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Friday, July 27, 2007

Companies Looking to Define "Applicants"

In an article in the September 2002 issue of HR Magazine, there was a profile of a company called Air Products that had difficulty meeting federal government standards for tracking applicants. Because they receive more than 30,000 resumes per month, they needed a way to narrow down the number of people they considered true "applicants" to comply with requirements for their company as a federal contractor.

Here's the system they devised:
"A person visits the Air Products web site to peruse openings. Then he creates a personal profile -- essentially a resume -- and attaches it to an opening in which he is interested. Air Products recruiters can access only those profiles tied to positions. (To try the system, visit the Career Center portion of Air Products' web site).

If the site visitor is interested in more than one opening, he attaches his profile to each position. Each application then shows up in the recruiters' database. Once an interested person has attached his resume to a job, it remains on the site and can be reused. Unattached profiles are also stored but are not accessible to recruiters.

A visitor who doesn't find an appropriate opening can set up a software agent that will send him an e-mail when one is posted."

Air Products now defines "applicants" as anyone who has filled out a profile and attached it to an opening."

Now here's where it gets interesting for resume writers and their clients:

"Air Products recruiters will not accept paper resumes - no exceptions. "We posted a vice president position and got 158 applications in six days, "Brockington recalls. About a half dozen would-be applicants tried to circumvent the system by sending a resume to someone they knew in the company. "I told those applicants 'you have to go online,' and all of them did."

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