The biggest lesson learned when we launched the TalentSpring Beta is that we didn't make it clear to candidates why they would want to use our site, and what the benefit is to them. I can (and have) talked people through it and they get it, but the site itself doesn't convey the message well. It will, just not yet.
Hiring Process
The best way to position yourself for a great career is to think about the process from the employer's point of view. If you've been a hiring manager or a professional recruiter you have a advantage in the marketplace, you understand how the process works and how each piece fits in, and you can spend the effort that gives you the best chance.
If you haven't been in that position, think about it now. You're a hiring manager for a small growing company or team and you need to staff up to deliver your project. If you hire just anyone you'll spend more time recovering from bad hires and their work and disruption than making progress on the actual project. If you are unable to hire anyone you won't be able to meet deadlines nor respond to competitive pressures.
You need to get candidates for the positions, screen them, interview them, and successfully close the hire.
Referrals
The most successful way to get the kind of people you're looking for is referrals from people you've already hired. They already passed the interviews and are above your quality bar, and they'll have some sense of who they know that should as well. People who have worked with each other in the past know the kind of work environment they're getting into and are more likely to be interested. The referral goes both directions, you're referring your friend and saying that she's likely to be a fit, and you're referring your company to the friend and saying it is a place she'll likely to enjoy working at.
There's a saying about this method of candidate acquisition because it is so successful: It isn't what you know, it is who you know. It is a lot easier to do it this way than the more time consuming methods, so I think people are sometimes willing to lower their standards here in order to save a ton of time later on.
Sourcing Resumes
If that doesn't work out, the next step is to source resumes. This can be done by job opening ads, logging onto major resume boards, paying large fees, and getting access to random resumes, having a job section on the company web site, putting up a booth at a career fair, etc.
You're the hiring manager, remember. You spend a few hours (or days, or more) doing the above and now you have a pool of 500 resumes, a big stack on your desk. These are basically random, you have no idea how many are good enough to bring in for an interview, if any at all. So you have to look through them and make a pile for "interview".
It takes an average of one minute (once you're good at it) to scan a resume thoroughly enough to determine if the candidate is worth talking to. This is not enjoyable work, even professional recruiters have a very difficult time doing it for more than a couple hours, three tops. So you're looking at 120-180 of the resumes in your pool at most.
Cost to Interview
Furthermore, you can't interview everyone. A half hour phone screen to determine if they're worth taking time to interview in depth: that's time to get in touch with them, coordinate schedules to set up a time for the phone call, screen them, and then figure out if they're worth spending hours of employee time doing thorough interviews. Figure two to three hours total for each candidate you phone screen.
Depending on the industry and type of position you're interviewing for, whether they're local, and how much you're paying the employees who would interview them it could cost from hundreds to many thousands of dollars to bring them in. This is not a decision to be made lightly, and unfortunately even if they get that far often one of the two sides will decide there isn't a fit and there won't be a hire.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat... Always Repeat
The worst part of this whole thing is that you then have to repeat it for every job opening you have. It can take months and months to build up a team, especially where the quality bar is very high.
Candidate Questions
Here are the biggest questions you need answers to in order to make you job hunt or even overall career as successful as possible:
- Is my resume even in the pool for the jobs I'm interested in? If not, was it just random chance or is there information missing from my resume that would have gotten me into the pool?
- Did I make the cut for the phone interview, and if not why? Was it a good reason or did I not present myself well?
- Of the people that made the cut, am I one of the hiring manager's favorites or did I just barely make it in?
Currently the only feedback mechanisms for resume quality are giving it to friends and family and asking what they think, or professional resume services.
Why TalentSpring?
Our solution to this bottleneck in the hiring process is to provide recruiters and hiring managers with resumes that are ranked by the community consensus of their quality relative to peers. They're ranked in specific job categories so it is an apples-to-apples comparison.
This means that the entire sourcing of resumes portion of the process above goes from the least efficient part to the most, recruiters can zero in on the resumes that will fit their job opening well (for instance, "C++ Programmers with 0 - 2 years of experience who don't require an H1b Visa and are actively looking for a position") and get a selection of the top quality resumes.
As they go down the list they can stop at the point where the resumes fall below their quality bar knowing that the ones below that point are worse. They can then concentrate their efforts on the subset they want to talk to, and spend more time and effort on interviewing and recruiting the best available candidates instead of just trying to find them.
Answering The Questions
All of that is important to the candidate because more efficiency for recruiters means more hires, which means a better chance to get a job.
More critically, we provide answers to the questions above:
You can see where you rank in your industry, so you know what the perceived quality of your resume is. If it is lower than you expected, you can spend time improving its quality and see the results from those changes.
We provide everyone with resume feedback in terms of a Merit Score. Your resume is compared to others as part of the hiring process, however before TalentSpring this process was done by each recruiter/hiring manager and was totally opaque. Now you can see the results and take action based on it!
Summary
We're about making the resume sourcing part of the hiring process as efficient as possible. This benefits employers and employees greatly because today it is horribly broken and inefficient.
Recruiters we talk to get the value proposition, they are very excited about using our site because it promises to let them have better results with less time and effort.
So far most candidates have not understood why it is beneficial to them. That's our fault for not making the message clear and not communicating it. We're working very hard right now on making that front and center to our site's experience as well as other methods for getting the word out, but first I wanted to post it as it is in my head so I can get feedback and maybe get the message out to two or three more people.
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