The perfect candidate
Yesterday I was speaking with a talent scout who confessed with utmost sincerity that he often had to look through about 300 résumés each day in order to single out a specific professional profile.
Only thanks to his experience could he choose the résumés that deserved to be analysed further for that specific profile from those that could be discarded at once.
The truth is that the selector’s job cannot be reproduced by a software program. When dealing with human resources the expert’s experience cannot be calculated in (with an algorythm.
But the number of analysed résumés (300) can give us some important information:
1) the time dedicated to most part of each résumé is very small. It is a question of singling out 2 or 3 discriminating pieces of information to understand if it is the case to proceed with the reading of that file or if it is possible to discard it at once.
2) It is not possible to substitute the reading with a banal research for keywords. One must always consider the context in which the information is given. Keywords cannot make you understand a person’s experience. The variety of the offers doesn’t allow the recruiter to single out few simple keywords to get on with the research. Finding the information is not obvious also because of the different formats in which the résumés present themselves. For example the position of the title of study or of the foreign languages can vary, and generally one must scroll the whole text to find them out.
3) It is not possible to classify the résumé “a priori” because the candidate’s suitability depends precisely on the offered job position and thus already controlled files must be examined again every time.
4) As the discarded résumés are obviously the majority, a filter for the research taking into account the context (ie: taking into account the semantics of the requested information) would allow the selector to focus on the résumés that can really lead him to the ideal candidate.
Reducing the number of résumés to analyse by discarding immediately the useless ones offers an enormous saving of time for the recruiter, so that he can focus on the effective job of looking for the right person for that specific position instead of having to filter the inadequate candidates.
Automatic classification and semantic research find a perfect application in the field of staff selection. It helps the professional’s job so that he can spare the repetitive and little specialised part of the research for talents, thus allowing him to focus his resources on the real value expected from a highly professional talent scout.
