5 Costly Side Effects of a Slow Screening Process

“My favorite part of my job is reviewing hundreds of resumes every day,” said no recruiter ever. For recruiters and sourcers, prospect screening is equally as fundamental to the hiring process as it is tedious. What is it about reviewing resumes that frustrates even the most seasoned talent acquisition professional?  

It’s the volume! On average, corporate recruiters can expect to receive 250 applications per job req that they need to determine the 12 most qualified. The prospect’s skills are projected into the requirements of the role. Hard decisions are made. Artistry is employed. The field is downsized. The best prospects are presented to the hiring manager – all of which takes precious time. 

Someone popularized the idea that it only takes 7-seconds to review a prospect’s resume. If only that were true. The most efficient recruiters and talent sourcers still spend 1-3 minutes at a minimum reviewing a background. If a requisition receives 250 resumes, background reviews alone can add up to roughly 8 hours spent just evaluating a single applicant. 

Now consider a recruiter typically works on 30-40 roles and reading resumes is practically a full-time job. If a recruiter only has about 1.5 hours per week per requisition, it’s easy to understand why screening resumes is overwhelming. Not only is this prolonged process painful for recruiters, but it’s also costing you countless hours of time. 

So, what can you do to streamline this process for your team? Start by socializing the detrimental cost and impact of slow screening processes to set the stage for making the business case for modernizing TA platforms and transforming processes and practices. Among the most common detriments and impacts we hear about are these five:  

1. Recruiter inefficiency.

   Your recruiting team is focusing on the wrong things. Not by choice but by necessity caused by a lack of time. Instead of spending their time engaging with the best prospects, they’re sifting through hundreds of resumes by hand, manually marking candidates of interest. At times recruiting feels like you are in a game of “whack-a-mole,” filtering out the chaff, instead of a well-thought-out process to onboard the future talent of your organization. What’s needed is a way to immediately sift and search through applicants, surfacing the most qualified candidates immediately, saving time and speeding recruiter efficiency. 

2. Recruiter dissatisfaction.

   The turnover in the recruiting industry is high. A talent shortage has increased the demand for recruiting talent. Recruiters recruiting recruiters offer greener pastures daily. And it’s not just about the money. The tech stack, the team, and the requisition load are integral to a satisfying experience for recruiters. Talent teams need to understand present challenges facing recruiting, but better yet, they need to champion tools, technologies, and processes that create an exceptional employee experience for recruiters, helping them attract and retain recruiting talent.  

3. Candidate neglect.

   The stories of neglect litter review sites like Glassdoor, and Indeed. You hear things like, “I submitted my resume and never heard back.” You read about your failures on Twitter and LinkedIn. The lack of human interaction creates feedback that is hard to ignore; especially when other potential candidates read what your current candidates say about their experience. What’s needed is a candidate experience that stands out among markets and against competitors, and what’s needed is the right kind of talent platform capable of both delivering efficient candidate interactions while also freeing up recruiters’ collective time to create them. 

4. Extended time-to-hire.

   At the heart of most measurements of success or detriment are metrics, and perhaps the most precious to recruiters is their time-to-hire. When recruiters are forced to mire through hundreds upon hundreds of resumes, when we’re facing a revolving door of recruiters, when candidates aren’t receiving timely communications... all of these add up to incredibly longer times-to-hire. But when we can modernize recruiters’ tools and technologies, when we can introduce efficiencies that empower THEM to deliver exceptional candidate experiences, then we see metrics like time-to-hire come way down.  

5. Failure to remove bias from the evaluation process.

   The impact of bias has been well documented. When we rely on a manual, human-led process, we introduce risk for human bias to influence that process and its outcomes. Manually reviewing hundreds of resumes then, for every single open requisition, may introduce a substantial quantity of bias risks. But what if technology could be employed to minimize or even remove risks of bias from the review process as a whole? Remove bias from identifying the most qualified candidates and remove it from individual candidate review, too.  In the relationship-building business, a process that forces recruiters to spend more time on the resume instead of people is a drain on a recruiter’s time and your company’s ability to hire the best candidates. While these are common problems most recruiters have faced, there are solutions.  SeekOut's Applicant Review solution directly addresses these common challenges by empowering recruiters to easily, fairly, and efficiently review both large and small numbers of job applicants by matching skills and experience to job requirements. Applicant Review then stack-ranks applicants based on their match score so that recruiters can focus their efforts on the most qualified candidates first, all the while maintaining complete control of their applicant pipeline. Recruiters can even disposition applicants directly from SeekOut without needing to bounce back and forth to the ATS system. All resulting in hours of time saved, increased recruiter efficiency, reduced time-to-hire, and an overall improved candidate experience.