Candidate vs. Recruiter: Whose Experience is More Important?

If you’re currently searching for a new job, I have tremendous sympathy for you. Unemployment is high, the job market is full of overqualified candidates, and unfortunately the candidate application process isn’t made to suit you.

If you haven’t looked for a job in the last 5 years, let me update you on the 2012 employment application process. The experience has evolved, and not in a positive way.  Over a decade ago, candidates still looked through the Help Wanted ads in the newspaper and  ”pounded the pavement” passing out resumes to every manager who would shake hands with them. Many people still snail-mailed their resumes to potential employers.  That’s right, kids, people paid for postage and fancy resume paper to look for a job during the dark ages. When Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com appeared on the scene, candidates rejoiced.  A job seeker could fire off hundreds of resumes a day with the “Apply Now” button (whether they were qualified or not) all while sitting on the couch, munching on Cheetos, and lounging in pajama pants.

Recruiters, on the other hand, did not necessarily rejoice. Suddenly they were inundated with hundreds of resumes for a single job posting. As a former recruiter myself, it was not uncommon to post a job opening for a Director of Sales and receive 2 dozen resumes from “pizza delivery specialists.” Something had to be done. Recruiters were spending tons of time wading through unqualified applicants and not meeting/interviewing true prospects.  

Around the same time, companies started heavily investing in Applicant Tracking Systems.  These programs helped weed through the unqualified candidates based on a set of criteria or keywords and give recruiters a chance to have more face time with interviewees.  Additionally, they helped recruiters track the candidates as they moved through the selection process and kept valuable records in case of a lawsuit.  Super! Applicants can still apply online, and recruiters have a computerized helper to target their efforts. Problem solved!

Not quite. Now when you click the “Apply Now” button on Monster or CareerBuilder, you’re taken to a company’s website and asked to fill in every detail of your employment history in their customized program.  Remember that resume that you worked so hard to format perfectly?  Well forget about it, because even if you’re allowed to upload your resume into the system, you’ll still have to manually type in your name, address, contact info, references, employers, job descriptions, dates of employment, education, certifications, blood type, organ donor status, favorite color, and food allergies (I’m almost kidding here).

My husband is currently searching for a new job, and over the past week I’ve timed how long it takes to complete each application.  On average, it takes 22 minutes per job and that’s if there is no selection assessment included in the process.  For one electronic retailer, there were 42 pages of questions, and several pages asked the same questions over and over again.  Imagine how it feels to do your taxes or apply for a mortgage loan.  Now multiply that by 5 or 6 times a day.  That’s how a job applicant feels.

To say the least, the candidate experience has suffered.

Now, seeing as how I’ve worked in the selection assessment industry for 8 years, I am obviously a strong advocate for using scientific assessments in the hiring process.  However, the right assessment should be used at the right place and the right time.  Some companies are trying to weed out candidates by including a selection assessment in the initial application process.  While that may cut down on the number of resumes to read and the amount of time a candidate has to spend in the recruiter’s office, there are a few problems with that approach.

First, without proctoring the assessment, you have no way of guaranteeing that the person answering the questions is the actual candidate you’re hiring.  Why assess a candidate’s skills if you aren’t sure who answered the questions?  My husband has completed at least 20 assessments during his job application process, and I could have easily taken any one of those assessments for him.  My assessment score wouldn’t help him once he’s on the job, but at that point the company has already wasted time, energy, and money bringing him on-board and training him.  Using a selection assessment without proctoring is risky at best.

Next, candidates often take the same popular assessments over and over when they apply at multiple companies. Recently, a colleague of mine mentioned that he had taken the same “sales ability” questionnaire 3 times now for 3 different companies.  He joked that it would be interesting to see if he even answered the same across the 3 administrations.  He also planned to take screen shots the next time he had to fill out that assessment so he wouldn’t have to read the questions in the future and could just fill in the same answer pattern.  There’s a problem here.

Finally, to accurately assess a candidate, you want them to be fresh, clear-minded, and free of distractions. How often is your household free of distractions?  How fresh and clear-minded do you think your candidate is if he/she has been filling out job applications/assessments all day long?  Certainly, I believe that it is the candidate’s responsibility to manage his/her time, energy level, and focus, but let’s be realistic.  Life happens.  When my husband was filling out applications, I was sitting next to him and the dogs were begging for his attention.  Some days he spent 4 to 6 hours just applying for jobs.  The last thing I want one of my candidates to do is take the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (which requires serious concentration and mental clarity) after a long day of filling out mind-numbing applications. We all want the best candidates for our open positions, and our candidates should have the best chance possible to show off their skills.

HR and Recruiter friends, we can do better!

We need to do some creative thinking and problem solving to strike a balance between automating the paperwork side of recruiting while keeping the process human for our candidates.  We can take advantage of valid, scientific assessments that measure skills and abilities without compromising the integrity of the assessment or exhausting candidates with the length of the application process.  We have to stop looking at the candidate application process as an “either/or” experience (i.e. Either the recruiter is inconvenienced by paperwork or the candidate is inconvenienced by redundant questions.)

Let’s look for the win/win.

How can we improve the process for the recruiter and the candidate?