Sorting Through Online Resume Submissions

If you've posted a job online, you'll need to be ready to deal with the deluge of responses to your ad. Whether you set up your own electronic file system, or use the organizer tool on one of the for-fee job services, you’ll need a system for sorting the resumes that come in to you.

You’ll select the resumes of candidates you definitely want to interview, those who you might want to interview or screen, and those who don’t fit the job. Match your sorting to your process – this is a good time to consider whether all or some of the candidates should get a phone screening before being invited to speak with you in person.

You might want to also make a folder for the Save for Later resumes. There might be candidates about whom you'd like more information before scheduling an interview — you may want to ask for work samples from people before you talk.  

Once you’ve solicited responses from people, it’s worth noting any candidates who might fit other positions at your company, now or sometime later. Too few companies make use of their save-for-laters; you’ve got a pool of people who have shown enough interest in your company to send you their information, so they could still be an interested bunch later on when the right opportunity opens up.

If you get to the stage where manual sorting doesn’t keep pace with the job applications you’re processing, you can turn to software that automates this process. Once you’ve grown the Careers section of your own Web site, you can either link up with a service like CareerBuilder to sort and route the applications that people submit. Alternately, you can use relationship-management tools such as ACT (www.act.com), GoldMine (www.frontrange.com), and SalesForce.com (www.salesforce.com) to keep track of active resumes, on-hold candidates, and those in other stages of the process.