5 minutes
Does your organisation receive hundreds of CVs a week or month that you’re expected to read? This is the case for most human resource (HR) departments and can be the largest part of their workload. Even if you spend 5 minutes reading each CV and receive 100 a week, that’s more than 8 hours a week spent reading resumes. Why wouldn’t you outsource this mind-numbing task to a resume parser that can extract the data and put it into a more readable format?
How Do Resume Parsers Work?
If you work in HR, there’s no way you haven’t heard of resume parsing. A CV parser is simply a type of software that scans incoming resumes to pull out structured information. This data is categorised according to type for easy review by the hiring panel.
Your developer can even connect a resume parser with your applicant tracking system (ATS) so that you can enjoy the benefits of resume parsing without any extra steps. When an applicant uploads their resume, the CV parser will get to work extracting data, making the resume screening process easier than ever.
Top 13 Resume Parsing Benefits For Human Resources
- Save Time
One of the top ways that companies reap the benefits of using a resume parser is that they save time. Hiring managers generally don’t have hours to read through every CV, and you likely have multiple hiring processes on the go. If you could cut your review time in half (or more!) by extracting candidate data, wouldn’t you do it?
- Shorter Time To Hire
While saving time on its own is an excellent resume parsing benefit for Human Resources teams, it has an even better flow-on effect – speeding up the time to hire! Keeping the time between advertising a role and the successful candidate being informed of your decision is a crucial element of the hiring process. If the time to hire is too long, the most suitable candidates could drop out as they find jobs elsewhere. The remaining candidates may become restless and annoyed that they haven’t heard back from you yet. A negative experience like this can flow through when your new hire starts, as they will remember how tiresome the recruitment process was and might start off on the wrong foot.
- Improved Candidate Experience
Candidate experience can be dramatically improved by adding resume parsing software into your recruitment process. While this is primarily a behind-the-scenes tool, candidates can also enjoy the benefits. For example, they won’t have to upload a CV and then complete manual data entry to re-enter that same information into an application form. Additionally, because the time to hire is quicker, they won’t be waiting for weeks to hear back from you to find out whether they were successful.
- Positive Employer Branding
A considerable part of any HR department’s role at a company is upholding a positive impression of your business as an employer. This is known as ‘employer branding’. Developing an excellent employer brand includes being known as a fair and supportive workplace, a simple recruitment process, and generally being easy to deal with. After all, if candidates have a negative experience during the hiring process, they tell their friends, and word of mouth can spread like wildfire. Avoid this by using resume parsing to select candidates faster and maintain your excellent employer brand.
- Widen Your Talent Pool
Companies who begin using CV parsing frequently find that they are considering candidates they may have previously overlooked. When all resume data is in a list, this can make it much clearer that, even if an applicant’s CV was hard to follow, they do actually have the skills required. As it’s easier to spot suitable candidates, the end result is a broader pool of talent to choose from.
- Find The Best Person For Each Role
Resume parsing software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse candidate data makes it far easier to determine the best applicant for each position. With all the information sorted into relevant categories, it is extremely simple to compare candidates against the requirements listed in the job description. For example, you’ll be able to quickly see each person’s qualifications, past job titles, years of experience, and more.
- Better Hiring Outcomes
When it’s easy to quickly determine the most suitable applicant for a role, this can result in better hiring outcomes. An individual who is a great fit and is hired fast is more likely to be highly productive in their role and have excellent job satisfaction. And these positive outcomes are infectious, potentially raising morale, especially as more and more people are hired using resume parsing techniques.
- Search Your Talent Pool
Most resume parsers can offer you the ability to search within your ATS using keywords if you get your developer to connect the two systems. This is a handy functionality if you’re looking for specific attributes in your candidates, such as skills or qualifications. You’ll be able to find the information you need much faster than you would by reading through each application.
- Continually Improving
Some resume parsers, such as the one offered by Affinda, are being continually updated as new research emerges. This means that you’re not investing in an off-the-shelf, static system, but one that will improve over time to be even more accurate and leverage new research coming out about AI technology.
- Reduces Cost Of Hire
Recruitment costs are often one of the largest expenses a Human Resources department incurs. Unfortunately, the costs add up from using job boards, paying interviewee travel costs, and the time taken to review applications, amongst other expenses.
By using resume parsing, you can save a lot of money by reducing the time it takes to review applications. If we refer back to the example of spending 8 hours a week reviewing applications, for someone with a $33 hourly rate, that’s $264 a week spent just on the application review process. Using CV parsing dramatically cuts this to just a fraction of that time and cost.
- Accurate Data Entry
How do you currently handle candidate data? If you don’t use a resume parser, you have two main options: saving all resume files somewhere that you’ll probably never open them again or manually typing out that data into your ATS.
Manual data entry is not only time-consuming but notoriously unreliable due to human error. You need dependable data that you can count on if you want to come back to an applicant. Resume parsing can help you to achieve this – this type of software features a much higher accuracy rate when compared with data entered by humans. So not only does it reduce your workload, but the amount of correct data in your system.
- One location for Candidate Data
Usually, to find all of the applications for a role, you’ll need to search your emails, rifle through paper copies on your desk, and check if anything was uploaded through a job board. Connect your ATS and resume parser, and you will instead have all candidate data listed in a single location. This is far easier than going to many places to find all the resumes you have received for a role.
- Standard Format
One of the best resume parsing benefits for human resources is having that data listed by category. This allows you to scan the lists and see the information you need at a glance. For example, if you’re looking at a list of candidate data and you want to know which qualifications each person has; just scan the qualifications column. This is much less time-consuming than opening each PDF file individually and looking for the qualifications section.
Which Is the Best Resume Parser?
Affinda is hands-down the best option on the market, delivering all of the resume parsing benefits for human resources that you could wish for at an extremely competitive pricepoint. It leverages AI technology to extract fields accurately and uses machine learning to improve consistently over time.
Affinda Features:
- Parse many different resume formats, including Word docs, PDF, TXT, and more!
- Uses natural language processing to understand the true meaning behind the text.
- Our API can be seamlessly integrated with your ATS or other recruitment tools.
- Can parse in 56 languages, including English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, Italian, and many more!
- Many data fields extracted, such as job title, location, dates employed, degree, certifications, skills, personal details, languages spoken, and many more. In fact, we can extract over 100 fields from each CV.
One happy customer provided this feedback about Affinda’s Resume Parser:
“Most of our workforce is not ‘experienced’ in the art of writing resumes, meaning that the challenge of parsing their data is hard and has caused many issues in the past with hiring. [Resume Parser by Affinda} has made it a lot better for us, in the short time we have been with them. Our hiring managers are much happier with the quality of the tool, we lose less time.”
Interested in seeing a demo of the Affinda resume parsing software? Contact us today to book one in!
