The challenge remains to classify resume information across sectors, countries, languages and laws affecting the job search and hiring process. Clearly, both research and practice would benefit from a more unified or standardized language for digital resume forms. However, this knowledge source is complex to develop, and would require various syntheses from areas as broad as Linguistics, Human Resources, Computer Science, Information Systems, and even Psychology. To date, there appears little knowledge sharing across organizations and research disciplines when it comes to e-Recruiting portal design (Wolfswinkel et al., 2010). Researchers from technical disciplines (Information Systems, Computer Science) and social sciences (Human Resource Management, Psychology) have worked independently from each other. Fortunately, in the past decade, scholars have started to undertake joint interdisciplinary
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efforts to understand the phenomenon and its multilevel implications within and across organizations; leading to several special issues on e-HRM between 2004 and 2012 (e.g.
Human Resource Management, 2004 and 2008; International Journal of Human Resource Management, 2009; European Journal of International Management, forthcoming).
Clearly, more technical research is needed in the e-HRM domain to develop an adaptive e-Recruiting ontology that can learn new skills such as applicants’ various computer or language skills. In order to enable effective matching, comprehensive skill ontologies need to be agreed upon within the recruiting sector. Research suggests that better taxonomies would produce better selection decisions (Terzis & Economides, 2005; Furtmueller et al., 2010).
As educational programs and skills change over time, skill ontologies for resume fields would need to allow learning from new users who fill in new skills which the system did not know before. Yet, different users will likely interpret skill levels differently. Therefore skill tests may need to be included when filling in resume forms. This would provide a more objective comparison of resume content data. An intelligent resume screening system could aid in the recommendation of applicants to recruiters (Viswesvaran, 2003). Also workflows for using, maintaining, and enhancing resume databases need to be developed in order to enhance recruiters’ effectiveness in using such systems.
This study is not without limitations. Quantitative research involving a larger sample of recruiters would be helpful for identifying essential and nice-to-have resume categories in a more comprehensive way. Furthermore, our suggested resume content fields may need revision depending on emerging novel job classifications and industry types in a growing universe of e-Recruiting services. We focused exclusively on analyzing Dutch e-Recruiting sites and interviews with Dutch recruiters. Resume preferences and resume fields may be categorized differently in other cultures outside the Netherlands.
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Conclusion
This paper addresses and synthesizes requirements of online resume forms into a knowledge framework. We conducted interviews with 17 full-time recruiters, and content analyzed the resume forms of the 40 largest Dutch e-Recruiting sites which provided insights into best practice in content items used in resume forms. These current practices were compared with extant resume design literature and concepts emerging from interviewing recruiters about their everyday professional experience. This research is useful for managers and designers of online resume forms, recruiters, applicants and academics engaged in e-Recruiting research. We synthesized and explained the content of the most sought after relevant digital resume fields by recruiters: career status, desired job, education, work experience, extracurricular activities, skills, personal information and contact information.
This research provides two new resume fields beyond what is found in the existing academic literature: career status and desired job. Both of these categories provide useful information for recruiters using resume databases for searching and matching. “Current career status” makes it virtually effortless to quickly sort out applicants that are not suitable for the open position, and “desired job” gives the recruiter information as to whether an applicant would be actually interested in an offered job. Further, we have represented the fields in a structured way that will enable design and development.
Despite the popularity of e-HRM (Ruël et al., 2004; Gueutal & Stone, 2005), the full potential of online recruiting is not being realized due to ongoing difficulties in matching and searching on resume fields. Filtering resumes and identifying suitable applicants, let-alone suitable applicants that are actually interested in the position, remains the same labor intensive, hit-or-miss process that it was in pre-digital times. In this study, we identified some of the reasons why this is the case, and proposed some solutions.
The knowledge representation framework and the insights gleaned from this exploratory study may aid in improved design that will enable recruiters to harness the business potential of the online resume databases in the future.
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Appendix A:
Largest e-Recruiting websites in the Netherlands
http://www.hrlog.nl/2008/10/06/hrlog-top-40-3e-kwartaal-2008, retrieved Sep 4, 2011 # url 1 http://www.monsterboard.nl/ 2 http://www.nationalevacaturebank. nl/ 3 http://www.intermediair.nl/ 4 http://www.totaljobs.nl 5 http://www.jobbingmall.nl/ 6 http://www.randstad.nl 7 http://www.volkskrantbanen.nl/ 8 http://www.uitzendbureau.nl/ 9 http://www.jobtrack.nl 10 http://www.jobrapido.nl 11 http://www.nuwerk.nl 12 http://www.tempo-team.nl 13 http://www.vacaturekrant.nl/ 14 http://www.stepstone.nl 15 http://www.werk.nl 16 http://www.studentenwerk.nl/ 17 http://vacature.overzicht.nl/ 18 http://www.werkenbijdeoverheid.nl 19 http://www.zoekbijbaan.nl/ 20 http://www.bijbanen.nl 21 http://www.luba.nl 22 http://www.adecco.nl 23 http://www.stageplaza.nl/ 24 http://www.content.nl 25 http://www.werkenbijhetrijk.nl 26 http://www.vitae.nl 27 http://www.studentenvacature.nl 28 http://www.studentjob.nl/ 29 http://www.megajobs.nl 30 http://www.maandag.nl 31 http://www.inoverheid.nl 32 http://www.mediavacature.nl/ 33 http://www.stagemotor.nl/ 34 http://www.yer.nl 35 http://www.careerjet.nl 36 http://www.loopbaan.nl/ 37 http://www.gemeentebanen.nl/ 38 http://www.brabantzorg.net/ 39 http://www.zorgselect.nl/ 40 http://www.eenbaan.nl/
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