Spotlight for Recruiting Professionals
May 9, 2012
For several years, Vanguard has explored the possibility of going paperless in its college recruiting program to address several challenges associated with accepting paper resumes.
Kurt Styers, of Vanguard’s human resources department, says these challenges include shortening the time it takes to get a resume into the system and back to recruiters, simultaneously sharing a resume with several recruiters and hiring managers if the candidate is qualified for multiple opportunities, and sharing resumes among recruiters and hiring managers in locations throughout the United States.
Vanguard’s paperless recruiting initiative is currently in the developmental phase.
“At this point, we are defining the technical solution and strategy, and beginning to identify and secure the infrastructure needed to support a college recruiting app,” Styers explains. “This will also require the use of an iPad to capture the student’s data on campus.”
The college recruiting app, Styers says, will allow Vanguard recruiters to perform a variety of tasks, such as:
- Adding schools of interest to Vanguard’s database
- Capturing an image of a student’s resume
- Setting up recruiting events
- Sending e-mails to students
- Scheduling students for interviews or Vanguard site visits
One significant benefit of going paperless is a faster response time to the candidate, Styers points out.
“Having the information stored electronically will enable recruiters to more quickly review a student’s information and make the connection,” he says. “With mobile devices quickly becoming the primary channel that people use, having an app as a recruiting tool could be a differentiator for Vanguard with students and provide a competitive edge at recruiting events.”
The paperless initiative has the additional benefit of sustainability, as it allows candidates to reuse their resumes while removing the need for paper copies when distributing this information to multiple sources.
Styers says he’s seeing colleges exploring paperless options as well. During a recent career fair that he attended, students’ information was stored via a bar code on their name tags.
“For a nominal fee, we were able to purchase a scanner that captured data from each candidate when they approached our booth and [the system] e-mailed the [candidate’s] information directly to us,” he says, adding that QR codes could also be incorporated in such an initiative.
“As paperless technology advances, the number of options will continue to grow and become more viable for both colleges and employers.”