Working committees have failed technology recruiters and job seekers

Recruiters are having difficulty finding qualified applicants to fill open positions.

This scenario seems to counter the situation on the street where qualified employees seem to wander the streets in search of a position open, willing to accept them. But the volume of available talent has made a Sisyphean tasks close to the qualified recruiters to separate from the unconditional. Human resources departments and recruiters are drowning in resumes, writes Trevor Smith recruiter on recruiting blog.

Who among us hasn't posted a new opening on a job board or other vehicle just to get to work the next morning with an Inbox full of hundreds (literally) of resumes?

In reply to "Labor Market Barometer report," published last month by TalentDriveIn, 45 percent of recruiters at Fortune-1.000 said "efficiently filter through resumes" is the biggest challenge of their profession. Find qualified candidates is now like finding a needle in a stack of needles are slightly different.

This comes as a company under investigation, are preparing to hire again and fill open positions en masse for the first time in two years said:

76% of companies reported budgets of talent-acquisition would increase during the first three months of the year, up from just 44 percent during the same period last year; 42% of companies are concerned about the struggle of turnover, which would further increase the pressure to fill job openings.

How did we arrive at a place where qualified talent is available in abundance but hard to find? Recruiters are being crushed between two technology trends that have let them down:

1. Job boards, many more than any other aggregators, have made it easy for candidates (skilled and unskilled alike) to find open positions and auto-submit buttons have made it easy for them to send their curriculum vitae. Many more job seekers are finding open positions and too many unqualified resumes are making it through the door.

Add into the mix, the huge volume of sent seekers looking for work during the recession and then made a desperate but unprecedented lengths of unemployment and you have too many resumes floods recruiters desks.

Some recruiters despise working committees and auto-submit features so many that they strive to maintain their research under wraps while using old-fashioned methods to source candidates. Ron Holifield, CEO of strategic resources Government, Keller, Texas, is a recruiter, he told TheLadders.

Automated display of these applications as a silver bullet for the hard work of building relationships based on trust short-circuit lacking, because there are no silver bullets that do so. Organizations that require applicants to use the module will attract lower-level employees, but many senior candidates are just going to skip the possibility ...

2. technology to filter candidates has not kept pace with the demands being placed on recruiters.

Most employers and recruiters of Agency (62%, according to the report TalentDriveIn) are based on a search engine resume standalone or resume search application is embedded in an applicant tracking system (ATS) to collect, sort and filter incoming resumes. The ATS is supposed to be the first stage of review of resume, using keywords and contextual search to omit unqualified candidates and produce only qualified candidates that can be monitored for quality as pedigree and experience.

In theory, the ATS should protect the recruiter by the pain of a tidal wave of unqualified candidates. But do a poor job ATSes, say most recruiters, including Glen Cathey, recruiter and author of the blog Blackbelt Series Boolean.

I am well aware that ATS serve many critical functions, in addition to the search of candidates they contained, but let's pull punches here-you can't hire someone, or begin to automate the management of relationships with candidates with someone who didn't find in the first place. And just because a candidate is buried somewhere in your database, this does not mean you've actually found them (or you can find them when you want or need to).

And in a cruel twist, the recession has made significantly more selective hiring managers. Recruiters call it purple squirrel syndrome. In the past was enough to find a purple squirrel to fill an opening for a purple squirrel, but because the recession has made so many squirrels purple, assuming available now ask managers ... purple with a squirrel-size 9 shoes ... w/shoelaces ... white and the seven years of experience with shoes ... size-9 and 4 years of experience using white shoelaces ... in emerging markets.

The ATS is intuitive enough for modern select applicants with experience are purple squirrels and wearing shoes size-9 and Lasso white and have a connection to emerging markets, but the specific nuances of experience are not usually evident without a manual review by recruiter of dozens, hundreds of résumés. Sometimes requires a phone call. Back to square one.

All this means recruiters are drowning in resumes that are preparing to ramp up to meet the growing demand to fill open positions. For job seekers, means that there will be probably more open opportunities to find a job or change jobs in 2011, but their needle shiny shall project into a stack of needles.
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