HR and hiring managers often find themselves swamped by rsums because they are so easy to send

HR and hiring managers often find themselves swamped by résumés because they are so easy to send with a click of a button. Some large retailers can get a million or more résumés a year. Even small businesses get flooded with them. When Raising Cain, a Louisiana-based fast-food chain, opened an office in Dallas, the firm needed to hire 35 people. It received 10,000 résumés and had to hire an outside firm to help sort through them.

Applicant tracking systems and résumé-screening software are helping harried HR personnel, managers, and business owners cope with the problem. After résumés are screened and reviewed, interviews can be scheduled automatically using a firm’s email system and electronic calendar, and job offers sent to candidates to sign electronically and return. Many job boards have résumé screening capabilities and algorithms to recommend candidates similar to the way Amazon recommends products based on what a person has purchased in the past.

Not all HR professionals are fans of résuméscreening software, however. Managers tend to use huge numbers of key words so that very few applicants can make it past the screen. Different kinds of software can have different kinds of glitches. The software might not read certain types of fonts or reject a résumé of a good candidate if it contains a single typo. Unqualified applicants have learned to “pepper” their résumés with a job’s keywords to get past résumé-screening software.

Peter Cappelli, a University of Pennsylvania professor, has written a book called Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs. Cappelli relates an incident in which an HR manager put his own résumé through his company’s screening process and got rejected. In another instance, an engineering firm received more than 25,000 résumés for a job but none of the candidates made it past electronic screening. 

There is also a lack of the human touch and judgment in the process. Résumé-screening software can’t easily pick up on candidates’ “soft” skills, such as a person’s ability to interact well with other people. And managers don’t end up seeing interesting résumés—résumés from people who have different skills or life experiences that would translate well to the job. Consequently, a lot of people who would make excellent employees never get a glance.

Some recruiters have found ways to avoid the downsides of automatic résumé screening altogether. Kevin Mercuri, president of Propheta Communications, aa public relations firm in New York City, got tired of being swamped by résumés. Now when he needs to recruit personnel, he posts a message about job openings on his LinkedIn page. “I get people vouching for each applicant, so I don’t have to spend hours sorting through résumés,” he says.

Questions 

1. What impact do you think résumé screening tools are having on HR departments? What about line managers? Would you use the software to screen résumés? 

2. How might the drawbacks associated with résumé-screening software be addressed?