Please summarize this, and try to make it short. USING YOUR OWN words Electronic
ID: 3496089 • Letter: P
Question
Please summarize this, and try to make it short. USING YOUR OWN words
Electronic submission systems and a tough job market have left HR and hiring managers drowning in a sea of résumés and applications. Some large retailers can get a million or more résumés a year. Even small businesses can find themselves flooded with them. For example, when Raising Cain, a Louisiana-based fast-food chain, opened an office in Dallas, the firm needed to hire 35 people. It received 10,000 résumés and had to hire an outside firm to help sort through them. Given this trend, it is not surprising harried HR personnel, managers, and business owners are rushing to install software that promises to do the screening and sifting of résumés for them. In fact, recruiters say the percentage of online applications viewed by an actual human being today ranges from just 5 to 25 percent. Résumé screening software built into applicant tracking systems used to be expensive—something that only large firms could afford. Today, however, many are web-based, easy to use, and relatively inexpensive. For example, when Southern Company, an energy company based in Atlanta, posts jobs on its site, applicants click on the links and are taken to Hire.com, where the screening is done. The applicants do not even realize that they have left the firm’s corporate website. Hire.com also has a feature that allows companies to ask applicants screening questions related to their education, job knowledge, experience using certain work equipment, and so forth. PreVisor and Kenexa are two firms that offer close to a thousand online assessments, with prices ranging from a couple of bucks to $50 a test. Many job boards now feature prescreening questions as well and have algorithms to the recommend candidates similar to the way Amazon.com recommends products based on what a person has purchased in the past. The boards also let employers send automated responses to applicants when their résumés are received and their prescreening tests have been taken. The messages help let candidates know where they stand in the selection process and what the next steps are. Some recruiters have found ways to avoid the “resu-mess” altogether. Instead of posting job ads, they use social networking sites to get the word out for the types of employees they are looking to hire. Kevin Mercuri, president of Propheta Communications, a public relations firm in New York City is one of them. Mercuri got tired of being swamped by résumés generated by ads he posted on Craigslist. Now when he needs to recruit personnel, Mercuri posts a message about job openings on his LinkedIn page. “I get people vouching for each applicant, so I don’t have to spend hours sorting through resumes,” he says
(Ch.6)
Explanation / Answer
In this paragraph, the author emphasises of how advancements in technology has completely changed even the employment scenario. The author starts by saying that due to a change in resume submission process, now becoming electronic, the resumes obtained by even the smallest companies number to thousands and millions for the larger firms. The resume submission turned into resu-mess, which is now slowly taking a turn. Companies, now no longer sit through hours to scrutinise amongst these resumes, rather use softwares for such cumbersome processes. Human screening has now come down to only 5-25%. The author has given an example of hire.com, which is a recruitment website, where when the applicant is applying for southern company, he is redirected to hire.com without even knowing, from which the company may also ask questions relevant to the job profile and the applicant can answer. There are firms like PreVisor and Kenexa which offer a range of services starting from a couple of bucks to up to $50, to chose from assessment techniques. Also, depending upon the company's recruitment patterns, the recruitment site may also suggest candidates matching the company's requirements, and if matched, sends automated replies to the selected or chosen candidate. In order to avoid such inflow of resumes, some companies also post their job requirements on social networking sites such as LinkedIn to avoid the large inflow of resumes.