Employers get hooked on applicant volume and foolishly listen to their heart

Quality is far more important than quantity when it comes to sifting through a vast pile of job applications in search of the perfect hire.

The FOMO epidemic

When looking to fill a role, many employers seem to suffer from a form of FOMO – 'fear of missing out' on the one perfect person for the job. They assume that the more applications they review, the better the chances of finding that one perfect candidate. As you'd expect, they end up absolutely swamped.

At first glance, looking far and wide for the perfect person might seem like a smart hiring strategy. Especially amid the current talent shortage, when you can feel like you're missing out if you're not flooded with applications.

In truth, you're just making life harder for yourself, while actually increasing your chances of making a poor choice. Especially if you're only skimming resumes and glancing at skills, which they may or may not actually have, in order to decide who makes the first cut.

It wasn't too bad back in the days when job seekers had to mail off resumes in the post, meaning they'd only apply for half a dozen positions. The advent of job boards saw this rise to 35 positions, but with all of today's technology it's risen to an amazing 105 applications per jobseeker. Things will only get worse now that people are turning to artificial intelligence bots like ChatGPT to write their resume for them.

Related article: ChatGPT ghostwrites CVs

For some people, part of the drive to fire off a vast number of applications is to retain their Centrelink benefits, even if they have no real interest in most of the jobs. It naturally makes it very difficult for potential employers to separate the wheat from the chaff.

When we're overwhelmed, paralysed by choice and short on time, people tend to make bad decisions. It's called resume fatigue, when we get overloaded and throw up our hands in despair. At this point, instead of approaching the problem logically, we can make a snap decision and hope for the best – which is certainly not a recipe for hiring success.

Productivity suffers under a heavy churn rate

One of the biggest impacts of poor hiring choices is a high employee churn rate. Some businesses just take high staff turnover for granted, even though it can take a heavy toll on productivity, morale and the bottom line.

After a while, you can even start to lose people who really are a great fit for the job, because they're fed up with the revolving door and constantly needing to train new people. Now you're even worse off than when you started.

Some employers struggle with hiring and make poor decisions because they approach it as if they're searching for their one true soul mate. Assuming there's only one perfect person out there for the job, they undertake an exhaustive search but then get exhausted when it comes to choosing "the one".

Related article: Love, dating & predictive technology

The truth is that no one is perfect, but there's certainly more than one person out there who would be a good fit for any job. Finding one of those people requires focusing less on their skills and more on their attitudes – something which is difficult to divine from a resume.

New recruitment tools offer the solution

The solution to hiring great people is to place less emphasis on covering letters and CVs. Instead, you need to take advantage of new recruitment tools which focus on asking the right set of screening questions. 

Using short surveys, Expr3ss! quickly and cost-effectively pinpoints job applicants with the right skills, attitudes, temperament and cultural fit. Surveys typically only take around six minutes and can include deal-breaker questions to ensure applicants have all the necessary qualifications before they are recommended for an interview.

The results speak for themselves. Signature Hospitality Group operates 50 venues across Australia and New Zealand, including the Sporting Globe Bar, TGI Fridays and Varsity. They employ more than 2000 people and have an amazing 95 per cent staff retention rate, which is simply unheard of in the hospitality sector.

They don't find and keep all of these great people because they scour the earth and wade through piles of resumes. Instead, thanks to Expr3ss!, they can easily find people who have both the right skills and the right temperament for the job.

Whether you're looking to hire one person or one thousand people, you can't run around town with a glass slipper expecting to find your happily ever after. If you really want to know who's a good fit, you need to ask a few pertinent questions up front to help narrow down your choices.