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What is it a company looks for when it sets out to recruit a new employee? Of course, they will look for someone they believe will be able to achieve the objectives assigned to the specific role they are looking to fill, and who will therefore ultimately help the company reach its stated goals.

That’s correct 100% of the time, isn’t it? Well, I suspect not. I think all too often roles are filled (and re-filled) because every company has a “this” or “that” role, or a company has always had a this or that role, without any fundamental review of the organization’s vision and how it’s organizational structure, functions, skills and capabilities are best suited to fulfil that vision. But that is a topic for another day. Let’s assume for the sake of this article that the role is vital for the success of the company.

How then does a company look for their ideal candidate by finding that perfect CV? Well, more and more, companies and recruitment agencies use an application tracking system (ATS) which is essentially a massive searchable database of job-seekers. If a company is therefore looking to fill a position with a job specification that includes “experience in software sales” they will type these same words into the system. The system will then only highlight candidates whose CVs have these desired keywords in them.

So, the whole process of finding that very special person who has the right education, job experience, motivation, attitude, customer focus, ambition, drive, ability to travel at short notice, willingness to work long hours when needed, and is essentially the perfect fit both professionally and culturally is becoming controlled by what is essentially “search engine optimization (SEO) for CVs”.

Potential candidates are being coached on how to format and word a CV so that an ATS will pick it up. This means that instead of persuading a potential employer of your suitability for a role with genuine related work experience and achievements, the story of your career progression and your “commercial worth”,  job seekers are being encouraged to play a search engine game.

You are far more likely to secure candidates with the appropriate skills, knowledge, experience and cultural fit if you base your selection on a list of candidates that have been personally and professionally identified, interviewed and ranked from a real network of contacts and authentic recommendations together with a targeted skill, knowledge & experience screening process.

Your company deserves better that identifying its talent from the result of a keyword search – so contact Crescus (www.crescus.com/recruitment) to learn how we can help you.