Instead of a deluge of online applications, the HR professional receives a report with the top 10 prospects, with skills tested and assessed, and an e-archive of all applicants — and the data is compatible with all your systems
Anyone who has ever worked in retail knows what a flood of resumes looks like. Every weekend, teenagers fan out across shopping malls handing in resumes and filling out applications in hopes of landing a part-time job.
The process is really no different at many organizations across the country. Many employers see a constant flow of applications, even when there is nary a help-wanted sign in sight, and resumes just keep piling up until they become a juggernaut that either gets pitched or sorted through at length in the search for the one ideal candidate.
Assessment technology is slowly changing that, and it’s about to revolutionize the process all over again, according to Chuck Allan, director of the HR-XML Consortium, a global non-profit organization dedicated to creating data standards for human resources management.
Instead of simply handing in a resume to add to the pile and walking away, a teenager walking into a record store to apply for a job would be handed a business card with a Web address and a password to go online and fill out an assessment. The jobseeker would go home, or to school or a library computer and apply online. The company receives a record of the applicant, how he scored on the assessment and files the information to be pulled when a position is available.
Having applicants complete online assessments, rather than filling out applications by hand or handing in resumes, pre-screens the candidates without much grunt work by the HR department. Allan said there are a growing number of scenarios where the assessment company itself is the first point of substantive contact with a potential employee. The HR department’s role kicks in when the most qualified candidates land on their desks along with a pipeline to all of the applicants.
While that idea may not be entirely new, the technology supporting it will soon get an overhaul. Version 2.0 of HR-XML’s assessment standard is expected to be rolled out by the end of summer and should be approved by the end of the year. Work on version 1.0 began in April 2002 and was approved in November 2002. By developing and publishing open data exchange standards based on extensible markup language (XML), the consortium provides the means for any company to transact with other companies without having to establish, engineer, and implement many separate interchange mechanisms.
“HR professionals are keenly aware that solutions providing merely ‘plumbing’ to get candidate information from Internet-based employment portals to applicant-tracking systems are not sufficient,” said Allan. “To be really valuable, recruiting solutions need to provide decision-makers with actionable, targeted and validated candidate information.”
Basically, the HR-XML standard allows an organization’s human resource management system (HRMS) to communicate directly with an assessment company’s software. While many third-party assessment tools are well-established predictors of performance, it has been expensive and difficult in the past to integrate the information into a human resource management system.
But with HR-XML’s assessment standard, once an organization links it systems with its assessment provider, it simply has to enter a request for an assessment to be done. HR can then query the system to see the status of the assessment, checking to see if it has been completed and scored. Then that information is dumped from the assessment company into an organization’s recruiting software to help HR and managers make the final hiring decision.
Allan said the new technology has a lot of potential, particularly for organizations in the service sector that tend to see more resumes.
“In this labour market, when demand is weak, you can end up with a whole lot of resumes queued in your applicant-tracking system,” he said. “And, frankly, nobody is going to read them. Who knows, maybe you have a dozen people that walk in a week and hand you resumes. With this, you don’t have to sort through it. You first ascertain that they have the basic skills for the job and then bring them into your hiring system and your hiring workflow.”
Another feature of version 2.0 is the ability to query catalogues. An employer could query a catalogue of test providers based on a list of competencies it may want to assess. In response to the query, the testing provider could provide details on tests that matched the competency criteria.
“I suppose you could, in a crude way, describe it as an intelligent Google search for assessment catalogues,” said Allan.
Another key component of the new HR-XML standard is something Allan called “chaining of assessments.” What this will do is link different third-party assessment providers together. Because assessments are difficult and time-consuming to create, and can be very specialized for specific jobs, most companies turn to a variety of vendors who provide assessments.
The new HR-XML standard would allow organizations to use numerous assessment providers and still have only one package of results returned to them.
“The idea is that one employer is likely to want to go to multiple vendors, yet manage all those assessments from the workflow and decision support framework of their HR system,” said Allan. “It allows you to order across two or more assessment providers and get a consolidated result for a candidate.”
One of the roadblocks the consortium often runs into is getting competitors to work together — but, in this case, it’s been a pretty easy sell, he said.
“I think the assessment providers realize by and large there’s not one that can provide everything,” said Allan. “Very often their customer will want to mix and match and here’s a way that they can still maintain a relationship with the customer and satisfy the customer’s needs.”
Allan also said HR-XML’s assessment standard is getting buy-in from vendors a lot faster than many of the consortium’s other efforts. While many of the specifications can take maybe a year or two after being published to get buy-in, this one has generated strong interest from the beginning.
“If you look at our membership, just last year we added a half-dozen assessment companies,” said Allan. “Some of the leaders in the field have joined this effort.”
The HR-XML Consortium is planning to do a demonstration of an integration between ePredix and RecruitSoft at the International Association for Human Resource Information Management (IHRIM) 2004 Conference and Exhibition in April in Orlando, Fla.
The process is really no different at many organizations across the country. Many employers see a constant flow of applications, even when there is nary a help-wanted sign in sight, and resumes just keep piling up until they become a juggernaut that either gets pitched or sorted through at length in the search for the one ideal candidate.
Assessment technology is slowly changing that, and it’s about to revolutionize the process all over again, according to Chuck Allan, director of the HR-XML Consortium, a global non-profit organization dedicated to creating data standards for human resources management.
Instead of simply handing in a resume to add to the pile and walking away, a teenager walking into a record store to apply for a job would be handed a business card with a Web address and a password to go online and fill out an assessment. The jobseeker would go home, or to school or a library computer and apply online. The company receives a record of the applicant, how he scored on the assessment and files the information to be pulled when a position is available.
Having applicants complete online assessments, rather than filling out applications by hand or handing in resumes, pre-screens the candidates without much grunt work by the HR department. Allan said there are a growing number of scenarios where the assessment company itself is the first point of substantive contact with a potential employee. The HR department’s role kicks in when the most qualified candidates land on their desks along with a pipeline to all of the applicants.
While that idea may not be entirely new, the technology supporting it will soon get an overhaul. Version 2.0 of HR-XML’s assessment standard is expected to be rolled out by the end of summer and should be approved by the end of the year. Work on version 1.0 began in April 2002 and was approved in November 2002. By developing and publishing open data exchange standards based on extensible markup language (XML), the consortium provides the means for any company to transact with other companies without having to establish, engineer, and implement many separate interchange mechanisms.
“HR professionals are keenly aware that solutions providing merely ‘plumbing’ to get candidate information from Internet-based employment portals to applicant-tracking systems are not sufficient,” said Allan. “To be really valuable, recruiting solutions need to provide decision-makers with actionable, targeted and validated candidate information.”
Basically, the HR-XML standard allows an organization’s human resource management system (HRMS) to communicate directly with an assessment company’s software. While many third-party assessment tools are well-established predictors of performance, it has been expensive and difficult in the past to integrate the information into a human resource management system.
But with HR-XML’s assessment standard, once an organization links it systems with its assessment provider, it simply has to enter a request for an assessment to be done. HR can then query the system to see the status of the assessment, checking to see if it has been completed and scored. Then that information is dumped from the assessment company into an organization’s recruiting software to help HR and managers make the final hiring decision.
Allan said the new technology has a lot of potential, particularly for organizations in the service sector that tend to see more resumes.
“In this labour market, when demand is weak, you can end up with a whole lot of resumes queued in your applicant-tracking system,” he said. “And, frankly, nobody is going to read them. Who knows, maybe you have a dozen people that walk in a week and hand you resumes. With this, you don’t have to sort through it. You first ascertain that they have the basic skills for the job and then bring them into your hiring system and your hiring workflow.”
Another feature of version 2.0 is the ability to query catalogues. An employer could query a catalogue of test providers based on a list of competencies it may want to assess. In response to the query, the testing provider could provide details on tests that matched the competency criteria.
“I suppose you could, in a crude way, describe it as an intelligent Google search for assessment catalogues,” said Allan.
Another key component of the new HR-XML standard is something Allan called “chaining of assessments.” What this will do is link different third-party assessment providers together. Because assessments are difficult and time-consuming to create, and can be very specialized for specific jobs, most companies turn to a variety of vendors who provide assessments.
The new HR-XML standard would allow organizations to use numerous assessment providers and still have only one package of results returned to them.
“The idea is that one employer is likely to want to go to multiple vendors, yet manage all those assessments from the workflow and decision support framework of their HR system,” said Allan. “It allows you to order across two or more assessment providers and get a consolidated result for a candidate.”
One of the roadblocks the consortium often runs into is getting competitors to work together — but, in this case, it’s been a pretty easy sell, he said.
“I think the assessment providers realize by and large there’s not one that can provide everything,” said Allan. “Very often their customer will want to mix and match and here’s a way that they can still maintain a relationship with the customer and satisfy the customer’s needs.”
Allan also said HR-XML’s assessment standard is getting buy-in from vendors a lot faster than many of the consortium’s other efforts. While many of the specifications can take maybe a year or two after being published to get buy-in, this one has generated strong interest from the beginning.
“If you look at our membership, just last year we added a half-dozen assessment companies,” said Allan. “Some of the leaders in the field have joined this effort.”
The HR-XML Consortium is planning to do a demonstration of an integration between ePredix and RecruitSoft at the International Association for Human Resource Information Management (IHRIM) 2004 Conference and Exhibition in April in Orlando, Fla.
