Tip of the Week – Test Candidate Matching
It’s Friday afternoon, and you just posted a position with your applicant tracking system (ATS). The position has been placed on your website, job boards and the other usual sources. When you come to work on Monday, you realize that you have had over 200 candidates apply for the position.
Sound familiar? Well it doesn’t necessary need to be a Friday, but many companies experience this type of high candidate volume for certain positions. Even with an applicant tracking system, this could be a quite the chord to review all the information and resumes. This is where candidate and position matching features can help save the day…or at least some very busy work.
The candidate and position matching feature available in certain ATSs serve users “pre-qualified” candidates to help ease the burden of reading resumes one-by-one. The ATS can identify either keywords or the skill sets required for the position then run a search against a resume as it is submitted. If there is a match, the ATS can send a notification such as an email to the recruiter/HR professional.
For this weeks tip, try testing the accuracy of your ATS’s matching system. Apply with a resume that you created as a “perfect match” and see how it ranks or if the ATS identified it as a match. Then try working your way down to the George Costanza resume. Be sure to generate a bogus position so you don’t skew performance in your reports.
Filed under: Tip of the Week
Tags: Applicant Tracking System Matching, Applicant Tracking System Tip, ATS Matching, ATS Tip
Jake,
I can definitely see the value of a system like to this to recruiters. The one thing I would be worried about is that these kind of systems can sometimes weed out candidates who might have ended up being very high performers but don’t fit the profile of what you’ve defined as a “perfect match”.
Unfortunately, this is the blessing and the curse of web recruiting technologies. It’s now much easier to reach candidates, but we get flooded with resumes. A robust ATS system will allow you screen and keep your volume manageable, but you may inadvertently weed out some great performers.
At any rate, great tip!
Chris
I think checking the accuracy of your ATS system is a great way to make sure that your system is narrowing down candidates correctly. I think it’s also important to pull a sample of “rejected” resumes to see if any are a potential fit. If you find a lot of resumes that seem like potential fits, then maybe it’s time to re-examine the software you use.
-Timothy