Case Study $2.$ Pros and Cons of Cleaning up the Resu$-$messHR and hiring managers often find themselves swamped by resumes because they are so easy to send with a click of a button. Some large retailers can get a million or more resumes a year. Even small businesses get flooded with them. When Raising Cain, a Louisiana$-$based fast$-$food chain, opened an office in Dallas, the firm needed to hire $35$ people. It received $10,000$ resumes and had to hire an outside firm to help sort through them.Applicant tracking systems and resume screening software are helping harried HR personnel, managers, and business owners cope with the problem. After resumes are screened and reviewed, interviews can be scheduled automatically using a firms email system and electronic calendar, and job offers sent to candidates to sign electronically and return. Many job boards have resume screening capabilities and algorithms to recommend candidates, similar to the way Amazon.com recommends products based on what a person has purchased in the past.Not all HR professionals are fans of resume screening software, however. Managers tend to use huge numbers of key words so that very few applicants can make it past the screen. Different kinds of software can have different kinds of glitches. The software might not read certain types of fonts or might reject a resume of a good candidate if it contains a single typo. Unqualified applicants have also learned to pepper their resumes with a jobs keywords to get past resume$-$screening software.In his book Why Good People Cant Get Jobs, Peter Cappelli relates an incident in which an HR manager put his own resume through his companys screening process and got rejected. In another instance, an engineering firm received more than $25,000$ resumes for a job but none of the candidates made it past electronic screening.There is also a lack of the human touch and judgment in the process. Resume$-$screening software cant easily pick up on candidates soft skills, such as a persons ability to interact well with other people. And managers dont end up seeing interesting resumesresumes from people who have different skills or life experiences that would translate well to the job. Consequently, a lot of people who would make excellent employees never get even a first glance.Some recruiters have found ways to avoid the downsides of automatic resume screening altogether. Kevin Mercuri, president of Propheta Communications, a public relations firm in New York City, got tired of being swamped by resumes. Now when he needs to recruit personnel, he posts a message about job openings on his LinkedIn page. I get people vouching for each applicant, so I dont have to spend hours sorting through resumes, he says.

Questions

$1.$ What impact do you think resume screening tools are having on HR departments? What about line managers? Would you use the software to screen resumes?

$2.$How might the drawbacks associated with resume screening software be addressed?