With the job market in many sectors and locations across Australia being ‘flat’ and slow in movement at the moment, employers are often finding they are getting bombarded with applications for positions they advertise. This seems especially true for those administration, support and entry level roles. Whilst recruiting for these roles yourself without the assistance of a professional recruitment partner typically seems very achievable, the process of culling such a huge volume of applications can be daunting and time consuming, especially for the busy manager or small business owner.
These are my 5 top ways to cut down that resume cull time whilst ensuring it’s effective and successful:
- Know what you are looking for – understand what you want to read in a resume so you can focus on that, and skim past the rest. This may mean location in terms of their address, a specific qualification, some key experience in a similar role, or work experience in the same or a similar industry. If you understand the 3-5 key things you are looking for in a resume, you can more easily skip through the non-important stuff, cutting down your time per resume.
- Don’t read on – if you’ve eliminated the applicant in the first page because they don’t meet a critical criteria, stop reading – you are wasting precious time! You would be surprised how many people keep reading just ‘out of interest’ where there is really no point in doing so.
- Be Ruthless – Let’s face it, if you are looking to cut down your cull time, you’ve probably got plenty of applications to choose from – so you can afford to be ruthless. To make it simple, create yourself a ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘maybe’ folder. If they are a definite applicant you want to speak to further, move them straight to yes, if they don’t meet the key criteria move them straight to no, and if you’re undecided don’t sit there wasting precious time weighing up the pros and cons of your ‘middle of the range’ applicants – move them to the maybe folder and come back to them only when you’ve exhausted all the top applicants.
- Have clear head space – to be effective at culling resumes and applications quickly and effectively, you need to be able to concentrate and be undisturbed. So set some time aside, close the office door, switch the phones to voicemail and allow yourself time to focus on this task
- If in doubt – outsource or get help – like any of these tasks in your business, you don’t have to do it yourself. There are professional service providers in the marketplace who will do this quickly, effectively and professionally for you. Alternatively, this may be a task you can ask one of your other staff members or contractors to assist you with, if it’s appropriate and they have the right skills and knowledge of the business, the position and the recruitment process.
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