34 CHAPTER 2: Basic Concepts for Understanding Systems Debate Topic RESUMIX: PROCESSING RESUMES WITHOUT PAPER Did you ever wonder what happens when a job applicant sends a résumé to a large company that has placed an advertisement in a newspaper? Who actualy looks att? if 100 résumés arrive ‘on the same day, how do they decide which applicant to interview? And i a similar job opens ‘three months ater, how does the company find the many applicants who are probably stl inter- «sted, regardless of whether they have seen the company’s next newspaper advertisement? While an engineering manager at TRW' artificial intelligence research center in northem. California, Steve Leung grappled with issues relating to hiring practices at his company. He was totaly frustrated by what happened when he called job applicants who had responded to TRW's advertised job openings. The best applicants were no longer available by the time he called them. When he went to the human resources department to complain, he found four people reading through piles of résumés that had been accumulating for weeks. A year later, he founded Resumix, a software company devoted to solving problems related to the processing of résumés, What Steve Leung saw at TRW was typical. The traditional large company approach for processing résumés and matching them to requisitions for new employees was slow and paper intensive. The human resources department ceived and processed résumés submitted by job appi- ants, mostly in response to requisitions or newspaper ads. The résumés were date-stamped and passed on to internal recruiters who coded the résumés, categorized them by job grouping, and filed up to several hundred resumes in a day. The paper-intensve steps in matching the resumes to jb requisitions included identifying the résumés that seemed appropriate fora particular job req- Lisition, copying those résumés, and forwarding them to the hiring managers for review. Recruiters then tracked each forwarded résumé manually to make sue the applicant received an appropriate letter either setting up an interview or saying the résurné will be kept on file ‘An HR department using Resumix software handles résumés quite cifferently. Firs, the résumé is captured in electronic form using a scanner iit has come in by mail or by fax. Next, an optical character recognition program finds and catalogues the ter in these images regard- less of the résumés format, font, or style. A patented program analyzes the text to extract key résumé information and then transfers that information into an applicant database. The infor- ‘mation in the resumé summary includes name, addresses, telephone numbers, degrees, schools, grade point averages, and work history including dates, companies ob titles, and up to 80 skis ‘The software does this using a knowledge base of over 85,000 rules and concepts defining skill terms and phrases, abbreviations, acronyms, and even common misspelings. With high-volume ‘optical scanner it's possible to scan and process up to 2,000 pages a day per scanner. Computerizing the résumés transforms the initial screening for eligible applicants. The recruiter or manager simply identifies skill and experience criteria and clicks on a search button, Resumix responds with a prioritized lst of qualified candidates for review. Instead of looking through a large number of résumés, the recruiter or manager examines only the résumés of the ‘applicants who fit reasonably well based on the selection criteria entered into Resumix. No one ‘needs to examine the large number of résumés that are an obvious mismatch, Storing the résumé data ina database also makes it more likely that an unsuccessful respondent to this month's news- ‘paper ad might be contacted three months from now when another job opening aries. With paper- based résumé processing, finding that résumé again would often be difcut, regardless of what ‘the rejection letter says about “keeping your application on file.” Having a computerized record of ‘each application also makes it easier to track the statu of al résumés, to send out rejection letters efficient, and to compile statistics about the efficiency and turnaround time of the hiring process. ‘Where equal opportunity goals apply, having computerized information makes it easier to submit reports to the government and to justify that hiring was consistent with guidelines. ‘The technology in Resumix is designed to convert a résumé into a series of fields in a database regardless of what the initial résumé looked like. Statements that don't match ‘these specific data fields aren‘t recognized; Does the use of this technology imply that a ‘company does not care very much about the individuality of the applicants?