Employer’s View: How Office Workers Are Hired

I wanted to hire you, say, an office manager.

1. You go to HR (to the girl) and say - I want, say, an office manager. So that the girl, so that the appearance was pleasant - we have a male team, again you work like an HR manager with an office manager - pick up, so as not to grip, such and such a salary fork, a visit schedule - such and such, should help with that and that, well, and, sometimes, for the team to make sandwiches.
   
   
2. HR wraps it all into beautiful requirements for vacancies such as VO availability, knowledge of languages, computer skills, work experience, etc., etc., puts it on, say, hh.ru.
   
   
3. for the next day, 80 resumes come to the vacancy, every other day - 150, by the end of the week the number of candidates for the vacancy aspires to 400 people (real numbers, data for December 2009 - all sorts of lawyers, business analysts, office managers, secretaries, employees personnel departments, logistics and junior economists have similar indicators of people in place, the situation with designers and system administrators is slightly better (not those who set up servers, but those who change users' mice))
   
   
   
4. poor HR girl working hard just trying to read the entire resume. The usual resume length is 1-3 pages. It is impossible to read carefully, to understand the text, usually there is a review of the “education” section, a couple of top lines of “skills”, the expected salary and a couple of recent jobs (special attention is paid to the time during which the person was not working). And even with such a cursory review, it takes 4-8 minutes to open the document, to understand its structure, to read. And also to go out for lunch, rest, do exercises for the eyes ... In general, during the day HR accurately examines 50 resume sketches, and if it does not sit in LJ, VKontakte and doesn’t chat on ICQ, then up to 80 hits.
   
   
5. During the initial processing of a resume, long (more than 2.5 pages) are cut off already at this stage, since the management (I) had a requirement for a pleasant appearance, the age qualification is held, the qualification is by gender (you clearly need to work girl - but no! always consistently 3-4% of male resumes). Resumes with photos, with good experience, level of proficiency, approximate compliance with the requirements specified in the vacancy are postponed to the top. Education is looked at only in terms of "is / no" (university city, prestige, additional certificates for education, diplomas, the number of "towers" do not care at all). The rest are moved to the "long tail", which with so many resumes means, in fact, a failure. After the initial selection, 40-70% of candidates are eliminated, mostly “random” - definitely not passing (“confusing” the vacancy), too often there are too short resumes and a significant amount of inadequate (relative to the stated requirements and salary fork).
   
   
6. By the beginning of the 3rd working day, when a handful of resumes are at least a little bit, but HR is sorted, it starts slowly calling the candidates on top of the list. Although all resumes were sent electronically, it is good practice to call the candidate first and then duplicate the invitation email. It takes 5–20 minutes per call (taking into account the need to get through, and the candidate cannot speak right now). Taking into account the analysis of the still-coming resume before the end of the week, 1 HR will call up to 30 people at most.
   
   
7. During the call is an invitation to a telephone interview. Sometimes, if the candidate is not busy, it happens right there after the invitation. A telephone interview lasts 10 minutes, during his HR clarifies some details on the resume, special skills and puts all sorts of notes about the candidate (such as the voice timbre, the ability to express thoughts, parasitic words and just like it - do not like it). In the end, the standard phrase “Thank you, we will notify you about the results of the interview” sounds.
   
   
8. According to the results of calls, the resumes you like are moved to the table for the hiring customer. This is a very delicate moment, since resumes, screened out by HR at the previous stages, most likely will not reach the person who makes the decision on employment. Moreover, if there are a lot of candidates, then there is a great temptation to give a pack of paper with experienced resume applicants to someone else so that he goes through, podsokratil to a reasonable 12-20 pieces. Personal viewing of ALL received resumes occurs only in the case of searching for some completely unique specialist in order not to trust filtering to non-professionals (that is, in this case - HR).
   
   
9. And so, out of 370 resumes received from last Monday, a week later, 30 pieces lay on the table, which I look through. What is my guide in the selection of candidates? Oh ... An office manager is a very important unit of a company. This is the man who greets you in the morning with a smile and not because he should, but because he is glad to see you. This is a person who dilutes gray working days with sunlight. But also it is not necessary to forget about other office duties like the order of office, water, food, preparation of payment of bills for light, office and the parking too. And so, for hiring an office manager, you need to understand how a hired person will get along with the rest of the staff, which means you need a personal interview.
   
   
10. But a personal interview takes a significant amount of time - from the time of HR, who needs to call the candidate, agree on the timing of the interview, explain how to get to the office, to the time of a specialist who will evaluate the candidate in terms of professional qualities, and this specialist also specialty need to work. Sometimes there are days completely devoted to interviewing candidates, but in this case this is not the case, so I allocate one hour per day during the week, and during this time you can interview 10-12 candidates. Accordingly, out of those 30 resumes, which I laid on the table, you need to select 12 pieces, and push the rest into the tail (maybe next week you can still find time to interview the rest)
    
    
11. As a result, only 8 interviews happened during the week and we selected one of the candidates.

findings

1. One HR specialist in the full time mode can process no more than 80 resumes per day.
   
   
2. From sending a resume to an invitation for an interview, it can take more than a week.
   
   
3. A detailed resume is important only at the final stage, too large resume with unnecessary details can get into the trash.
   
   
4. Only a small number of resumes reach the person deciding whether to hire or not, others are eliminated by an HR specialist.
   
   
5. Education and certificates only matter if they are relevant.