Hiring new employees for any open position can be a time-consuming and difficult process for any size company. The internet has allowed employers to quickly and easily post their job openings online to reach a larger audience. While this does increase a company’s candidacy pool, it also can create resume overload, as some companies receive dozens or even hundreds of resumes for just one job opening. This leaves managers and human resource departments with the daunting task of filtering through all of these resumes to find their prime candidate. Although this task may seem nearly impossible, there are several tips to help employers narrow down their selection and find the right applicant.
Create Job Description
Even before you consider posting the job online, you must create a detailed and comprehensive job description for the position. This job description should include the key features that someone applying for the position should have. This includes things like desired skills, required educational level, past experience requirement, and necessary work-related characteristics and traits. Try to make the job description as detailed as possible.
You also need to set a salary range for the position prior to posting the employment opening. This is because some of your applicants, especially the highly-qualified candidates, may inquire about the salary range right from the beginning. To ensure you company stays competitive in the job market, you can do some research on salaries for similar positions in your industry and location, and look at the market pay study.
Job Posting
When creating your job posting description, you want to incorporate a lot of the wording use in the job description. Try to be as specific as possible, so you attract candidates who meet your set criteria. Now, you need to decide where to post your current job opening online. Your initial though may be to post your job opening on every job board online, along with every social networking outlet. Unless you are hiring multiple employees, you probably want to limit how many job boards you use to post your new job. Try to find the job posting sites that are most likely to attract the type of applicant you desire for your position.
Create Job Application
Most companies only ask their job applicants to submit a resume when applying for a certain position. While this is a good method to help you learn about each candidate, a resume can leave out a lot of the specific information you want to know. You should consider creating a customized job application to be completed by each applicant, in addition to submitting his or her resume. By creating a customized job application, you can be sure to get the specific answers that you need to help you narrow down your selection of candidates.
Use a Filtering System
Not long after you post your job opening online, you can expect to start seeing resumes and/or job application filing into your inbox. Now the question becomes, how to scan through all of the resumes and/or applications to find the right potential employee for your company. First, you should use an application tracking system to help you manage and organize your job postings, and the applications you receive. This allows you to track everything you need at one convenient location.
This kind of software oftentimes provides a filtering system that allows you to sort through the resumes by looking for certain keywords. You can use this feature to narrow down your selection of applicants by searching for keywords that match the criteria you want in a potential job candidate.
Sorting through a large volume of job resumes does not have to be as time-consuming and difficult as you think. Learning how to create a detailed job posting will help to target the specific type of applicants you want. In addition, an application tracking system will significantly cut the time you spend sorting through the resumes. Take your time and be sure to filter out candidates who do not match your set criteria first because this will narrow down your selection and make choosing the right candidate easier.
Byline: Eric Foutch is a contributing writer at Recruiterbox, a leading provider of applicant tracking software.