It’s Friday afternoon, and you just posted a position with your applicant tracking system (ATS). The position has been placed on your website, job boards and the other usual sources. When you come to work on Monday, you realize that you have had over 200 candidates apply for the position.
Sound familiar? Well it doesn’t necessary need to be a Friday, but many companies experience this type of high candidate volume for certain positions. Even with an applicant tracking system, this could be a quite the chore to review all the information and resumes. This is where candidate and position matching features can help save the day…or at least some very busy work.
The candidate and position matching feature available in certain ATSs serve users “pre-qualified” candidates to help ease the burden of reading resumes one-by-one. The ATS can identify either keywords or the skill sets required for the position then run a search against a resume as it is submitted. If there is a match, the ATS can send a notification such as an email to the recruiter/HR professional.
For this weeks tip, try testing the accuracy of your ATS’s matching system. Apply with a resume that you created as a “perfect match” and see how it ranks or if the ATS identified it as a match. Then try working your way down to the George Costanza resume. Be sure to generate a bogus position so you don’t skew performance in your reports.
One Comment on “Tip of the Week – Test Candidate Matching”
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Posted on 20. November 2008 at 08:20
I was always paranoid and didn’t rely on a program to “review” my resumes (I wanted to make sure that I didn’t miss a good candidate who wrote a poor resume - many engineers fell in that category). I would go through those 200 resumes in an hour on Sunday afternoon and have my top candidates picked out for Monday at 8am. Regardless, I am sure that your tip is better, easier and more efficient than my method.