Over the past two years, many companies pivoted their recruiting from substantially in-person to almost exclusively online, a clear example of the industry-spanning digital transformations brought by the pandemic. Early 2020’s hiring freezes and cutbacks have since been replaced by remarkable outflows and inflows of talent — elements of the “Great Resignation†— as new applicant resumes strain both HR teams and the tools they depend upon.
From the applicant’s standpoint, the hiring process should be straightforward: submit a professional resume, demonstrate strong qualifications for the position, and receive a prompt, hopefully, positive response. Instead, many applicants submit resumes, hear nothing for weeks, then receive generic rejection letters or perhaps no response at all.
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As HR professionals look to streamline and optimize their hiring process to ensure maximum high-quality applicants are considered for each position, they have turned to digital transformation technologies to find smart solutions that deliver success. Faced with too little time to personally review every applicant for every open position and far too many positions open at once, HR managers now use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to identify the top resumes. Although ATS can be extremely helpful and efficient, they must be improved to further boost the productivity of users, streamline the review process, and help ensure hundreds of potentially excellent candidates are not ignored.
At this point, one might wonder how an ATS distinguishes between great, okay, and bad resumes, and the answer may be surprising. There are over 20 different ATS optionsOpens a new window in the marketplace, each relying on software to import resumes and scan for keywords. Many automated systems struggle to properly import and scan resumes in popular formats, such as Microsoft Office and Adobe PDF. Consequently, a candidate’s success or failure has at least as much to do with the resume’s formatting as its content. Resumes that are difficult to analyze require hiring professionals to review them manually. As a result, some will get skipped, given not every resume can be manually reviewed, and the number that can is entirely dependent on the backlog of the screener.
And when the screener does manually review the resume, the ATS may do a poor job displaying it. For example, the screener may incorrectly assume that a sloppy-looking resume is due to applicant carelessness rather than flaws in an ATS document viewer. That’s a few more applicants eliminated from consideration.
The dedicated hiring screener will dig deeper and attempt to open the resume by downloading and opening it with another tool, such as Microsoft Office. With the best of intentions, that hiring manager may have inadvertently exposed the entire company to a cyberattack or put an applicant’s personal information at risk of being leaked.
Intentional or not, technical issues with software tools are impacting the fairness of hiring practices and exposing the hiring company to personally identifiable information (PII) leakage and cyberattacks. Overwhelmed HR teams are feeling compelled to accept “good enough†solutions that are not, in fact, good enough.
A Better Solution
The correct solution isn’t to exponentially multiply the numbers of HR personnel or hours spent manually reviewing resumes to meet the flood of applicants; instead, companies need to fix the tool and automation that are causing problems. This means updating the ATS with a modern office document viewer that supports the candidates’ reasonable format preferences — Word and PDF for resumes, PowerPoint for dissertation summaries and portfolios — and supports internal documentation added to a candidate’s file, including Excel documents that include salary and benefits information. In addition to supporting those formats, the viewer needs to parse and render content accurately. If the ATS has a document viewer but doesn’t do a good job of displaying or ingesting content, it needs to be replaced with a better solution.
If the ATS does not include a document viewer or includes a viewer that doesn’t display content correctly, the user will download the candidate’s documents and view them outside the tool. But modern privacy and business security requirements must be considered. Given recent data protection laws, businesses can no longer afford to ignore the privacy implications of enabling hundreds of documents containing individual personal data to be downloaded to multiple users’ local storage for every job posting. However, an ATS that clumsily handles resumes may encourage just that kind of behavior. Once a document is out of the ATS, any personally identifiable information is at risk of being shared with unauthorized people inside or outside the hiring organization.
And there is a hidden, even more, risky hazard. Ransomware and trojans have become very real, multi-million-dollar threats to businesses over the last two years. Since Office documents are well-known channels for introducing malware into organizations, an ATS that encourages downloading and opening Office files could trigger traps hidden inside resumes submitted by cybercriminals posing as candidates. Worse yet, create local copies of bugged resumes on multiple computers.
A smart solution must be able to properly display Office documents and accurately export Office content to the ATS for bulk processing — in both cases, securely. ATS should hold each submitted document in a lockbox, so the ATS can scan and process the documents and authorized users can view documents as they were originally submitted without creating local copies or enabling malware to spread. Eliminating the need to download and manually open documents eliminates the risk that malware will spread or personally identifiable information will be exposed.
Integration into the ATS is important. By keeping the viewing experience inside the ATS, all personally identifiable information remains safe and secure and eliminates the possibility of spreading malware, all while saving users time by not requiring downloading to open each document separately. A third-party solution such as DirectOfficeOpens a new window , which integrates fully with ATS offerings from multiple vendors, and enables high-fidelity ingestion of Office and PDF content for viewing and scanning, is a better choice.
Thinking Ahead to What’s Next
A truly fair candidate screening system shouldn’t reject or improperly parse or display resumes submitted in common formats, and fixing the document viewing/importing tool can address that. The next challenge for ATS developers includes improving the content scanning process for using techniques that go beyond keyword scans and hunt for broader indicia of an excellent candidacy, including soft skills. While finding “soft skills†isn’t as easy as searching for words that match hiring requirements, in the end, those skills may be the key difference between technically qualified and superlative candidates.
Artificial intelligence may eventually be able to help with this process by applying training from past resumes to usefully identify patterns in new candidates. However, AI isn’t yet capable of taking on this task, leaving HR managers to review documents manually.
Today, the most practical solution for HR managers is streamlining the review process by ensuring the ATS can properly handle documents on its own and ultimately eliminating the need for every resume to be individually downloaded and opened with Microsoft Office. Cutting the friction required in this manner can double the number of manually screened candidates without increasing the time or number of HR personnel required to do so. Moving from 10% to 20% manual screening isn’t ideal, but it’s an improvement.
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Until and unless ATS document screening tools improve, job applicants hoping to make the 10% cut have several alternatives.
- Pay close attention to the online submission tool’s permitted formats, and submit all your documents in those formats.
- Avoid unique fonts and flourishes such as fancy bullets, graphics, or special layouts. Instead, opt for the simplest format possible to avoid scanning issues.
- Use keywords that match the ones in the job posting rather than seeking creative alternatives.
In an ideal world, the recruitment process would be smarter and more efficient than it is today, providing a fairer process to candidates and an easier one for recruiters. While advancements still need to be made, automation and document processing tools are continuing to innovate and take the right steps toward improvements. In the end, it’s now up to companies to adopt modern tools that will open doors to the best possible candidates, not just the ones with the most basic resumes.