If you are using staffing agency software to manage your firm, you should read this article to understand how having a resume formatting tool can immensely increase your bottom line.
In this article, we will talk about:
- What is a resume formatting tool?
- How much it takes to format a resume.
- Pros of using a resume formatting tool.
- Cons of using a resume formatting tool.
- The best online resume formatting tool on the market in 2021.
What is a resume formatting tool?
An online resume formatting tool is software that automatically formats resumes to match a designated template. Recruiters often format resumes manually to meet clients’ specifications and make resumes easier to read and review, but that’s no longer necessary.
Resume formatting tools are software applications or online services that help recruiters, hiring managers, and job seekers streamline the process of formatting and organizing resumes. These tools come in various forms, including standalone applications, online services, and plugins for existing software.
They can save time, improve consistency, and ensure that resumes are presented professionally.
Some key features and benefits of resume formatting tools include:
- Consistent formatting: Resume formatting tools help recruiters apply a uniform format to all resumes, ensuring that they are easy to read and compare. This consistency can help in quickly identifying relevant skills and experiences.
- Customization: Many resume formatting tools offer customizable templates and formats, allowing recruiters to tailor the appearance of resumes to match their company’s branding or industry preferences.
- Time-saving: Formatting resumes manually can be time-consuming, especially when dealing with a large number of applicants. Resume formatting tools automate this process, enabling recruiters to focus on evaluating candidates rather than spending time on formatting tasks.
- Integration with ATS: Good resume formatting tools can integrate with applicant tracking systems (ATS), making it easier to manage and organize candidate data. This integration can help recruiters streamline their recruitment workflow and reduce the risk of errors. For example, you can integrate iReformat resume formatting tool with Recruiteze ATS
- Parsing capabilities: Some resume formatting tools have built-in parsing capabilities, which can extract relevant information from resumes and convert it into structured data. This feature can help recruiters analyze and compare candidate information more efficiently.
- Export options: Resume formatting tools often provide multiple export options, such as PDF, Word, or plain text formats. This flexibility allows recruiters to choose the format that best suits their needs and ensures that resumes can be easily shared or uploaded to different platforms.
- Collaboration features: Some resume formatting tools offer collaboration features, enabling recruiters and hiring managers to work together on reviewing and editing resumes. This can improve communication and decision-making during the recruitment process.
If you are looking for staffing agency software with an advanced resume formatting tool, you do not have to go far. Recruiteze is the perfect small business online ATS with the most unique and advanced resume formatting tool available.
Modern online staffing agency software can provide the features to manage your jobs, candidates, notes, and communication. However, there are not many systems that can offer you accurate resume formatting tool like Recruiteze.
It takes an average of 20 minutes to format a resume
Yes, based on our survey, we have found recruiters taking anywhere from 5 minutes to 35 minutes to format a resume. Most recruiters do not even do resume formatting because of time restraints.
An average recruiter submits at least four resumes per day. So, you are looking at 80 minutes spent on formatting.
Here are some hiring statistics that will help you understand the funnel:
- 1000 candidates will see a job post.
- 200 candidates will begin the application process.
- 100 candidates will complete the application.
- 75 of those 100 resumes will be screened out by the ATS.
- 25 resumes will be seen by the hiring manager.
- 4 to 6 candidates will be invited for an interview.
- 1 to 3 candidates will be invited back for a final interview.
- 1 will be selected, and 80% of those offered will accept it.
Looking at these numbers, when you submit a resume to the hiring manager, you should provide a professional-looking one that is cleanly formatted. You can manage your staffing process through software; would it not be better if the same software can help you streamline your submissions?
Pros of using an automated online resume formatting tool
Now let’s discuss the pros of using an automated online resume formatting tool. Here’s the list of prons we will talk about in great detail here:
- Sanity saved
- Time saved
- Diversity and blind hiring
- Eliminating conflicts
- Automatization
- Branding
- Better hires
Sanity Saved
It hurts the brain to read dozens of resumes in a day that all look different. Between fonts, font sizes, order of information, date order, name order, and colors, each resume could have changed a great deal from the last, requiring the reader to regroup for each one.
One resume will have education first, then work experience, then skills, with the month first and the day second, and the last name first and the first name last. Then the next one could be the exact opposite. And the third some combination between.
And the colors and fonts, we won’t even go into that one.
And what if you are looking for an individual factoid? It’s so much more simple to just jump to a resume and find precisely what you want when the resume has been formatted in a template you chose or design.
It’s like boom; here it is. I know exactly where to look.
Time Saved
That mental regrouping mentioned in the last paragraph slows the reader down. Thinking is excellent when reading resumes, but it should only be thinking about the match between the candidate and the job, not sorting out their resume format.
Both the candidate and the business will benefit from allowing this extra time and attention to be devoted to what’s important.
A resume formatting tool also saves time if you’ve been formatting resumes manually. Talk about a mind-numbing task when you could be giving your attention to the candidate.
Staffing agency software that also has resume formatting tools can format resumes within 15 seconds. If it also supports email templates, you can format and submit a resume within 30 seconds. So, you are now saving more than an hour of your time.
When you have more time, here are some things that you can do to increase your bottom line:
- Increase the number of your clients. Tell them how you can differentiate by providing personal care and attention.
- Spend more time talking to hiring managers to get detailed job descriptions. Capturing thorough job, skill, team, and culture requirements are immensely useful to submit the best candidates for the position.
- Spend more time sourcing the best candidates for the job. Sourcing involves screening the candidates carefully to understand they have the required experience to work on the job.
- Spend more time talking to candidates. If you can speak to candidates, explain the job requirements better, and understand their capabilities. It helps build your relationship with the candidate. Also, it will help you submit the right candidate for the job.
- Faster submission. Resumes are reviewed in the order of receipt. So, the sooner you can submit, the better your chance of getting an interview for your candidate. The interview is what will finally lead to closure.
- When you do all these activities, it will increase your fill ratio. This positively increases your bottom line.
Diversity and Blind Hiring
Blind hiring is a helpful tactic in developing diversity initiatives, and a resume formatting tool can help you achieve it. However, if you aren’t familiar with it, blind hiring is a powerful way to tackle unconscious hiring bias, which is where someone is making discriminatory decisions about a candidate without realizing it.
The online resume formatting system can remove names, addresses, schools, and any other criteria that may be a tip-off for biases:
- Names can reveal gender and race.
- If the reader is familiar with the address given on the resume, they may automatically know the candidate comes from a poor or rich neighborhood or a white or black one.
- Schools can tip readers off to a candidate’s location and monetary status or give them an idea about their skills or intelligence based solely on the school’s reputation.
- You might end up with a horrible candidate who lied about their school or was an underperformer at a great school while another candidate excelled in a less than exciting school.
If you run this tool before reading the resume yourself, you won’t have a chance to even know the information before interviewing the candidate, so all the steps leading up to it cannot possibly be biased.
If you are sending the resume to another manager or a client, you can use the tool to remove this information before they see it.
Using recruiting software like a resume formatting tool also helps you prove your case if a question of discrimination arises.
Eliminating Conflicts
Have you ever sent a resume to a client’s hiring manager or let a fellow hiring manager see a resume and then had them call or email the candidate themselves when it was your job to do that?
This is just the sort of situation a resume formatting tool can solve. Innocent confusion or sheer untrustworthiness don’t have to be an issue if the other person doesn’t even receive the contact information. They can’t contact someone they don’t have the means to contact.
The online resume formatting system can do this automatically, so protecting your interests and the efficiency of the relationship or business is effortless, at least in this area.
Automatization
A resume formatting tool formats instantly.
No more wasted time doing nothing but confirming a resume to a set format. Some tools process resumes automatically upon their receipt, and others require you to upload others into the tool.
Either way, it handles many resumes in seconds while you do more important things like actually reading and considering a resume or planning a strategic, self-screening job ad.
Branding
The online resume formatting system can instantly add headers, footers, and watermarks to each resume a recruiter send to clients, providing powerful branding in an instant.
All you have to do is create the information to be added and input resumes into the tool. There aren’t mistakes, as may be seen if you manually add these to each resume yourself. Unless the errors are in the template itself.
Better Hires
People get frustrated, bored, and unproductive when doing repetitive tasks. What about when that repetitive task is also jarring?
You are going to get tired and just want to be done as quickly as possible. Who wants hiring to be this way?
The candidate would be horrified to know that the recruiter or hiring manager was so frustrated or simply exhausted that they made an instant judgment on their resume based on one bit of information or simply because they’re not even paying attention anymore.
In this situation, you are not getting quality hires because you can’t juggle reading this volume of unformatted resumes and get the hire processed fast enough to achieve the desired time-to-hire.
And it’s virtually impossible for a hiring manager or recruiter to read dozens of unformatted resumes in a day without reaching that point.
Cons of using automated online resume formatting tool
The downsides to using an online resume formatting system are few and easily avoided and discounted. They are:
- Wonky resumes
- Maintenance
Wonky Resumes
Not all resumes can be processed by the resume formatting tool.
Since this software is automated, it has set rules it goes by, and if a resume doesn’t fit its limitations, the resume can be discarded or formatted incorrectly. The latter could make the resume unreadable or at least very irritating.
Vendors are already working to eliminate the potential for this to happen. Also, websites and services that advise applicants on creating resumes will only be suggesting formats that will work with resume formatting tools that recruiters use.
The second solution involves changing some settings on your online resume formatting systems, such as the option to remove headers and footers. It can’t have a problem with these common resume sections if it isn’t asked to do anything with them.
The third option is to include tips on your careers page for creating resumes that work with resume formatting tools. If applicants have somehow gotten by the advice online and on your page and managed to create a resume that new, updated resume formatting tools can’t handle, then there isn’t much that can be done about that rare occurrence.
Maintenance
To ensure your resume formatting tool works as you want it to, you will have to check it periodically to make sure it didn’t discard a resume that you wanted. You could find resumes that look interesting but were overlooked because they were in a weird format and weren’t compatible with the software.
Over time, you’ll probably also just want to change things about your format. For example, you’ll decide a new option would work better than the one you’re currently using or want to use a whole new design.
This isn’t a biggie because it’s not hard to do. What irritation there may be in occasionally telling the software to do what your brain could instantly do is outweighed by all the time you’ll save the day in and day out by not having to manually format resumes yourself. This bit of effort will seem like absolutely nothing in comparison.
Conclusion
It’s essential to consider the pros and cons of an online resume formatting tool before purchase, as it is when preparing to make any investment.
There are many game-changing pros, such as saving time, money, and sanity and improving diversity and branding goals.
The cons are few and easily surmounted, amounting to a bit of maintenance and the potential that a small number of resumes may not be processed correctly.
The latter point can be corrected, so it should be a very rare occurrence and vendors do their best to address the potential for it continually.
The Best Online Resume Formatting Tool for 2021
Recruiteze is an ATS with which you can manage your:
- jobs,
- candidates,
- job portal,
- clients,
- hiring managers,
- schedules,
- notes, and communication.
Recruiteze, combined with iReformat can provide unparalleled efficiency by combining resume formatting with staffing agency software.
iReformat is a resume formatting tool offered by Recruiteze, that allows you to format a resume using pre-defined custom templates within 15 seconds.
In addition, a formatted resume can be submitted to the hiring manager within 15 seconds using custom email templates.
Now you can see how you can significantly benefit from staffing agency software combined with resume formatting.