Resume harvesting is an important activity that allows recruiters to source the right talent for their organizations. Here are some of the key aspects that you need to be aware of.
What is resume harvesting?
It is a common consensus among recruiters, that the majority of their day and bulk of their efforts are spent on various job boards. Job boards are used by many staffing firms and HR departments to find talent to hire. Using the traditional manual approach, this process can be long and arduous consuming several hours per applicant, as recruiters need to go through several profiles and compare each aspect of the job requirement.
All this headache is a thing of the past now. Automated resume harvesting allows you to streamline the entire process and make the use of your job board subscriptions faster and more cost effective. Using rule-based searching software,bots, keywords you can easily sift through a large number of resumes and applications to narrow down the results. Let us know more about the features and benefits of resume harvesting.
Why use resume harvesting?
Resume harvesting is a rule-based search technique that is used to bring in high quality talent into your organization. It helps to identify and categorize applicants based on the fitment criteria before initiating the next steps involved in the recruitment process. With a plethora of organizations competing for the same limited talent pool, it is an effective way to tap into the vast online collection of candidate profiles and applicants before making your hiring decision.
Advantages of resume harvesting
Let us examine some of the key benefits of using resume harvesting.
Save Time and Effort
Modern resume harvesting uses aspects of Artificial Intelligence technology to automatically search job boards based on your recruitment criteria. You can schedule the search to occur during non-work hours, thereby saving you a significant amount of time and effort. In fact, when you use a top resume harvesting software like the one offered by Wisestep you can save up to 10 hrs / Recruiter / Week.
More Focused Candidate Search
By automating the tedious job of searching for profiles (and overall quality) you get more time to spend on evaluating the quality of the resumes harvested. Moreover, you also get the opportunity to build an actual human connection with the candidate and get to understand their different face, much better.
Develop In-House Resume Database
Another practical advantage of resume harvesting is that it allows you to build your own collection of resumes that have already been sorted based on your chosen criteria. This can be stored on the cloud for easy access anywhere and significantly reduces your dependency on job boards for sourcing talent.
Cost Effective
Digital resume harvesting allows you to use your job board subscriptions and paid credits more effectively. With one automated search, you can easily scan through multiple job sites based upon the parameters you require in the role you are hiring for. Moreover, by investing in the on-time setup fee of a cloud based resume harvesting software, you can save big in the long run while also reducing your costs related to manual maintenance errors.
Disadvantages of resume harvesting
Most recruiters consider resume harvesting to be a life saver, as it allows them to focus on other qualitative aspects of hiring. However, some may find the resume based hiring process not ideal. Here are a few possible reasons for this:
- Resumes are sorted entirely based on the criteria and keywords used as input. Hence, the sorting software may overlook other important aspects in the candidate’s profile.
- There are several resumes with half-truths and designed to beat the system by liberal use of keywords so as to catch the attention of the software.
- On the flip side, there may be potential candidates who may not have updated their resume in a while or do not realize the impact of the keywords being used for searching. You may lose out on such candidates as their resume is unlikely to get included in the search results.
- If you do not use a cloud based ATS then you may have additional costs of job portal subscriptions as well as some form of storage server hardware to maintain the collected database of resumes.
Best practices for successful resume harvesting
Modern Application Tracking Systems (ATS) have come a long way and include automated elements for almost all aspects of recruitment and employee management. Some of the best ATS platforms, like the one from Wisestep, include resume harvesting as an integrated module that can connect and work with a host of popular job boards.
One of the most beneficial ways of using this component is by creating rule based bots. You can enter multiple parameters and search criterias for various job roles across different hierarchical levels. You also have the flexibility to choose your search-run frequency.
To further optimize their working day, most recruiters choose to run these bots post work-hours. Thus, when they come to work the next day, all the search results are neatly organized into their inbox of shared drives and the next steps in the hiring process can commence.
Ideally, if you have an ATS in your organization then even the next steps like resume screening and interview scheduling can be seamlessly managed in a matter of a few clicks.
Summing up
Resume harvesting is an important aspect of the hiring process. However, it is tedious and time consuming. Automating it not only saves time and effort but also increases the chances of bringing in high quality and talented resources to take your organization forward. Using the right ATS platform can significantly boost hiring quality as it will allow the recruiters on the more human aspects of hiring while the harvesting bots take care of the more mundane aspects
