Forget about digging through CVs – iCV solution

Many of you have certainly dealt with the recruitment of new employees, and within it you have encountered the fact, that the process of selecting the Curriculum Vitae and comparing with your expectations is really difficult. In this article, we would like to show you how we managed this not very effective but necessary process in our company.

Stuck in pile of CVs

Due to the growth potential of our company, we needed to strengthen out internal team. The first choice was our web portal. After a while of clicking, I quickly got my bearings and had a decent filter of available CVs. Awesome. I immediately started sorting them. When I was at number thirty-five, my initial enthusiasm became to decline radically. Almost no resume met our requirements. The conditions we expected were simply different and I couldn’t think of anything else within the filter options. And I still had at least a hundred CVs ahead of me.

So I’ll try to look at it from another end. I would rather sacrifice time (and also some resources) to create an job advertisement and I will impatiently wait for the offers (CVs), that will come to my e-mail. During the creation itself, I thought about how to make the form as interesting as possible, what formulations to use, how to be original and distinguished from thousands of other ads. My goal was to reach potential candidate. I filled all the necessary fields with my answers (of course as original as possible), I filled in the characteristics, expectations and my ad was ready. I will put it there for two weeks, so that I can collect as many answers from potential applicants as possible and there is something to choose from. In the addition, I will share the ad in social media and wait for responses.

Digging through CVs continues

Within an hour and a half, I had first CV in the mail and the amount of them began to grow. I was satisfied, the CVs kept coming. I admit that I stopped reading them right away and I set aside every other morning to summarize, select and address the candidates whose CVs interested me . In total came more than 70 CVs and many of them, as in the first case, didn’t meet my expectations (I will not express my thoughts on what motivation have candidates, who send their CV to an ad in which they do not meet the basic expectations of a potential employer - this would be on a separate article). After two weeks on Friday morning, I prepared myself a huge cup of tea in order to summarize the current selection. It took me a while, but on Monday I had a summary of my interview recommendations ready. During Monday's discussion with the boss, we got to the CVs of the finally invited candidates once again. I will not describe the next part of the process, the important thing is that we found the candidate and mutually agreed to cooperate. We don't make selections for our company often, but I thought of what it would look like if we weren't successful in this case and we would have to go through the whole process again.

Selection through CVs – eww

With our professional deformation always optimizing something, we came up with the idea of how to improve the possible selection process in the future. How about inventing a change within the usual approach? My colleague and I have been thinking about electronic forms with database data collection and interpretation of this data using business intelligence (BI) tools for some time. Why not to use this principle to improve the process of selecting potential candidates working on the iForms platform. After a while, I had created a form in the structure of a professional resume. The key difference compared to the data I received from the web portal was that the data was immediately structured in the database. You could work with them as a database, sort them according to different priorities, make selections, filter, etc. My colleague and I took an endurance test to find out how our electronic form works. We flipped all the obtained CVs into it and simulated the entry of data by individual candidates. The form worked great. It allowed us to insert e.g. the candidate's photo, "scans" of the obtained certificates and attestations, own files in various formats. We obtained a very interesting database of data. However, the completion seemed too lengthy. From the point of view of the data we wanted to sort, filter, evaluate, there was too much information in general. So we decided to simplify the form to make filling it out faster. We have decided which data is key for us and we need to have it in the right form in a structured database. However, in order not to lose the overall overview of the applicant, at the end of the form we have added the option of inserting an attachment - a file with a professional CV, certificates, certificates, etc.

New era of digital CVs – iCV

The result was remarkable. After the final analysis, I stated that this database contained far better and more comprehensive information than the data that I was able to filter from the website. At the same time, the data were complete (all relevant data was marked as mandatory). I was able to start sorting and filtering them right away.

What this solution will bring to us:

Increasing the overall efficiency of the selection process, high time savings of the person, who is responsible for the selection process in the company.
Possibility to link the iCV directly to the company's website, or to condition the inclusion of the applicant in the database within the advertisement only on the basis of filling in the iCV.
The flexibility of the possible optional fields results in a quick modification and precise targeting to a specific area on which I want to focus in the selection.
Quick ability to filter, sort and select potential candidates.
The “burden” will be transferred to the applicant himself/herself – if you are interested in the job, it is necessary to fill in this form an attach (for example) your CV. By this, we are also filtering unrelevant applicants.

A few thoughts at the end. Once again, it has been confirmed to me that when the same task is solved, it does not necessarily mean that it is always the same. With the right approach, it is possible to invest far less work in a task, gain time to carry out other tasks, increase the percentage of suitable jobseekers and work more efficiently. After all, it is work that has to be done, not we.