As of this morning Google had 16,700 different matches on the phrase "recipes for strawberry shortcake". Don’t tie the words together and the matches go up to over a million. Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy wizard, can find questions if you have the answer. So using a computer to find the perfect candidate for your job should be easy…Right?
Absolutely! …and…you are willing to spend gazillions on a super-computer, hire the cream of computer geekhood and wait several years to develop the algorithm to pull your candidate out of LinkedIn.
Not what you had in mind – starting with the $$$ gazillions!
Can YOUR computer match phrases and words, find them in a string of text? It certainly can. So you choose some words out of your job description and go hunting for the candidate who has guessed correctly and put exactly these same words in his/her resume. Will you get a hit? Maybe, maybe not.
To rephrase Tip #1: Don’t expect your computer to work miracles. The level of search techniques used to scan a resume, even using well tested techniques, is a guessing game. The candidate can only guess what you are looking for. It’s not playing at the top of the computer’s game.
Corollary to Tip #1: Use the computer for what it is good at – filing, organizing, ranking, tracking and sending e-mails. A little time spent at the beginning figuring out exactly (computers are good at exactly) what you want it to do and it will be your efficient servant saving you time and money.
Before I go on to Tip #2 – an example of doing this both well and badly…
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