Without question, the Internet can be exceptionally helpful in efficiently connecting recruiters with promising candidates. However, the growing reliance on candidate attraction from web postings conducted by the majority of staffing and recruiting firms is yielding some rather questionable results both anecdotally and empirically.

Thanks to many new web-based tools, it’s never been easier for candidates to apply to positions for which they are not even marginally qualified. One result is that lean recruiting teams are being bombarded with all the wrong candidates.

Last year, one of our clients used VoiceScreener to help qualify potential drivers.  A full 25% of the “candidates” knocked themselves out on the following question: “Do you have a valid driver’s license?”

Recruiting from the swarm without getting stung

In a conversation with one of the largest US retail banks, we heard a truly harrowing tale of the approximately 4,000 web responses that they receive each month for teller positions. Since tracking of these responses began, they have only hired six of those. That’s less than a .15% success rate.

Now consider the cost of maintaining the personnel to evaluate these candidates. In this particular example, there is a team of three recruiters dedicated to the task. On average, recruiters spend approximately 60% of their day conducting “courtesy interviews.” For these recruiters, more than 99.85% of their day was spent in these exasperating conversations. (I can only guess at their recruiter retention rate!)

A director of recruiting at an enterprise IT staffing firm had heard his team griping for years about the poor quality of the web respondents. Last month, he started crunching the numbers.

He found that only 20% of web respondents were qualified.

When you consider that they receive close to 30,000 inquiries each month, the math can start to make one’s head hurt. By using better upfront screening techniques, the team has been able to provide the 24,000 non-fit candidates with a “Gentle Turn Down “(GTD) — reclaiming countless hours of productivity and increasing overall recruiter morale.

The anecdotal examples we have been observing were recently corroboratedby a study by the Corporate Leadership Council (CLC). According to one CLC study, there was a 128% increase between 2009 and 2010 in candidate flow with managers reporting that on average only 25% were qualified for the positions for which they were applying.

The question now becomes … How can we quickly find that proverbial needle in a haystack?

Graphic acknowledgement: W. Hollar woodcut, shared via Creative Commons