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Showing posts from July, 2009

How to quickly screen thousands of resumes and find the best talent?

Screening resumes is an inevitable process that has gained a lot more significance since recession. The global recruiting scenario has hardly changed with job cuts still happening around, pushing the unemployment rate to 9.5% - the highest since 1983. So why should resume screening become all the more important? The reason is, job cuts have lead to tens and thousands of resumes floating around in the job market targeting for a job. But the irony is that there are only a very few job openings as the employers are now very cautious with respect to hiring; they need only the “Best Talent.” It is the recruiter’s responsibility to carefully screen the resumes and find the best talent for their clients. With stiff competition all around and stringent time constraints, the recruiters need to manually wade through huge stacks of resumes to pick the right candidates. This eventually takes a lot of time and resources. There is a possibility that you might also miss a potential candidate. So, ho

Use Engaging Elements to reach out to Candidates

Source: eGrabber Newsletter How adept are you at using Web 2.0 technologies to reach or find the best candidates? More than 30 percent of adults, in the U.S., between 25 and 34 years, create online content (blogs, video uploads, etc.) on a monthly basis. If this population's characteristic is a representative of your target, then are your sourcing practices in sync with them? What kind of online content do you produce to attract prospective candidates in this population? You can use these technologies to be more persuasive, to better assess and engage candidates. One characteristic of this population is that they prefer to watch rather than read. You can create video ads that make a compelling case to a candidate on why they should join your organization or apply to a job ad. Your videos can show the workplace, details about the position, feedback from existing employees in similar roles, etc.

Use Trigger Words in your Job Postings

Source: eGrabber Newsletters Recruiting is very much a sales activity - you try to convince candidates to buy your company's or client's employment value proposition. So, it only makes sense to adopt any good sales and marketing technique for things that you do. One such good practice is the use of trigger words; phrases that can make your job ads and postings very attractive and powerful. Usually these are phrases that get your prospective candidates excited - that in simple terms, explain a hard-to-describe benefit and so on. The best way to identify trigger words for a job posting is by talking to employees in that job role. If you wish to attract top talent in the industry, talk to top performers in the company first. Pay rapt attention and capture the exact words they use to describe their job and its benefits. Such phrases or words can be priceless. Get them to say what makes their job and the company exciting. Next, use those exact phrases to craft your job ads.

Supercharge your resume screening process

Screening resumes is one of the most crucial processes involved in recruiting, particularly in a situation where the number of resumes outnumber the number of job openings. In the current scenario, recruiters receive thousands of resumes for a few job openings. Hence, the recruiters need to be all the more cautious in choosing the right candidates from the huge pool of resumes. As a recruiter, how will you handle a similar situation like this? Imagine you receive thousands of resumes for a few hundreds of job openings and you need to screen and short list candidates from different locations with different skill sets. If you are screening manually, how long will it take to finish the project or how many additional resources would you need to employ to finish the task? Manual screening is not only time consuming and strenuous but also increases your expenses. Moreover, there is every possibility that you might miss a potential candidate. So what is the solution? An automated resume scree

Include Related Job Titles in your Resume Search

Source: eGrabber Newsletters You might sometimes have the tendency to get stuck by a single title that your client (company) may use to describe a job position. In today's industry, job titles are changing frequently. For example, software programmer, software developer, software engineer, etc. are different job titles for the same job function. So, unless you use all the related titles in your search, you are likely to miss out on some good candidate leads. One way to find all relevant job titles is to first search the career sites using the (only) job title given by your client. Take note of the job titles that come up. Most sites provide a "View similar jobs" link beside the job titles in the results. Clicking that link will get you a series of similar positions categorized by Freshness, Overlooked, Relevant, etc. Under the Relevant category, you will find jobs similar in content to the position you are searching for. You can include all such relevant job titles to exp