• New! Interview Exchange Integrates TalentWise Employment Screening
• Interview Exchange Adds Performance Evaluation System To Growing HR Software Portfolio
• Interview Exchange integrates with HigherEdJobs
• Interview Exchange integrates JobTarget OneClick "Job Posting Distribution Interface"
• Interview Exchange Launches Employee Referral Portal
• New solutions reduce recordkeeping expense, while finding better applicants

These are curious times in the staffing profession. Heard any of these mixed messages lately?

• Job boards have become too much of a good thing. Sure, they're relatively inexpensive and they churn out tons of resumes. But way too many applicants are unqualified.
• What keeps job boards from prescreening applicants before they even apply? That would let me stop spending so much time reading useless resumes. I'd do anything to improve things!
• Nearly 60% of employers who post jobs online are unsatisfied with the response they generate. (1)

Given this scenario, why don't more recruiters swear off job boards completely? And if they're confirmed job board junkies, why don't they aggressively deploy tech-based solutions that can make fast work of online recruiting's needle-in-a-haystack challenge?

If you concluded that frustrated recruiters are abandoning online recruiting in favor of more traditional methods, such as search firms, you'd be wrong. The search industry is reeling from the longest and steepest business decline in 30 years, according to Hunt-Scanlon Advisors.

Even though employee referrals remain the top source of new hires, Forrester Research, Inc., estimates that online recruitment advertising will reach $1.8 billion in five years, more than doubling this year's expected spending. Most of this improvement comes at the expense of newspaper job classified ad revenue, which has plummeted by nearly 50% since 2000.

And nearly half of the dissatisfied recruiters referred to above say they'll expand their use of commercial recruiting websites over the next five years.

Yes, online recruiting seems to have survived a rational test of its long-term viability: if not a full-blown recession, then certainly the first significant business downturn since job boards first graced the Internet in the mid-'90s.

To the casual observer, recruiters seem to have voted with their budgets to remain loyal to job boards. Logic, therefore, would seem to dictate a change in how they handle the resume volume. Right?

As always, the name of the game is finding the right candidate for the right job in the fastest and least expensive way. With productivity a major goal of every HR manager, recruiters would appear to have little choice but to join their corporate brethren in employing technology in greater magnitude and in more innovative ways.

Many have, in the form of applicant tracking systems and other productivity applications. Yet when it comes to the critical first interaction between the employer and the applicant – i.e., job boards, corporate career sites and other applicant databases – remarkably few recruiters seem eager to use proven means of unclogging the bottleneck seemingly inherent at this essential stage of the recruiting process.

More to the point, amid all the signs that they should, most recruiters remain reluctant to adopt today's advanced tools for prescreening job applicants.

Dr. John Sullivan, a well-known thought leader in HR, puts it this way: "Everybody says they're tired of the status quo, but they're afraid to change." His "not too fictitious" ad reads: "Wanted: a radically new recruiting approach that costs very little but produces great results. However, it cannot require any change on my part, new ways of thinking, or anything that might make me uncomfortable." (2)

Sensible recruiting staffs are planning now for the anticipated hiring frenzy just around the corner, driven in part by an expected explosion in employee turnover. As they formulate these plans, they'd be wise to look closely at new ways of tackling the challenges they know already exist – and which can only intensify in this more demanding recruiting environment. The competitive standing of their companies may depend on it.

Kevin Wheeler, President and Founder of Global Learning Resources, Inc., is an authority on human capital acquisition and development. Wheeler's work has convinced him that recruiters remain lukewarm to applicant screening and assessment tools for several simple reasons:

• Confusion. Since few recruiters have an industrial psychology background, they may have little understanding of the tools and methods used for screening and assessment, some of them complex and expensive to use. The solution: increased emphasis on learning more.
• Concern that candidates will react negatively to the tools. To the contrary, Wheeler and others have found nearly universal endorsement for the process from both recruiters and job applicants.
• Fear of the legal aspects of screening and assessment. The courts have defined quite clearly what is legal and what is not. What reputable screening vendor wants to risk legal repercussions in today's litigious society? (3)

Others point to a lingering discomfort with technology in general and to too many fire drills in the daily lives of HR managers.

In general, according to Dr. Charles Handler, reluctance among staffing pro's to adopt tech-based screening and assessment tools may be explained by other factors as well. Handler is President and Founder of Rocket-Hire, a source of expert, objective information about the online screening and assessment marketplace.

Based on the findings of a recent Rocket-Hire study, he says, "Many staffing pro's don't yet have the decision making clout needed to enable the purchase of new technology. Often, too, the broader organization is skeptical of the ability of screening tools to produce cost-effective results." (4)

Plenty of evidence points to the fact that screening and assessment tools do work, Chandler adds, though some solutions deliver better results than others.

Moreover, he adds, "If recruiters invested a bit more time on the front end in order to help them lock into a good candidate pool, the value of screening and assessment tools would become more visible."

So where does all this leave already overworked and understaffed HR managers? Ready for positive change, you'd think.

John Sullivan views the future this way: "Hiring managers have forever learned the lesson that technology is an essential element for dramatic improvements in productivity…. They will never again have even the slightest interest in [hiring] individuals … who cannot adapt rapidly to change … and who are not well versed in the latest available technologies." (5)

What do you think? Are today's applicant screening tools up to the challenge? Do you use them? If not, why? Please let us know at newsletter@interviewexchange.com.

(1) Survey of U.K.-based recruiters by the Recruitment Confidence Index.

(2) Recruiting 2003 workshop, a Kennedy Information conference and expo. Contact Dr. John Sullivan at johns@sfsu.edu.

(3) ER Daily, Electronic Recruiting Exchange, www.erexchange.com, 4-30-03. Contact Kevin Wheeler at kwheeler@glresources.com.

(4) Contact Dr. Charles Handler at chandler@rocket-hire.com.

(5) ER Daily, Electronic Recruiting Exchange, www.erexchange.com, 11-17-03.