How Long Does It Take to Screen Resumes?
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Someone from a smaller firm asks how long it takes to screen resumes because they think they are spending too much money for an external recruiter.
‘m Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter. I’m the head coach for JobSearch.Community. And the question for today is, how long does it take to screen resumes? And this is asked from the perspective of an employer who’s using a recruiter that they’re finding expensive to get good but not great candidates. As they write, for each position, we get three to five candidates who go to the hiring manager.
And they’re thinking of bringing the process in-house and using the tools like ZipRecruiter and Workable and want to think . . . and they’re recruiting for IT positions. How long is it going to take to narrow things down to get those same three to five options? Now, the real question I want to start off by pointing out is most people undervalue a recruiter in what they do because you’re seeing the result of their efforts. So, for example, you’re looking at the three to five and thinking to yourself, yeah, I can get three to five resumes if I use those tools.
What’s the problem? And the problem starts off with, okay, let’s look at who’s going to screen those resumes that come in and do the pre-interview with them. Who’s going to evaluate them? I know when I was doing recruiting, what I would receive is hundreds of pieces of garbage that were little more than spam that, you know, some systems will have a data dictionary that will allow you to evaluate and have the system screen but, you know, sometimes these systems miss things. So, if you’re okay with that, let’s move on.
And let’s assume that your system is delivering . . . I’ll just give myself as an example. Again, Monday morning, it’s typical for me to walk into 200 . . . well, it was typical for me to walk into 200 to 250 resumes and then have to start going through them. In the usual three to five seconds that normally is used, you do the math.
And if I operated like a machine and, you know, I was actually able to do this in five seconds with five seconds to open up the next one and to delete the previous one. You know, it’s six per minute, 250 resumes. It’s six into 240 is 40 minutes to go through it.
But I get interrupted. I get distracted. I’m not a machine.
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I’m a human being. It’s boring to read a little more than spam. And you have to at least look at it for a few seconds to figure out what are they saying they did before you delete it.
And as I said on an early podcast for Job Search Radio, I think it was actually the first show, typically, out of those 250, you know how many I’m going to wind up actually interviewing? The answer is two. Two out of 250. So, just working your own math here.
If you’re stuck in this position of getting 250 resumes for which two are going to be qualified, it’ll probably take about two hours of labor time. Now, I must tell you, there are days that go by where I’m not seeing two resumes that are worth my following up on. It’s awful, but it’s true.
And the result winds up being, in terms of finding those three to five people that you actually want to interview, it may take several days. And that’s before you start actually pre-interviewing people before deciding to forward them to the hiring manager. Now, that’s a dedicated effort.
And the probability is, in a firm like what’s being described here, you’re not going to have a dedicated resource doing it. It’s going to be an ancillary to their job. Because if you had a dedicated resource, you wouldn’t be asking the question.
You’d already know this person would be doing the pre-screening for you. You wouldn’t be using the external recruiter. So, my guess is, it’s a small firm.
It’s an add-on function for someone’s day. And it’s going to take more time than you think. If you’re okay with that, fine.
But that’s what you’re paying the external recruiter to do is to do that screening to get it down to the three to five. I would say easily, easily, it could take a week to a week and a half to get three to five, while this person is doing something else, as well. So, you know, I’ll just simply say, if that’s worth it to you, if that expenditure of time that may wind up being pointless, because the people that they identify may not fit either, go ahead, bring it in house, do it.
But if you’re not sure, I’d simply say, if you want to cut your costs, reduce the recruiter fee, take it down by two points. So, if you’re paying 25%, bring it to 23%. If you’re paying 20%, bring it to 18%.
Simply say, I want to continue giving you an exclusive, but we’re evaluating internal resources. And I want to consider you because you’ve been very helpful to us. And this might be a way we get around it.
Have a great day. JobSearch.Community. I can’t believe this spammer. Phone spam.
Phone spam. Have a great day.
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
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He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2900 episodes over 13+ years.
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