For many recruiters, the following scenario is all too familiar.
They begin a resume search with a clear understanding of the position to be filled, complete a resume-search Web form with all the right keywords in all the right fields, and end up with too much information.
The results likely include most of what they were looking for, and more: a too-large collection of candidates, the bulk of which are not qualified for the open position. In the end, the recruiter will likely discover some real contenders in the search results, but only after sorting and screening hundreds of resumes. And they may be left with a nagging feeling that other qualified candidates in the resume database have been passed over for reasons unknown.
Until recently, this scenario represented the state of the art in resume search. But that’s about to change. Technologies that have been developed over the past several years intend to make search much more efficient, accurate and on target -- for both employers and job seekers.
Keyword Search: the Bane of Recruitment
The inefficiency of keyword-based resume research, a legacy technology that some career database companies have begun to replace, has multiple causes.
“The problems all start with resumes being so idiosyncratic,” says Bill Kutik, a technology columnist with Human Resource Executive magazine and co-chair of the HR Technology Conference. From the way dates are formatted to the vocabulary used to describe skill sets, variability has always made it difficult to automatically pull out the best matches for a given position.
Then there’s the special skill required to compose a more sophisticated keyword search, one that uses logical operators like and, or and not to improve results. “For recruiters, the difficulty is that you have to be pretty expert in Boolean searches,” says Kutik. “Without a well-composed search, your results may be ‘apple farmers’ rather than ‘Apple programmers.’”
For a search engine that’s examining a resume, it’s far from trivial to sort out these details. In addition, “other technology has scanned, parsed and extracted information from resumes, to determine what’s a previous job, what’s a skill, what’s education,” say Kutik. “For 20 years, this has been imperfect.”
Improved Efficiency with Conceptual Search Results
Recent advances in technology promise vast improvements in matching jobs to resumes. One key advancement: the ability to search on concepts instead of specific words in a particular resume or job posting.
“The best search is conceptual, based on synonym lists,” says Kutik. “A conceptual search will recognize a Java programmer even if his resume doesn’t use the word Java.”
Further, a conceptual search engine understands terms like J2EE, Spring Framework, Tomcat, Cactus and JDBC, and knows how to relate them to the overarching concept, ‘Java programming.’
The advantages of conceptual search go beyond a more intelligent approach to vocabulary.
Conceptual resume search engines are able to put a candidate’s background in context by quantifying how much relevant experience the candidate has, the depth of their skills, and the extent to which the candidate possesses required and nice-to-have experience and related credentials.
The Next Generation of Search
Monster is ramping up its efforts to improve resume search by incorporating intelligent search technology from Trovix into its next generation of products for both employers and job seekers.
“It’s really about finding quality candidates faster,” says Jeff Benrey, founder and CEO of Trovix, a Silicon-Valley based company that Monster acquired in 2008. “With Monster search powered by Trovix, candidates will get more credit for deeper knowledge, for years of experience, and for desirable skills that are relatively rare. The search engine will see all these things and bubble up to the top the best applicants in the pool.”
HR managers are likely to appreciate the increased efficiency of conceptual resume search technology, which will enable side-by-side comparisons of candidates. “Conceptual search does bring a very serious increase in productivity to the HR group,” says Benrey. “Recruiters can spend less time reading resumes and more time on the phone.”
Benrey believes that Monster’s new search technology is superior because it was developed with recruiters in mind. “There’s nobody who did it the way we did,” says Benrey. “We tried to emulate the way a person thinks when they look at resumes.”
This means, for example, that Trovix uses recruiters’ specifications of the relative importance of skills to create a holistic representation of the candidate’s relevance, rather than just tallying keyword matches between job posting and resume.
Trovix took great pains to reexamine the resume search process and, where necessary, rebuild it from the ground up. “Our ability to own every part of the resume search process, from A to Z, and understand everything and adapt and modify it, puts us at the forefront. This is a quantum jump in the quality of the results you see,” says Benrey.
Why Efficient Search Matters in 2009
Some might wonder what difference improved resume search will make in an economy where hiring has been down-sized and applicants are abundant.
“It makes a big difference to recruiters, because sophisticated search capabilities are much more accurate and efficient,” says Lisa Rowan, program director for HR, learning and talent strategies at industry analyst firm IDC.
In the current challenging business environment, with fewer recruiters sorting through ever larger resume databases, efficient and effective search may be more important than ever.