Whether you operate as a small-scale venture or an international company with multiple offices around the world, hiring and onboarding new talent can be challenging. HR managers and interviewers are often misunderstood in what they do in regards to processing and selecting viable resumes for available positions.
According to Small Biz Genius, average corporate job posts receive around 250 resumes, while 45% of employers said they can’t find candidates with proper skillsets. Making the selection process easier is a must in 2020, especially with social platforms such as LinkedIn serving as recruitment hubs without standardized data.
Because of that, resume parsing should be a noteworthy item on your agenda when it comes to evaluating and selecting the right talent. But what are the practical benefits of resume parsing as opposed to traditional, hands-on candidate processing? How do you parse resume data correctly in order to hire the right people and make your HR workflow more manageable?
Benefits of Resume Parsing
Speed & Efficacy of Data Entry
The first major benefit of parsing resumes with a dedicated tool is that you will process candidate data much faster and more efficiently. Depending on the industry you operate in, your candidates might include a variety of subsections and data points in their resumes without following a system.
This can make manual processing time-consuming and chip away at valuable working hours for your HR department. While you can delegate resume data entry to an intern or a less busy colleague, this is still less efficient than a parser would be. Instead, using a dedicated resume parser will allow you to speed up your data entry activities with the benefit of freeing up crucial time.
Lowered Margin for Error
No matter how experienced or focused on your work you may be, you can still make mistakes while parsing important resume data. This is where a resume parser built from the ground up with accurate data parsing can come in handy and mitigate your margin for error.
Coupled with its speed, a resume parser will transform the way you select candidates to facilitate the perfect employee experience and on-boarding from day one. This is especially true if you operate in an industry where candidates have to list programming languages, acronyms and numeric data which can be misspelled. Simply inserting submitted resumes into your parsing tool and double-checking for any inconsistency from time to time will do wonders for your work efficiency.
Benefit of Automation
An important element of parsing resumes via a dedicated platform lies in automation. More specifically, the processes of delegating time-consuming resume parsing activities to an AI algorithm. Doing so can bring about a multitude of benefits to your HR department, including the free time you will gain.
James Timothy, HR Specialist and Writer at Best Writing Advisor spoke recently: “A recruiter’s main concern is to match right candidates to the right positions. The paperwork and data processing that go along with it can hinder the recruiter’s ability to make informed judgments for his company. Thus, using specialized HR tools such as a resume parser is more than welcome as it can augment data writing and formatting for the interviewer.”
Consistency in Parsed Data
Using a resume parser will ensure that your candidate data is consistent no matter how many resumes you parse per day. Whether you insert a dozen or a hundred resumes into your parser each day, you can rest assured that it will consistently segment the data.
All you need to do is set up custom parameters and parsing format before you integrate a resume parser into your HR activities. Once you set up a data storage system which serves your purposes, parsing and analyzing additional candidate data will be a simple matter going forward.
End-Result Format Standardization
No matter what industry you operate in, chances are that your candidates will apply for open positions by submitting resumes in a variety of formats. These formats range from traditional PDFs to .doc and .txt files in some cases, making it difficult for HR to parse through data by hand.
However, by introducing a resume parsing platform which will alleviate those problems, you will be able to standardize your data formats moving forward. This will make it far easier to extrapolate relevant data with a press of a button once the selection process is underway. Likewise, it will ensure that your HR staff doesn’t have to use various software applications just to read candidate resumes.
Streamlined Candidate Matching
Finally, using a resume parsing platform is more than just about data entry. A professional resume parser will enable you to match candidates to their viable positions more efficiently and with higher accuracy.
In order to do that correctly, you should provide future candidates with detailed job posts which offer an extensive overview of their obligations and requirements. You can then set your resume parser to match candidate data with previously-set parameters and provide you with actionable results in a matter of moments. Once your candidate pool is filtered through, you will have a much better overview of viable and unviable candidates for any position.
How to Parse Resumes the Right Way
Now that we have an idea of how you can benefit from a resume parser in your hiring activities, let’s discuss how to use one. Contrary to popular belief, your recruitment process starts as soon as you decide that you need new talent in your company.
Make sure that you are clear on what kind of an expert you want to hire before you announce an opening. This will make it much easier for potential candidates to decide whether or not to apply. With that, let’s briefly go through the basic steps of utilizing a resume parser for ongoing recruitment activities.
- Outline your Job Position
What are the competencies your candidate should have? What about their professional background and formal education? Will you prioritize soft skills or hard skills in your candidate pool? It is pivotal that your job post is as detailed and thorough as possible in order to attract the right talent. Incomplete, vague and poorly written job posts will result in very few candidates or worse yet, incorrect talent coming your way. Post your job position on an accredited platform such as Taleo or Workday and give the posting some time to attract attention.
2. Gather Candidate Resumes
A good resume parser will allow you to synchronize your company’s inbox with the hiring platform you chose. This means that you can easily gather candidate resumes from a centralized repository. Make sure that there are no duplicate resumes present to allow for easier filtering and subsequent resume parsing.
3. Engage with a Resume Parser
Once you use the resume parser, you will experience the numerous benefits we have discussed previously in practice. Use your resume parser to extract relevant candidate data and to organize it into a structured format. Thanks to the resume parser, your HR can pay closer attention for potential errors, incomplete applications or inconsistencies in the candidate pool.
4. Select and Onboard Candidates
Once your parser has gone through the list of resumes, you can use the tool to make an informed decision on which candidates to hire. As an HR specialist, you can contribute to the hiring process immensely by applying critical thinking to the results parsed by the platform. While the AI algorithm will indeed do a good job on its own, you can make the final judgments yourself. Resumes which currently don’t fulfill your requirements can be saved for further analysis or additional selection.
In Summary
Duties of an HR specialist go far beyond reading endless resumes and trying to come up with a manual way of processing critical candidate data. The list of benefits you can gain from using a resume parser in the hiring process shouldn’t be overlooked.
A professional resume parser such as Skillate can help you even if you don’t have a dedicated HR expert in your company. Make sure to check out its list of features and see how you can benefit from using. In the age of high-speed data processing and short attention spans, using such a reliable hiring tool can be significant for your company’s continued development.
