THEN SHOW UP AT THE DOOR, OR CALL.
Sheesh.
Computers never lie...
That’s not a bug, that’s a feature.
What a load of Horse Paste!
Not credible. If the software is constraining recruiting that is a policy decision of the HR leadership.
Went to Lowes recently and all the registers were self-serve and credit card only. I tracked down someone way in the back of the store and told them I wanted to pay cash so they had a ‘manager’ come and open a cash register. As I was paying I suggested they hire more people and she said they had been trying but, despite good starting pay, not many people are interested in working and of them, very few applicants pass the drug test.
A few months ago I applied for a job I was reasonably-well qualified for, and got a rejection e-mail literally two minutes after I hit “Submit” on the application.
Took me ten times as long to complete the application as it did for them to say “No”.
This has been the case for a long time. HR is an impediment. They just look for people who fit a cookie cutter description they are given for each job. They take what should be guidelines and turn them into hard and fast rules. Thus missing out on a lot of good candidates who don’t fit the exact traditional standard description they are given.
It took me a while to learn to play the game. Nobody tells you this in college or in business school. Read over job descriptions similar to what you want to get. Repeat those key phrases in the descriptions of your previous roles. Nobody can or does really check what you actually did in other jobs. Just make sure you are 100% accurate about degrees and certifications you claim to have and make sure the dates of employment in your previous roles is accurate. They can and do check that.
PS be sure to read up on the terms you put in your job descriptions so you can BS your way through an interview. Once you get your foot in the door and are actually in a job you want, you can figure out how to do it if you have even moderate intelligence. It’s not that difficult. Really.
At my company, they converted to all external and internal resume scans, only.
I never understood why any company would use an automated system to process applications for positions that are specialized enough to require a resume. When I was in a corporate managerial role I always wanted to get a paper resume and cover letter instead of electronic ones. That immediately narrowed the candidate pool down to those who were willing to pay for a stamp and take the time to mail something. Then, after I found the candidate I wanted for the position, I’d have that person post his/her resume on our stupid HR job site.
Back in the day working local bands would try to get out of doing the hard tedious work of replacing a band member by specifying experience so exactingly that they’d guarantee getting someone who had been floating around and failing for years. It was no surprise that successful pro bands sat and listened to every hopeful and wannabe until they hit paydirt.
Our local full service car wash (workers vacuum and wipe down your car after it goes thru the wash tunnel) has a big sign ‘self service only, we can’t find workers’. I doubt their ‘resume scanning software’ is rejecting resumes lol.
HR “professionals” showing that they are cream of the crop.
My advice to job seekers — and I’ve advised more than a few — is to bypass the automated systems entirely. Network. Use LinkedIn. Research the hiring managers and reach out directly, first by email, then by phone. Use your contacts to reach other contacts and work your way through the system. This is especially important for those missing checkbox items like college degrees (which actually are useless for most positions).
It’s not gaming the system. It’s working the system.
All that said, recruitment software systems should be banned and avoided by companies all together. They do not help firms hire the right people. They simply help firms fill in the blanks in the programs. All one needs to do is look at academia or our government to see that hiring by checkbox does not mean hiring qualified, capable employees.
“Desperate for workers”
BS
Desperate for slaves who can be tested for substances, fired at will, and paid so little they will never have a chance to own their own home or have a pension.
there is exactly zero shortage of people who will work jobs with security, respect, and decent pay.
Any place that is complaining that they can’t get workers *IS* the problem, and good riddance.
B*** S***. I uses to work on e-recruiting systems. They are extremely flexible. Maybe paying people more money to stay home than they can make working just possibly has something to do with it.
When I retired from the military a few years back, I wrote up a nice resume in blank font.
Then I inserted a footer with white font and typed key words over and over and uploaded it to the website for the company where I wanted to work.
The electronic system would “see” the white font on white background, but it wouldn’t print.
Got a call the next week and landed a job.
swaths of willing and available workers remain “not visible” to recruiters, who have become increasingly reliant on automated software that is inflexibly configured and filters out large numbers of viable candidates,
Here is my most recent experience with a small custom sheet metal manufacturing co. where I was until recently, the bookkeeper/office manager who mistakenly volunteered because of my many years of HR experience, to help them recruit and pre-screen applicants for their numerous job openings.
They were using Indeed to post job openings, but the person posting the jobs had no experience in doing so and posted the very same job numerous times with little information, even a simple job description, anything about the company, the hours or pay, anything about the company and wondered why he was getting few responses.
He was also running up many hundreds of dollars a month in fees with Indeed for multiple/duplicate posts and never looking at most of the applicants or not getting back to them until months later when most had already gotten a job or those who didn’t, didn’t have a job yet because they were unemployable. The owner finally had me shut down all those previous postings and start from scratch.
The first thing I did was to write up job descriptions for our openings, determine the skills required and the number years of experience required, our expectations, etc. I first drafted this up based on postings for similar jobs in our same industry and general location, esp. for jobs like welder/fabricators (did they need more experience in Tig or Mig welding) and for millwrights (what type of mechanical skills did we need) and for our machine shop (what sort of manual machining skills we were looking for).
I also made some recommendations on pay based on the local pay scales and the fact that we offered no benefits opposed to most of our competitors.
Bu it is hard to fill a job position when you tell the applicant on the initial phone interview that we do not offer any health insurance benefits, our STD plan only pays a max of $100 per week, only one week of vacation after one year service and 2 weeks after 10, and a 401k but with no employer match until after 5 years of service.
And I got push back that we shouldn’t offer more per hour than our competitors even after I pointed out that our competitors were offering more generous benefits.
And I got very little feedback from management and the hiring supervisors on these job descriptions BTW. I truthfully didn’t know the difference between different types of welding but spent many hours, even on my off and unpaid time, researching so I could better understand.
So, I did the best I could and tried to make our job postings seem competitive and attractive and got a lot of responses and when I pre-screened the applicants who seemed qualified, that I thought showed promise, I tried my best to talk up the positives.
Then after spending many hours looking over applicants and telephone screening them, when I tried to schedule them for an interview, the production manager only wanted to interview applicants at 10AM or 1PM and was completely inflexible on this. Yet he would come to me day after day and complain how he needed more workers.
We were desperately looking for a manual machinist for our machine shop who not only had the skills we were looking for in manual machining, a bit of a lost art, but also someone with managerial and supervisory experience and I found the who I thought was the perfect candidate who telephone interviewed well.
She was a female, yet highly qualified and experienced and I knew a bit about her because she had worked for over 25 years at a company where we both used to work, and I thought very highly of her.
But since she was currently working, she wasn’t available to interview until after 4PM or later and the plant manger told me he 1) didn’t want to say even an hour late past his 3:30 work day and 2) he didn’t want to interview her while he was alone because…well she might want to accuse him of sexual harassment or “something”.
So, I offered to stay late and sit in on the interview if he was uncomfortable being alone with a woman and after weeks of him ‘thinking” about he finally agreed but of course by then, she’d already found another job.
I also found a highly experienced Millwright, a position I was told we desperately needed to fill ASAP, who phone interviewed well, had a great resume and work experience and who really wanted the job but said he had to turn it down because of the lack of health insurance.
FWIW we already had a few employees who we paid a monthly grossed up bonus to offset their ACA insurance.
I went to the production manager to propose we pay him $27 per hour instead of the $25 we originally offered along with a $500 per month grossed up bonus to offset his health insurance costs.
He told me he wasn’t “authorized’ to make that decision” and of course neither was I. When it tried to talk to the owner of the company, my boss, he blew me off so the position, last I heard is still unfilled.
Some of you all want to lay blame at the feet of HR folks but this is the type of crap we HR folks have to deal with.