How to Recruit and Screen Resumes
Recruiting is a Team Effort!
Human Resource Departments typically use multiple approaches to attract applicants. The most common approaches include posting the openings on web-based job boards such as Indeed, or having job fairs and open houses, offering referral bonuses, contracting recruiters and/or networking through LinkedIn. All can be effective but in tough labor markets, more is needed.
There are actions that Supervisors can do to help fill open positions in the company. This includes discussing open positions in team meetings to make sure everyone is aware of what positions are available within the company. Then employees can decide if they are interested or maybe they know someone externally that may be a good fit for an open position. Or maybe the Supervisor knows of a potential candidate outside of work.
Why Get Involved with Hiring?
Supervisors should be involved with the hiring process for four main reasons: First, head count in-and-of-itself is important to manufacturing success. Labor drives output. Assuming there is enough volume, adding labor hours will increase output. Increasing output will improve factory revenue and staffing can improve on-time-delivery (if labor is causing a capacity constraint). Second, the quality of your employees will drive your factory results in the areas of safety, quality, service and efficiency. You need good employees to get good results. Third, being well-versed on all aspects of the hiring processes will be useful for you throughout your manufacturing career. The need to hire is endless and as you advance in your career, your skills and knowledge of the hiring process will be paramount to success. Lastly, being involved with the hiring process provides you with the opportunity to partner with your Human Resources Department and that’s an important relationship to maintain.
Be bias-free! You’re looking for the most qualified candidates, period! There’s no reason to screen a resume or CV based on any criteria other than pure job qualifications. Your company deserves to hire the best candidate available. Sometimes though, unfortunately, biases come into play, and these can be conscious or unconscious biases. When you’re looking at a resume you cannot take into consideration anything but the applicants’ qualifications in the form of work experience and education.
Something like an address can create a social-economic bias. A first or last name can create an ethnic bias and the years of experience, or a graduation date can create an age bias. Even though this information is typically presented on a resume, this information cannot be used to influence the screening process. The company potentially loses a good candidate, and the candidate loses a good job and unfairly so.
How do you screen resumes? Screening resumes isn’t the end of the process, it’s just the beginning. If you’re on the fence about an applicant, put it in a separate folder. You may decide to come back to it later. Otherwise, there’s no harm in a phone screen. Sometimes a good resume leads to a bad candidate and vice-versa. Don’t be afraid to follow a hunch. Use these criteria to make the best choices for a phone screen: Relevant Experience, Relevant Education, Transferable Skills, and Length of Service at each employer. Note that length of service is tricky. If someone had a few long stints and a few short ones, that’s typically acceptable. If someone is new to the job market, you can’t expect to see long-term service in their job history. But if someone has 5-years of total employment with eight different employers – that’s a red flag.
Remember H.I.R.E. - (H) Hire Fast, (I) be Inclusive, (R) Reach your Target Audience, (E) give your candidates a great Experience!
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