Invest In Your Resume Rapid-Response
By Martha Frase-Blunt© IT Recruiter. August 2000.
When a candidate sends a resume, do you respond with an acknowledgment immediately? If not, you're missing an opportunity to connect with a candidate and bolster that all-important future relationship. But who has time for a personalized reply when resumes come pouring in via e-mail, dozens a day?
Executive recruiter Gary Kaplan of Gary Kaplan & Associates in Pasadena, Calif., believes that even in today's tight market, too many recruiters - particularly those on the corporate side - are functioning as though it's still 1990. "During the last recession, companies went through a period of receiving large volumes of unsolicited resumes when there were few positions available, and many abandoned the time-consuming effort of responding to every one."
Many have remained in that mindset, he lamented. "One of the chief complaints I hear from candidates is that when they respond to job postings, particularly on corporate Web sites and in open display advertising, their resume is going into a 'black hole,' so seldom do they receive responses." He noted that candidates tend to have more confidence that their resumes are getting through when they submit them to mass job posting sites like Monster.com or headhunter.net, and they receive instant acknowledgement.
Acknowledging resumes and contacts by potential candidates is important "not just out of human decency, but because it also makes good business sense," said Kaplan. "You never know when these people will end up in a position to buy your products or services, so we respond to everyone in a real-time basis."
Kaplan's approach is simple and informal. His firm responds to resumes with a letter, postcard or e-mail of acknowledgment, and the vast majority of resumes received are entered into the database. "We have a very skilled research manager who screens resumes, first checking whether they correspond with any current requirements. If there is any connection, even remotely, to an opening, they get routed to the appropriate consultant, who will contact them right away. Also, if we get a resume that corresponds with a field that we do a lot of work in - CIOs or high-level marketing people - we'll give them a call, too, and talk to them in the interest of cultivating a relationship as early as possible."
Kaplan recognizes that all recruiters get resumes "that make no sense" - for instance, from someone who wants to work exclusively in a remote location that the firm rarely services, or is in a field that recruiter doesn't serve - and in those cases, it's likely that the resume will find the ubiquitous black hole. "But that hole is much smaller for us," he noted. "I've talked to recruiters who tell me they almost uniformly throw out all the unsolicited paper that comes in over the transom. They say they are not structured in terms of manpower to deal with it. I walked into one search firm's office and saw hundreds of months-old resumes stacked up against the walls, uncoded. What purpose does that serve?"
Hand-off Approach
Tailoring a response to each resume may be prohibitive for most search firms and HR teams, but even a pro-forma acknowledgment is better than dead silence. "We try to communicate to our resume-senders that we will put them in our database, and that when something comes up, we will contact them. And we do exactly that," said Kaplan.
Many recruiters and HR staff who receive resumes primarily online have come to rely on e-mail autoresponders, also known as "mailbots," "infobots" and "e-mail-on-demand." These applications can be downloaded from the Internet at little or no cost, or recruiters can make use of autoresponse functions that are often integrated into larger applicant tracking systems.
Recruitsoft.com's hiring management system application provides an automated e-mail response to all candidates, "because we believe strongly that the candidate relationship and communication are critical to recruiting success," said Alice Snell, director of content services. "We know from anecdotal and various industry studies that one of the biggest candidate complaints is a lack of acknowledgment of their application by the company. In addition, candidates who apply for positions at companies whose career section is powered by recruitsoft.com also have the option of receiving e-mail in the future about jobs that match their profile. This is another important example of optimizing the candidate relationship."
Vicki Carver, director of client services for E-Cruiter.com, Inc., said her company has included "auto-acknowledgment" as part of its recruiting solutions software package. The response can be customized by job reference, or set up so that recruiters can look at the resume before firing off one of a number of specially tailored e-mails. "We allow our clients to use their own intervention if they prefer," Carver pointed out.
The autoresponder "is one of the first things our prospective clients ask us about our system," she said. "They're usually already doing some response, and they know there is a way to do it faster."
Speed is certainly a selling point for autoresponse. Faster acknowledgments will capture your candidate's attention at the very moment he or she is fully engaged in the hunt. In addition, E-Cruiter's solution "opens a two-way dialogue," Carver explained. "An applicant can actually respond to the response with more information. This instant feedback tells the recruiter something they didn't know already, and that message becomes part of the applicant's record." This back-and-forth can be a significant element of the screening process.
An autoresponse system can also provide closure to an applicant. Think of all those times during your own career history when, after sending off a resume, you waited vainly for that call from HR to schedule an interview. The weeks came and went until you had to conclude that the call wasn't going to come. And how did that color your image of the company? "You can use the same mechanism to contact your applicant base, letting them know that the position has been filled," suggested Carver. "Candidates are very electronically savvy, and they know an autoresponse when they see one. But the added courtesy of a follow-up e-mail on the status of the position, or the candidate's resume, can really score some points, and add validity to your organization." But Carver's point about the impersonal, reflexive nature of autoresponse is an important one. You must be careful not to lose the human touch, weighing its importance against the manpower effort required to be truly personal in your correspondence. "Because of all the writing I do in recruiting, I receive on average 150 e-mails a day," said David Perry, managing partner of HR consulting firm Perry Martel International in Ottawa. "We respond to each of them at the end of each day. Most people we can't help, and we refer them to others. Those we can, we send details on projects we currently have underway. We don't use a form letter or autoresponder because I can't stand the impersonal nature of them. If someone has gone to the difficulty of sending us their life story, I and everyone on our staff had better take the time to respond to them as people and not simply resources."
Responses That Work
Whether crafting an automated response or drafting a personal letter to a resume-sender, there are some rules for success:
- The content should both acknowledge receipt of the resume and contain information about what will happen next. You can also include any compliance statements, such as those related to affirmative action or EEOC.
- Don't make promises you can't keep. If you don't really intend to contact that person within 30 days for follow-up, don't state or imply it. If you will only contact those candidates whose skills match your immediate needs, say so. Try to be as specific as possible regarding your follow-up policy, while remaining general enough that your letter works for all or most candidates.
- Use the letter as an opportunity to market your organization. Any contact you make with potential candidates - from your newspaper ads to your follow-up letters - offers a chance to communicate compelling messages about your company. The content of your letter should be courteous, friendly, professional and reflective of your corporate culture. You may also want to add a link to your corporate Web site.
- Finally, your response may shed light on your organization's entire hiring environment. If job openings are fast and frequent, encourage applicants to check back regularly for fresh opportunities.
