Résumés have long been a useful tool in the recruitment process, requiring a considerable amount of discernment as you sift through mounds of paper to find the most qualified applicant for the job.
Despite this tried and tested method, résumés should not be the only tool you should use to help you in your recruitment efforts. It is now essential to utilize alternative methods to boost your accuracy in nailing down those quality hires.
While a résumé is indeed important, it does not deliver all that is needed to make the right decision or even help whittle your pool down to the best candidates. Hence, the need for résumé alternatives to help headhunters and HR personnel from a recruitment agency in the Philippines do their jobs more efficiently.
Relying solely on an applicant’s résumé may be the reason you are getting low quality hires. It’s high time you become fully aware that your dependence on it can leave you blind in terms of looking for the best man for the job. Then again, it is still essential in the initial screening of applicants so that you can determine who will move on to the next stage of the hiring process.
To keep you up to speed on why a résumé shouldn’t be your only means of hiring people for a job, you must first determine the problems posed by it and the alternatives that you could turn to to be more effective in your recruitment process.
Application Form
Since résumés do not follow a specific format for all, applicants are free to write down anything they want to say about themselves. This leaves out a whole lot of information that could be crucial in making that important decision of which particular candidate to hire.
To address this inadequacy, an application form could help you by having aspiring candidates fill this out and provide essential information using a format that is based on what you are looking for in a candidate. This could streamline your recruitment process and help narrow down your pool of candidates.
LinkedIn Profile
Gone are the days when applicants had to physically walk into an office building to hand over their résumé just to let an employer know they are interested in gunning for an open job position.
Both the internet and social media have now been encouraging professionals to advertise their skills and make it easy for them to connect with employers through popular networking sites like LinkedIn. You can have access to a large pool of potential hires who have easily verifiable information on their LinkedIn profiles.
Apart from serving as their online résumé, this is the perfect channel to showcase both their skills and experience. They can also gain recommendations and endorsements from others, making it a powerful tool in forging professional connections and help boost their chances of getting hired by you.
Portfolio
Résumés are generally a summary of a candidate’s experiences and skills, making it quite insufficient when trying to find the right one for the job.
A great supplement is a portfolio, which is a portable representation of a candidate’s talents. This contains samples of works or activities that can help you make a more precise estimation of a candidate’s skills and talents, which is a huge deal in helping you in your recruitment efforts.
There are a number of professions that need a candidate’s portfolio to better help you as a recruiter gauge his or her abilities. This works well when looking for architects, creatives and developers who can showcase their past achievements through a collection of their works to paint a complete picture of their careers leading up to their current job application.
Simple Essay or Questionnaire
The insufficient nature of a résumé warrants supplementary questions or an essay to understand an applicant better. This will encourage you to think about questions tailored to find out vital information about the applicants and prompt them to write down their honest answers.
A simple essay or questionnaire can also help you take a peek into a candidate’s personality and through questions involving ethical situations and conflicts that need to be resolved. This can also determine his or her decision-making abilities in the face of adversity.
Technical Test
If a résumé isn’t enough to gauge applicants’ skills, there is one way to help you get right down to business. A technical test is a no-nonsense approach that could measure both their knowledge and skills if they are up to par with the job at hand.
There are many professions that need a candidate with a specific set of skills to perform the job, so a technical test is essential to find out if all applicants are capable.
Skills or Interests Assessment
Just like any supplementary method to further delve into an applicant’s skills and behavior, an assessment conducted during screening can prove to be invaluable.
Remember, apart from the hard skills, it is also crucial to gauge an applicant’s attitude if he or she can handle everything the job entails. This is where questions involving teamwork, communication, or leadership dilemmas and situations where they need to resolve conflicts come in. Having the proper attitude and the ability to make the right decisions are two characteristics critical in hiring well-rounded candidates who can not only perform, but also keep the job they signed up for.
Short Video Application
A video application is a great way to show that applicants think more out of the box than just relying on a piece of paper to deliver a striking first impression. This allows you to put a face and a voice to an applicant as the video plays. It is a good indicator of an individual’s passion while showing signs if their personality is fit for the job.
Video applications are ideal for account managers and ad agency executives who should be screened via how they deliver their pitch through the video they submitted for their application.
Shooting and editing a video application may be quite an inconvenience for many applicants, but providing a guideline and the tools needed can be of huge help and even encourage them to showcase their personality through a short video clip.
Overall, a résumé may still be important in a job application during the initial screening process. But since there is still a lot of vital information needed from an applicant to help you make an informed decision, it would be best to make use of all these alternatives if needed so you could hire the next best asset of your company.
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