While small recruitment agencies often tend to bend towards manual resume screening methods, a slightly larger firm may employ an all-in-one ATS for the same process. In both cases, the probability that quality candidates go unnoticed are high. This blog explores the challenges of resume screening that most recruiters and hiring managers face. We also discuss a solution that we believe possibly can tackle every modern cv screening issue.
Recruiting is progressively changing with the drive moving from an employer to employee centric approach. It’s natural for recruiters to focus on strengthening candidate engagement and heightening their experience. Although this is extremely necessary, it’s also true that because the final list of qualified candidates for interviews are so ridiculously low that recruiters can only wish and pray that everything goes well. The hurdle here is the resume screening process.
Contrary to popular belief resumes are important indeed
The discussion around the relevancy of resumes to a job requisite has gained some pace in the recent time. Just as flat earthers, there are some who believe that resumes and CVs are a formal document unnecessary to the hiring process. The general argument is that it doesn’t show the full picture of a candidate's potential and makes for certain biases. Contrary to these beliefs, resumes are more than a piece of paper. A well crafted resume can provide valuable insights to an applicant's skills, experience and aptitude to successfully accomplish the job requirements. Emphasis on well crafted resumes. Here’s where a resume screener comes into force.
Maybe resumes are not the problem but how recruiters screen them could be the issue, after all.
Resume screening challenges overlooked by recruiters
Evaluation errors
Evaluating errors often occur, especially when it’s manual. With recruiters spending an upper limit of only 8 seconds to read a resume, a majority of their time goes in checking the candidates skills and maybe their recent experience. Based only on a selection of factors, mostly hard-skills, the recruiter decides if the candidate can move on to the next step or their resume goes in the bin. Instead of manuals, if a resume parser is used the difference in final outcome is almost identical. As most parsers are keyword centric, they often eliminate candidates who ideally should have found a place in the interview process.
Overflow of applicants
Quality candidates might be scarce but candidates, they are a ton and with every job application you can certainly expect an overflow of applications. From reading each application email from LinkedIn or Indeed to reviewing their resumes, the time wasted on checking unqualified resumes is a pain that every recruiter secretly experiences. It’s even more frustrating when from thousands of resumes only a handful really mean something. The fight to get the top candidate is squeezed to getting a candidate that barely suits the job role. Begging you to question, where are high quality candidates?
Skill detection
The next resume screening challenge is failing to detect skills. Yes, that’s right. While screening resumes online or manually, recruiters use blanket terms like “team work” to find relevant candidates for the job. However, this singled out parameter cannot define candidates' flexibility of working with different types of teams or their work ethic. Rather than a comprehensive view, this selective method makes resume screening a challenge.
Too fast to notice quality candidates
Some automated resume screening systems claim they can parse hundreds of resumes in minutes, that’s too fast to notice quality candidates. Resume screening is treated as an extra step in the hiring process and recruiters want to get done with it pronto. Rather, it’s the CV screening stage where you can unearth quality candidates. Screening demands more quality time than recruiters generally give.
A bit of bias is always in the mix
It’s unfortunate but true, resumes are a goldmine of candidate information and a bias can be triggered anytime. From long names to gaps in work experience, unfavourable interests and gender, a bias during resume screening is a common challenge that many recruiters unwillingly face.
One solution to all resume screening challenges
We discussed some of the most common resume screening challenges, now let’s look at a viable solution.
Skima AI offers a comprehensive recruiting solution with artificial intelligence resume screening and candidate matching. Here is how the AI recruiting platform slashes traditional resume screening challenges.
- With Skima you can automatically export all applicant information from LinkedIn to the platform. Once exported, Skima filters the applications according to the job requisite and ranks them from the closest to furthest, in order of their relevance to the job.
- You can also upload your existing candidate database on Skima to quickly get AI parsed and matched candidate rankings for the desired job role.
- Skima evaluates each candidate against thousands of data points, assessing their hard skills, experience, behavioural traits, proficiency and more. Trained on millions of candidate information, Skima removes the curtain of bias and ranks candidates objectively.
- As opposed to eliminating, Skima scores each applicant from high to low so you don't miss out on any candidate information and make your own decision. You can find all information about each candidate on your Skima dashboard.
Screening resumes the right way is extremely important to be able to discover top candidates. Traditional ways of screening have fundamental challenges that have been ignored for the lack of a better solution. No more. Skima AI resume screening and matching technology is the perfect solution to modern resume screening challenges.
