All it can do at best, is eliminate the longest and most complex phase of recruiting, which is dealing with all the resumes that aren't going to make it. Recruiters and their machines will no longer have to chuck out resumes based on the qualities of the physical documents themselves, and from what I've heard, most resumes are dumped at this stage. They won't have to check for appropriate content at such length either, because they'll be dealing with data that's already in electronic format and which can be scanned electronically.

It won't deal with bad job descriptions, or bad interviewers or bad interviewees, or candidates who aren't being honest, or are chasing jobs they aren't really suited for.

As for having useful skills, the market seems to be awash with people who have useful skills; if there's only one job and a thousand people who are skilled enough to do it, 999 of them are going to be out of work regardless of how skilled they are.

Interestingly, I recently attended a class about jobseeking in which every single example given related to finding IT work, especially IT management positions. Yet there are hardly any IT positions out there, and the class included one professional IT manager who was trying desperately to get out of the field for exactly that reason. Despite him saying openly that there was no work in this field, and despite others in the class showing no interest in the IT field anyway, the class continued to be shown how to apply for IT management jobs.

As long as potential candidates aren't given good information and helped to find and use the best and most appropriate resources, the quality of the job market isn't going to improve.

So it seems to me to be just a money-saving idea, I can't see how it will make a difference to anything other than the employers' pocketbooks. What do you think?

asked by Chris O. on 3/8/11