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  Hiring new applicants may not be the most important decision to make but it can be critical to whether your business is successful, falls flat on it’s face or suffers from the lack of charisma needed to keeps your business moving. Different applicants vary widely

in skills or having no skills at all but do inspire others if they have a great personality which also can give large sections a kick boost from enthusiasm. Finding a motivated worker with the required skills is an employee that is a real asset to your business and worth the effort in searching for.

   In reality the truth is that many qualified applicants never get to first base because of a lack of resume filtering software that searches for keywords that should appear or they use the software and ditch the results for the ambitious applicants who take the initiative to make the journey to your place of business. In reality these applicants are hoping to skip the resume filter and sell themselves by looks and personality combined with experience or without experience to fill an opening. Be careful in hiring these individuals that show up unannounced, though they may be commended for their charisma experience is the bottom line. Online applicants are often overlooked because of these applicants that usually have less experience.

     There’s nothing like starting your day with a new barrage of hundreds of resumes that have been received on a very up or down note. Getting a huge collection of incoming resumes can be encouraging that your online ad is getting attention, but the task is somewhat daunting to search through a massive collection of submittals without appropriate filtering software. You can play hit or miss if you like by opening resumes at random and get about the same results as interviews with walk in applicants as discussed earlier but it’s risky business. To start with you should start with a resume filtering software that can parse each resume looking for keywords you selected.

   You have a few choices here in resume filtering software. If you have very few resumes you could make a list of keywords on paper or in a text file and just open each resume in Microsoft Word and do a manual search for the keywords you’ve selected. If you use this method it may be helpful to score each resume by the number of keywords found or by the highest number of employers with matching keywords. Higher numbers of employers with matching keywords are always a good sign of strong expertise as opposed to a single employer.

   The online filtering software is the most convenient software and usually the most expensive to use. Resumes can be parsed for keywords through online services which may charge by the week, bi- weekly, monthly, etcetera. If you go this route look for free trials and carefully compare introductory prices, sites that hide the normal price could sting you later if you sign on to a yearly subscription. Skip offers from sites that hide prices. Online software should also have a reject folder where you can thumb through to see if the software is randomly discarding resumes into this folder because the software doesn’t live up to it’s claims. At any rate the rejected resumes should be saved to let you know the total number of responses you received. To prevent being barraged by emails you may also want to instruct the web service to only email you once or twice a day unless you want to review every incoming resume as it’s received. Look for sites that have resume scoring built in as an added bonus of using their service.

    Offline or local resume filtering is the most cost effective software. It does have advantages over the online software being most economical and not requiring sign up time and possible phone calls with service agents and time lost. In this case you can pick your own resume folders for storage and more easily change program settings for keywords, print daily lists of new resumes and have instant access to your resume folder.

An offline filter does require you to learn the software and get your own results but it may be harder in reality to use an online service to set keywords so the learning curve would be the same. Undoubtedly the offline software is more desirable from the standpoint of being able to tweak settings more easily and you are in control which means it’s more private as well. This is most probably the best option if you want the most control over the process and there is no doubt handling the process yourself that you won’t have issues with a 3^rd party or sites that don’t work or are difficult to use.

 It all depends on the time you want to invest for each option you decide on. Offline software has much greater advantages than using online software in some areas but online software is a great to use if you want to set and forget. If you decide with the expensive online software service check out their list of customers as proof of their success.