As our CEO wrote last week, finding talent in today’s economy is far from a cake walk. She described the challenge recruiters and hiring managers face when they are processing sometimes hundreds of applicants every day. Think of the problem this way: How do you affordably and effectively find the perfect new employees, when these people are needles in an ever-expanding haystack of applicants?

To keep with this metaphor, some recruiters are responding by tossing out whole sections of the haystack. Huffington Post, in Disturbing Job Ads: “The Unemployed Will Not Be Considered,” reported last week that some employers are telling potential candidates who aren’t currently employed to go look elsewhere.

Here’s an excerpt, describing one of the employers that the Post checked out for this story:

Qualifications for the job [this employer posted] are the usual: computer skills, oral and written communication skills, light to moderate lifting. But red print at the bottom of the ad says, “Client will not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason.”

If this practice results in hiring the right person, that’s terrific. But our experience has been that there’s a better way. Especially in this “buyer’s market” hiring climate, there are some extraordinary workers who don’t have an employer right now. You may even be passing over candidates with qualities you can’t find in their employed counterparts. For one thing, they might be more open to discussing pay levels that currently-employed workers would turn down.

Of course this begs the question, How often are the unemployed truly great finds? I have no idea, but would love to find out.

(Here are my thoughts on how a larger, older company might test this theory out. Find the most valuable employees with the company today or have recently retired, who have been with the company for roughly 25 or 30 years. Ask them if they were unemployed the year when they were hired, in the early 1980s. The likelihood they were is greater at that time in U.S. history because that was the last recession of this severity. In December of 1982 national unemployment topped off at over 10 percent. If these veteran employees said yes, they were unemployed when your company hired them, you’re looking at someone who turned into an amazing hiring investment.)

At the risk of bragging, let me tell you something that our VoiceScreener clients tell us constantly: Our voice asset management (VAM) application allows employers to handle large volumes of applicants without completely overlooking some great people.

VoiceScreener helps focus on worker merit

I say this having talked to dozens of applicants directly, during my stint as customer service director for HarQen. They told me how our web-based voice interview process gave them the freedom to do one or more of the following:

• Say things about their experience and approach that can only be expressed during a phone interview (and can now be recorded for recruiters to review and share!)
• Participate in their VoiceScreener sessions when they are at their prime — something especially important for agency creatives, third shift healthcare professionals, web developers and other pros who can keep extremely unconventional hours
• Demonstrate their phone skills and ability to verbally persuade

What’s most exciting about VoiceScreener is how our clients create a new (if you’ll pardon the word) meritocracy. Recruiters and hiring managers can look at candidates through a completely different lens than if they have only a resume as their source material.

It’s true that in this world what you see is usually what you get. However, VoiceScreener gives you the power to see additional qualities that would be completely missed if you pushed away candidates who didn’t look good on paper. The system allows you to quickly and efficiently review the qualities that truly matter in a candidate — regardless of their current employer or work situation.

Graphic courtesy of zsrlibrary presented under creative commons license.