Human Resources

Recruiting Like a Boss: Best Practices for Effective Candidate Management

Published on 12 December 2024

Modified on 8 January 2025

5 min

You can attract the attention of potential candidates, but that means little if you can’t manage the flow of applications properly. Effective candidate management is crucial to getting the most out of your efforts. It’s a shame to miss the ideal candidate because you didn’t respond to their application quickly enough.

Managing applications is all about efficiency. You need to be able to process all applications quickly. But reading, sorting, and checking the most important information in each CV is a time-consuming process. And frankly, not a very fun task. You should be able to focus on qualified candidates and not waste your time sifting through applications. Thanks to digital media, most applications can be sorted automatically, so you don’t have to invest as much time in processing. But how can you save time in practice and make the most of your application management?

Optimize the sorting of applications

More than a third of job openings in the sales and marketing sector attract at least 100 applications within a few days (Source: APEC study). Regardless of the roles you are hiring for, you need to optimize your candidate management if you don’t want to spend hours assessing one application after another.

Recruitment processes often take a long time (up to 10 weeks for 15% of employers, according to the Meteojob Job Search Barometer of January 2020). Besides organizing interviews, deciphering applications is the most time-consuming step in the process. Without the right tools, HR professionals spend a lot of time checking each CV for the required qualifications, language proficiency, and necessary technologies for the role. Additionally, verifying the consistency between the candidate’s background and the provided information can take forever. What can you do to focus on targeted applications that match the desired profile?

Using the “CTRL F” search function is a good start to identify keywords (e.g., Java J2EE, APICS certification, etc.), although this technique is quite limited. Parsing and matching applications can make the job easier for recruiters.

CV Parsing or OCR

With CV parsing or extracting data from a CV, all information is automatically identified, extracted, and stored in a database. You then only need to create automatic filters for the desired fields to sort the applications based on the terms you defined in the parsing solution. Parsing comes from the English verb “to parse,” which means “to analyze.” In your ATS (Applicant Tracking System), you create “tags”; these are specific terms related to the information you are looking for in the CVs. This information can relate to education (“hotel school,” “ICT training”), work experience (“HR assistant,” “key account manager”), or skills (“fluent in English,” “workflow management”) of your applicants. All these terms are then summarized in a single format for all CVs. What is the goal? To automatically assess CVs using filters. This makes it easier for you to read and search for relevant information among the many applications.

The potential of CV parsing is immense. Imagine you receive 250 applications for a single position. You decide to sort them by creating a table with the following data: first name, last name, email address, phone number, educational background, language proficiency, and years of work experience. You can do this manually, which takes about a day, or use parsing software. It “reads” all the CVs, identifies the requested information, and inputs it into the correct columns of your follow-up table. The entire process takes only a few seconds.

CV Matching

CV Matching helps you sort and prioritize the best applications. It uses digital tools that compare the characteristics of a CV and a job opening in real-time through semantic search to determine a match score between them. Based on a percentage of “match,” the system indicates whether the CV objectively matches the role.
The achieved score is communicated to you once the “bridges” between the CV and your role are established. A match of 75% or more is considered relevant for the role. Below this score, you need to further review the application to refine your processing. You can read the motivation letter or schedule a phone interview. The matching process is manual: you need to assess the candidate beyond the objective criteria of automated matching by considering personality, soft skills, motivation, alignment with company culture, and more.

CV Scoring

Just like matching, scoring simplifies the processing of your applications using automation tools. It is a system of filters that, once activated, assign points to an application. This allows you to prioritize applications based on an automatically assigned number of relevance points. For example, you can set the scoring rule for the profile of an international sales representative based on language proficiency: 5 points for native English, 2 points for fluent English, and so on. You can also add a score based on the candidate’s experience: 5 points for more than three years of international experience, 3 points for one to three years of international experience, and so on.

The benefits and use of an ATS

Today, many recruitment programs can accurately sort all CVs in their databases. Here are a few examples of what an ATS can do for you:

Collect all applications from different channels in one place, such as spontaneous applications on the career website, responses to job postings on job boards, applications via social networks, referrals, and so on.
Evaluate CVs in the database based on criteria you set, similar to searches on job boards.
Keep the current version of a CV while storing previous versions, so you can identify any changes in the candidate’s career path.
Archive applications and link them to a single application record.
Confirm the progress of a candidate in the recruitment process by various involved parties, such as HR Manager, Recruitment Lead, Manager, and so on.
Send reminders and involve others in the recruitment process to gather feedback on candidates.
Record digital information about an applicant, such as positive or negative feedback, reference feedback, or other comments from HR staff.

This allows you to select candidates with the highest scores based on your criteria. Using parsing, matching, and CV scoring is the best way to fairly evaluate all applications for a vacancy without the risk of discrimination. Automated sorting takes into account the actual skills of your candidates. The procedures of parsing and matching depend on specific digital tools, which you can also find directly within a powerful ATS.

Effective candidate management is key to hiring success. Discover how AI can help match candidates to roles in our next blog: “AI and Matching: Your Secret Weapon for a Top Talent Pool”