Susan Henry, acting manager of talent acquisition at Cognos. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

With the growing popularity of online job sites and corporate webpage career sections, many potential candidates take a "shot gun" approach to finding a job, firing off a resume to anyone and everyone and seeing what results in a call back. This is great in terms of numbers of resumes that companies are receiving, but it makes the HR department's job much harder than it used to be in finding the best candidate.

Cognos Inc., a business intelligence (BI) and performance management software company with more than 23,000 customers in over 135 countries, receives resumes from all over the world.

With hundreds, even thousands of CVs flooding in at any given time, an intense war going on for the best talent and HR budget restraints, recruiters need to have the best techniques for sorting through it all in order to land the best employees for multiple departments within a company.

Susan Henry, acting manager of talent acquisition for Cognos in Ottawa, spoke with the OBJ to explain how her team deals with all those resumes.

OBJ: How many applicants does Cognos see on average in a given time?

HENRY: On a global basis, 1,500 is a peak week when we've likely got lots of roles posted and recruitment campaigns underway. Applications received can fluctuate from 100 per week to a more average figure of 500 to 600.

OBJ: How do you deal with that volume?

HENRY: We have some software that assists us because any applications we receive we direct it through our website. Candidates go in and enter their details and that's how they end up in our database and thus in our hands. We then have the ability to search that database based on different skill sets and locations and different ways that candidates answer questions. They are also categorized based on roles that they have applied for or expressed interest in. So if I am a hiring manager, I can go in and see the candidates who have applied for my specific opportunity and review their applications. Or, I can go into the database alone and see if there are any people who would have categorized themselves in a way that we would see fit for the role.

OBJ: What do you look for in particular?

HENRY: With the Cognos tool, when you go into our website, you're asked to make choices. For instance, what is your first preferred employment category, so someone would choose "sales" or "product management" or "customer service." So we can take those answers and filter out who we are looking for and see if they say they are willing to travel or not, or candidates can fill out salary expectations or geographic locations. Anything that they put in the application are things that we can use to further filter the search of our database to identify them.

We are also able to search for candidates or resumes based on keywords. So if there is a particular type of technology we need to search for, then we can put that in and pull up those applicants. Or we can search particular words or traits.

OBJ: With so many different departments looking for so many different people, how do you keep communication open between departments and HR?

HENRY: There is a pretty rigorous hiring process that the business goes through. Anytime they need to hire, they come to the Cognos recruiting team and they discuss the type of person they are looking for and the skill sets. There are definitely some consistencies throughout the company...We look for traits like leadership, innovation, product knowledge, creativity. Those are standard traits that we look for with all of our employees, along with experience related to the work that we're asking them to do.

The communication between the business and HR is always very much upfront. We work with them to qualify the criteria and the needs of each person and what the work they will be doing is like and what qualities they will need to possess. So once we have that recipe for the perfect candidate, we can go to our databases and identify which Cognos applicants are most closely suited.

OBJ: Is there any kind of training to help HR deal with very technical resumes to dig out that information?

HENRY: In our team currently... the people who focus on our technical recruitment have actually come from that environment. So, my recruiter who for my products and development organization has a Master's in computer engineering and used to be a software developer, so we haven't had to give her any additional training to understand. But a lot of that is a partnership between the business and the HR team in that they are going to be the experts in a particular knowledge area related to that role whether it is science, marketing, technical or otherwise. We'll help them with the process and how to best get through candidates and best assess them and determine fit with soft skills and things like that.

You don't often see an HR person say, "Well, their programming skills aren't strong enough." We often leave that to the business.

THE EXPERTS SAY

If employers ask for a cover letter, I write a two-column cover letter that lists their requirements in one column and then what my clients have to match that criteria in the other column. In large corporations or the government, it's not the hiring manager that sees the resume first, it's the HR clerk or even scanning software. They look at that cover letter because they don't want to have to read the resume. They don't understand what the job position really requires; they don't have experience with that. So the cover letter is used to short-list people. They want to see a direct correlation from the requirements and what the candidate has to offer. So the two-column format is designed to make it easy for those first-level screeners to make that match.

Most candidates don't know this and they try to write these wordy cover letters, that try to impress an employer with lovely writing. But that's not what a cover letter is for any more. Resume conventions have changed and candidates need to know what's going on in the priorities of an organization.

Twenty years ago the hiring manager would look through all the resumes. But now, with the Internet, resume screening is in some respects easier, but in other respects it's harder because they get a flood of resumes for ever job they post and this has made it almost unmanageable.

George Dutch, president, JobJoy career services

Recruiters will look for relevance and simplicity. They tend to scan resumes because they just don't have time to read the whole thing. The way to help HR people read your resume is to start with an objective that is relevant to the position that you are going after. A one-size fits all resume does not work any more. Candidates need to make sure they format their resume to each job they apply to.

They should also be as succinct and keep it as close to two pages as possible. People still send resumes in four or five pages and a recruiter just won't have the time to go through all of that.

Recruiters want to see resumes that speak to results rather than actions. Everyone looks to the results. For instance people will write, "Had responsibility over 15 people." That's nice, but what did you do?

Another huge thing that recruiters look at are errors and typos, format issues. The last thing a recruiter wants is to have 100 resumes dumped on their desk and to have to try to make sense of a resume. If there is half a sentence on one page and the other half on another page, you tend to get weary. The easier it is to read, the more focused and to the point, the better chance someone has to get through.

Tony Scala, VP of marketing, Drake International Inc.