candidates to chase down the missing information.

In the late 1990s, the company started looking for a better way of managing applications. It sent out a request for proposals and asked the strongest companies to make an in-depth presentation. These included Southern Co.'s HR information systems (HRIS) vendor, PeopleSoft Corp. of Pleasanton, Calif., as well as RecruitSoft (now called Taleo Corp.) of San Francisco and Icarian (since acquired by Orlando, Fla.-based Workstream Inc.). In addition to HR staff, technical staff reviewed each vendor for data security. The company decided to go with an application service provider (ASP) model so the internal information technology (IT) group wouldn't have to support the application. This decision eliminated some other vendors from the running.

Southern Co. selected Hire.com, a privately owned recruitment ASP headquartered in Austin, Texas. Its HireEnterprise suite contains three modules: electronic recruiting, applicant tracking and staffing analytics.

"Hire.com started with a focus on candidate relationships and candidate screening so that companies are not dealing with volumes of unqualified candidates," says Shelley Schmoker, director of solutions marketing.

Hire.com hosts the software in its data centers in Austin, Texas, and Dublin, Ireland. Users access it through a browser interface. Customers have the option of purchasing just one of the modules rather than the entire package. For example, Southern Co. uses just the recruitment software, while Plantronics uses both the recruitment and applicant tracking modules. The front-end recruiting systems run on an Oracle database running on UNIX, while the back-end applicant tracking uses Microsoft Corp.'s SQLServer running in the Windows.NET environment.

For security purposes, the host provides each customer with a separate instance of the database, rather than trying to restrict access within a common database. Each of the modules has an open architecture and comes with predefined application program interfaces, the link between an application and the operating system or database, for integration with other enterprise systems the customers are using, whether proprietary or commercial HR management systems.