Vencel, a project manager at the nonprofit health care network, was half-right. Moving postings online generated a lot more résumésâ€"-300,000 a year for fewer than 10,000 job openings. But it didn't make the hiring process go any faster. In fact, so many resumes began flooding in by email and the network's Web site that they were simply dumped in a pile to await attention from affiliates' human resources departments. And there they sat, sometimes for weeks.
Not surprisingly, Vencel and other Sutter Health officials soon decided the network didn't simply need more resumes from IT and other job candidates; it needed better ones and a quicker, more efficient online process for sorting through them to find the best job candidates.
Sutter Health got exactly that last July when it signed on with Recruitsoft e-recruiting ASP (application service provider) that hosts Sutter Health's job site. Besides simply posting job openings and collecting résumés, Recruitsoft gives Sutter Health an automated way to evaluate, rank and match IT and other job candidates with specific openings. That's helped Sutter cut the recruiting process from weeks to days in most cases, Vencel said.
Sutter Health certainly isn't the only enterprise that found its initial foray into e-recruiting less than satisfying. The first generation of company-specific recruiting sites, ASP services and online talent marketplaces may have generated lots of résumés, but, said Maria Schafer, an analyst for Meta Group, they "so far are not living up to expectations" that they would allow employers to quickly target and hire the best candidates possible.
That, Schafer said, is because many haven't provided the filters and other tools needed to help employers home in on the best candidate for the jobâ€"-the C++ developer, for example, who's had exactly the right kind of experience on exactly the right kind of project.
