The Evolution of ‘Shirley’ – ProPivotal’s Resume Robot
Technology has taken us to places we never thought we’d go before.
- Real time health and wellness tracking? Check
- A drone delivering your paper towels for that week? Double Check
- Snapchat filter that turns you into a baby? Triple Check
So why did it take us till now to leverage technology to do the tedious work for us? We didn’t know where to start!
Once upon a time, one or our team members was tasked with sitting in front of their computer, Outlook inbox open, poised and ready to qualify a resume as soon as it came in. We figured out a while ago, that if we reached out to a qualified applicant in 5 minutes or less – we were (x) amount more likely to get that individual on the phone. Of course – getting that person with the stellar resume to answer a call from an unfamiliar number is not always the easiest. So we started emailing them.
As we took steps to modernize our recruiting process, we kept asking ourselves ‘There must be a better, faster way to qualify these resumes’. We were having a valuable member of the PSG team spend countless hours staring at an inbox when they could be impacting other areas of the business, and while this is a crucial role we knew that there had to be a better, fast, more efficient way.
Here’s what we did:
- We pulled together tens of thousands of resumes
- We reviewed resumes of candidates successfully placed into opportunities with our clients
- We pinpointed common keywords on those resumes, and fed them into our algorithm? (Think ‘administrative’ or ‘Microsoft Office’)
After that a dedicated team met daily to review the results. How many resumes were qualified correctly? How many were missed? Why were they missed? What changes need to be made to push the qualified % up?
It took months of tweaking key words, working with the algorithm to make sure the right words were identified in the right spot, and A LOT of painstaking attention to detail.
But we got the robot to be 90% accurate in qualifying incoming resumes.
The best part? Since this is now out of the hands of a human, technology moves so much faster! We went from scheduling one out of every 5 candidates, to one out of every 3! AMAZING!