How Hiring Managers Can Use Data to Fight Resume Overwhelm

Sujee Saparamadu, CEO at OrangeHRM, was a recent guest on the TechnologyAdviceExpert Interview Series. The series, which is hosted by TechnologyAdvice’s Josh Bland, explores a variety of business and technology landscapes through conversations with industry leaders. In  this episode OHRMCon 2015.we discuss everything from recruitment to mobile, big data, and  Listen To Podcast Below are a few highlights from our conversation:

TA: How does your HR software translate internationally? Do you see different trends in different parts of the world? Or is this mobile, data-driven trend a thing of the industry as a whole?

Sujee: Mainly, what I have seen, is people are using more mobile devices in Asia or even towards the European side, mainly because of the infrastructure, These areas, they don’t have huge infrastructure, fiber optics, and things like that. They mainly use mobile devices to do their day-to-day work. And that’s why more things are coming from Asia and Europe than from the US markets for us.

TA: What are some challenges that you’re seeing right now in HR industry?

Sujee: One thing is HR managers, they would like to see summarized data. Recruitment is one of the main things that’s going to happen. When you put a vacancy out there, hiring managers get thousands of resumes. They say, “Sujee, I just don’t have time to go through all these resumes. Is there a way you can summarize? Show me the most important people that I can go ahead and shortlist.” That is because of time. So that is an area a lot of vendors are looking into: how do you give this type of summarized data to hiring managers?

TA: What is the solution there? Is it just building an application that can better view the data? Or is it building an application that HR managers can understand better? How do you get around that challenge?

Sujee: We have set up an application with best match criterias. Even if you have thousands of resumes, the hiring manager should be able to say, “Okay. These are the five items or ten items I really want to see in this resume.” And then you have different algorithms or searches that can go through, and out of the thousand, it will say, “Here are the top 20 you will be able to go through.”

TechnologyAdvice: How important are mobile phones to the workplace?

Sujee: If you take the New York Subway or if you go to London, the Tube, or you are in Singapore, the Metro, then you will see 80 to 90 percent of people working on mobile devices in transit. They want to use the time they’re spending commuting or going from one client to the other to go ahead and do their day-to-day work. That’s why mobile devices are very important. People are not just going to be sitting at their desks and doing things. If you can take that data and then compare that data with your current and past employees, you’ll be able to see a pattern. With that pattern, you’ll be able to say, “Hey, you know what? This person that we have hired, who had IQ test of maybe about 80 or 90 and did well on the writing test, now where are those candidates in our organization?” Sometimes we can say, “Oh, you know what? These guys have done so well, now they are managers or they have climbed the corporate ladder. It’s this kind of data that’s in your systems that should be summarized and sent to the hiring managers. Provided by Josh Bland at Technology Advice.