A lot of staffing and recruiting companies, corporate HR departments, job boards, job fair organizers and several others; in this age of automation, consider automated resume screening to be a novelty. They are grossly underestimating its impact, and making a huge mistake in doing so. Paper resumes have and will keep causing problems at most of the corporations, organizations and businesses. Individuals who submit paper resumes by email or at a career fair are known to create challenges as they are not in a uniform format, and are full of mistakes and formatting mistakes done due to individual beliefs or misconceptions.
Unless recruiters take assistance from experts, they are quite likely to keep stumbling over piles of resumes; never to reach out to that right candidate they are looking for.
Candidates who copy-paste their resume for the umpteenth time in a form or on recruiter’s website, compels the latter to populate fields in a database which should ideally help them to search, manage and contact candidates. So this is an in-house situation. Situation at a job fair is more or less similar. Job fair organizers or companies are eager at collecting your paper resumes, but it is less likely that candidates receive an interview call. It’s usually so because, they have to scan your paper resume, and then ensure that their in-house teams parse it as well. Thousands of paper resumes are received at any job fair and screening them to reach out to the right candidate is a humongous task.
Format-related resume problems
Thousands of candidates’ use hundreds of various resume formats, which itself is a challenge.
- Accomplishments and skills are omitted in some formats as a lot of candidates feel that a resume is a mere summary of their previous job responsibilities. Due to this, they include only the duties and responsibilities from their job descriptions, visibly. Required in such scenario are experts at work who can look for key assessment factors such as skills, tool and accomplishments to populate or update the fields in the web based application or recruiter’s software.
- Chronological resumes and resumes in functional format, is another challenge. It’s often difficult to look out find out job experience at a particular company, work dates etc., which is time consuming for any recruiter and hiring managers; who tend to give up prematurely due to non-availability of information that they need – conveniently.
- Though safest choices seem to be docx, doc and pdf; resumes received from individuals over email are in various file types; Text, PDF, DOC and what not. Name of files received are not in own name; like “Resume 1.docx”, instead of “Chirag Shivalker March 2017.docx”.
Enlisted are a few more challenges that recruiters face:
- Use of bold and bullets
- Everything is not aligned to the left
- Though dates are an exception (right or left), searching and assessing them is not
- Fonts are not web-safe (Arial, Arial Black, Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Georgia, Garamond. And Times New Roman
- Fonts are not size 10 and up
- Other confusing elements include;
- Bad spelling
- Colors, images, graphics
- Columns or tables
- Use of more than one font
- Special characters, such as () / –
- Condensed or expanded text (font spacing)
- Acronyms (use the long form also, not just CIO or CPA by themselves)
- Headers and footers (i.e. the Word function with dedicated header/footer areas)
- Improper capitalization/ punctuation (they’re often used to mark the beginning/end of a block)
- Students using unusual section names at freewill and not sticking to “Work Experience” (or “Experience”) and “Education”, not “Career Achievements” and “Training”
The list does not end here. There is a lot more stuff, and most of it might look to be stupid challenges. However; it is mandatory to understand that they are required to be made clean and professional, and in a uniform format; since a human will read it at some point of time.
Just a thought
The recruiters and HR departments and all others involved with activities of human resources and manpower planning are required to understand the dire need of resume processing. Recruiters and HR managers are flooded with applications from scores of job applicants. Reviewing and shortlisting from such a vast pool of talented professional’s, from a heap of paper resumes, is an intense activity and demands increased mental energy and efforts. Inherently, recruiters can play by “The 6 second Resume” rule only if the resumes are in a uniform format, and readily available.
Conclusion
In-house teams are less likely to be equipped with the expertise, from resume data entry and digitizing to resume formatting for uniformity. For the recruiting process, all these challenges prove too costly and highly time consuming. It also consumes more time in reaching out to the right candidate.
Outsourcing data entry solution providers, with extensive knowledge and domain experience of resume formatting deliver consistent results even with tight deadlines. From digitizing gathered bulk resumes to 100% accuracy in field parsing, data entry of job fair registration forms or employment applications to project delivery in any desired format, including XML, XLS (spreadsheet), or direct client’s application; they have done it all.
