Recruiting can be a time-consuming process that businesses have to go through, in order to get the best candidates for their open position. Considering that most recruiters only spend an average of six seconds when scanning an applicant’s resume, it is likely that errors are made and the original goal of hiring the best possible candidate can be missed. As hiring can be costly, time-consuming and inefficient, you might want to consider resume screening tools as a new way of changing recruitment processes.
What is resume screening?
Resume screening describes the process of analyzing an applicant’s suitability for a job position, based on the qualifications written in their resume. It is the goal of any recruiter to fill the open position with the best possible candidate. Therefore, resume screening helps in filtering out candidates, before considering them in time-costly interviews. A relatively new innovation in this process are resume screening tools that allow businesses to make software guided hiring decisions.
What are resume screening tools?
Resume screening tools fill the demand for a minimization of time-spent on reading resumes, through different technological innovations. In short, there are three different types of functions that resume screening software can bring:
- Search functions: This allows recruiters to quickly search resumes for keywords, for example specific skills.
- Resume enrichers: This type of software searches for candidates’ digital footprints in order to provide more context information to the original resume.
- AI tools: The newest generation of resume screening tools automatically scans and analyses an applicant’s resume then rates his employability.
Why you should use resume screening tools
As stated, hiring is time-consuming and the trend requires companies to maximize the efficiency of their recruitment process, including the screening of resumes. Therefore, resume screening tools have several advantages. Here are three of them:
- It saves time: In the United States the average number of applications per position is 250, of which 88% are considered as unqualified for the job opening (before Covid). As a consequence, automated screening tools allow recruiters to allocate their time better, by filtering out a large number of unqualified candidates through software.
- It increases hiring quality: As stated, hiring is a time consuming process and resume screening in particular is a high volume task, where candidates only receive around six seconds of the recruiters attention. This increases the risk for human error immensely, since only a small percentage of
- automated screening is unbiased: Manual screening requires recruiters to be fair, however unconscious bias is natural in humans, which means that recruiters also. Therefore, automation in resume screening can reduce the number of biased decisions made in recruiting processes.
What are the disadvantages of resume screening tools?
While we believe that this innovative new tool will ultimately replace manual screening of resumes, there is still one noteworthy downside to using automated resume screening software. Algorithms and especially AI, just as humans are, imperfect. In other words, AI processing of resumes will not make perfect decisions in each and every single situation. It is therefore recommended that companies should be aware of this fact. Despite this, automated screening tools still possess a competitive advantage over manual screening, simply because of the large volume of applications.
Organizations can profit from more automation in recruitment
In conclusion, resume screening tools are a helpful tool in increasing overall hiring efficiency and quality of companies. Therefore, your organization can also profit from these new systems.
Sources: Ideal.com, Testgorilla.com
