What Are the Challenges of Paper-Based Recruiting?

Businesses receive dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of resumes for each job posting.
Like many HR professionals, you may struggle to navigate the hiring process and find the best candidates in such large applicant pools.

For many traditional HR organizations, paper-based procedures make the process of finding and hiring the right employees even more difficult. Here weve identified five of the biggest challenges of paper-based recruiting.

1. Applicant Tracking with Paper Clips and Gum

The traditional hiring and recruiting process can be lengthy and unorganized. For many HR departments, this is due to having to collect paper applications, pass applications to and from different departments and keep track of applicants using spreadsheets and outdated filing systems.

2. Lack of Efficient Communication

Companies receive, on average, 250 applications for a single job opening. Applicants expect to receive timely updates about where they stand in the hiring process, but emailing or calling every applicant isnt always possible. This often results in more follow-up calls and emails from applicants wondering about the status of their applications.

3. Costly Job Posting Tactics

Many HR departments are posting job openings as newspaper ads or on Internet job boards. These traditional outlets are expensive to use week after week. Additionally, posting to each job board individually and updating it frequently take extra time to keep your postings fresh, relevant and enticing to job seekers. And, at the end of the day, job boards just leave you with an inbox full of hundreds of resumes to print out and review as part of the manual, paper-based hiring process.

4. Piles of Paper Documents

Federal regulations require employers to retain applications and related documents for at least one year. With paper-based recruiting process, HR has to deal with piles of paper resumes, applications and legal documents that risk being mishandled if not stored properly. Plus, to top off those giant stacks of paper, companies have to pay for means to store all of the documentation required for every applicants for every job posting.

5. Applicant White Noise

The process of identifying the most qualified applicants from a stack of resumes is time consuming and ineffective. HR receives resume after resume for every job posting, and they have to manually review each one to find the right applicants. The process makes it difficult to identify the qualified applicants from the unqualified, so the best applicants often get lost in the shuffle of resumes.

Without a systematic and uniform procedure to track applicants and candidates across your company, your HR department becomes even more entwined around the challenges of your paper-based recruiting process.

Are you ready to overcome these hiring challenges? Contact Hyrell to learn how you can automate the hiring process with a simple, efficient solution.

photo credit: Adam Foster | Codefor via photopin cc