The current hiring process is broken. With nearly 74% of HR professionals admitting they’ve made mistakes in hiring decisions and bad hires costing organizations up to five times their annual salary, it’s clear that making the wrong hire comes with costly consequences.

However, HR folks are often stretched so thin across all their competing responsibilities that it becomes hard to pinpoint the flaws in the traditional hiring system. That’s why we’ll discuss what exactly is wrong with the current hiring process and how organizations navigate around it so they can hire and retain top talent.

Too Many Resumes

One huge flaw in today’s hiring process is that HR professionals are saddled with more resumes than they can read through carefully. Job posting platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed are essentially resume boards. Although these may have been helpful in the past, resume boards no longer effectively connect qualified candidates to employers. These platforms make it too easy for applicants to submit their resumes, resulting in an overwhelming amount for HR professionals to sift through.

Say an HR director is given 100 resumes for one job opening (typically, it’s about 5-10x this amount). It’s likely that, given their huge workloads, they only have time to look through some of them, if at all. In fact, today’s recruiters look at resumes for an average of 7.4 seconds each. So, they’ll probably decide to interview the first candidate that looks good—missing out on numerous other potential candidates. In fact, the 98th resume may be the best candidate, but the employer might never even see their resume! That’s why HR professionals reprioritize looking for the best fits, not just the first fits.

Ineffective Resources

Another issue with the current hiring process is that HR professionals often aren’t equipped with the right tools to help them find the best candidates. One commonly used technology is a resume-keyword scanner such as Freshteam that sorts and filters through candidates based on keywords. The premise is that by searching resumes for specific keywords, HR professionals can eliminate unqualified candidates if they don’t use the right words or say them enough times on their resume.

However, relying on keywords is a flawed way to find the right candidates because resumes simply don’t paint the whole picture. Someone’s resume may appropriately use the word “denizen” rather than “occupant” or “citizen,” but if the keyword scanner doesn’t know to look for the word “denizen,” it might pass over a perfectly qualified candidate. And although resumes do outline past job experience, they don’t tell employers whether the candidate is a good match for the company’s culture or what their soft skills are like, and they definitely do not predict job performance.

So what alternatives do HR professionals have?

Recruiters: A Last-Ditch Effort

In times of hiring trouble, many HR professionals turn to recruiters in a scramble to hire the right person. However, there are also issues when it comes to working with recruiters. Recruiters are motivated to fill positions, rather than building cohesive teams that are set up for success. In addition, recruiters are limited by the networks of candidates they’ve built, so they might try to sell the same candidate over and over again to different companies. On top of all that, employers have to pay a recruiting fee, which is typically between 15 and 20% of the position’s first year salary. Some recruiters may even charge 25% for roles that are more challenging to fill!

Fortunately, there’s another option out there—one that re-envisions the hiring process to help both candidates and employers get it right the first time.

Reimagine Your Hiring Process with the PATH

Are you sorting through hundreds of resumes, trying to find the perfect candidate for an important position at your company?

GoodJob’s PATH Assessment^® and unique platform can help you create a seamless hiring process that quickly finds top talent for your organization. Created by scientists at Harvard and Stanford, the PATH Assessment is far from the average personality test. While most personality assessments test irrelevant areas or use poor logic to analyze responses and draw conclusions, the PATH Assessment places a person’s personality, motivations, values, and traits within a relevant workplace context. It then organizes employee traits and behaviors into four modes—Purpose, Approach, Thinking, and Habits—so you know exactly what drives them, how they interact with coworkers, how they problem solve, and how they take action. The PATH Assessment also leverages data science and artificial intelligence (AI) to match candidates for the traits most advantageous to specific roles.

Job candidates sign up for GoodJob’s platform and take the assessment first, all for free. After an employer posts a job with a short description and key details, GoodJob instantly matches them with vetted, talented applicants on their platform based on their comprehensive recruitment system, without any human bias. Employers can then sort, filter, and rank all of their applicants and choose the best fit without ever combing through a giant stack of resumes.

Ready to find qualified job-seekers and get back to the high-impact work more deserving of your attention and focus? Our platform bubbles up the candidates that best match your team’s DNA to the top of the list, so you never waste your time slogging through resumes, interviewing candidates who aren’t as good of a fit, or relying on recruiters. Click here to learn more.