For recruiters, the tools provide a better way to collect and filter information about candidates. For qualified job-seekers, the tools provide a better opportunity to stand-out from other applicants. And everyone benefits from the reduced "cycle time" from job posting to job hire.

Here's what you'll need to know about the new tracking tools; how to create a job-winning profile; and what to expect before, during, and after the process.

A New Way To Hire

The advent of the Internet revolutionized job hunting. Suddenly, prospective hirees had instant access to information about companies and job openings around the world. Job boards like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com offered a way to tailor their searches in minutes and resumes could be sent to hundreds of employers with the click of a mouse.

Of course, this technology also made the competition for jobs more fierce. Positions that may have attracted 20 or 30 resumes through the newspaper can attract hundreds of them electronically — a possible disadvantage to the job-hunter and not necessarily the boon to recruiters that you might expect. While the Internet has increased the number of resumes a recruiter might receive for an opening, the sheer volume of resumes accumulated by large companies — some with over 500 openings at any given time — have made finding the perfect match for any one of them that much more difficult.

Online Job Application Tools

Enter online pre-screening application tools. The tools were devised to help large companies better manage the deluge of resumes they receive, ensuring that all applicant information sent to them electronically is entered into their databases in real time and in such a way that each resume can be matched with any number of openings company wide.

Creating a Personal Profile

The key is a personal profile job hunters are asked to complete instead of simply forwarding their resume. Job seekers answer a standardized questionnaire and either enter or cut and paste their resume into their profile. Weighted criteria for experience, skills, and competencies creates a scoring system that pushes the most qualified applicants for any given job to the top of recruiters' lists.

The profile takes a little longer to create, compared to just forwarding a resume, approximately 15 minutes — but the questions are pretty basic. The specific questions you'll be asked will vary from site to site, but typical profiles will ask for such things as your name, address, educational background, clearance level, and if you'd be willing to relocate. If you are applying for a specific position, you will be asked to answer additional questions — to ensure that you have the necessary background for that job — i.e., familiarity with a certain software that you would need to use.

By creating a profile on our site, job seekers will increase the likelihood of a recruiter matching their profile to a specific opportunity with Booz Allen.  We recommend that in addition to creating a profile on our site, job seekers match themselves with a specific job opportunity.  This added step will increase a job seeker's chance of having their credentials reviewed against positions that interest them. 

Streamlined Process Benefits Companies and Job Seekers

"Some applicants are concerned that the information they send online will be lost in a 'black hole," says Alicia Mallaney, the project lead at Booz Allen Hamilton, a global consulting firm which now makes most of its hires through an online pre-screening application tool. "Actually, the opposite is true. Now, after applicants enter their profiles, they are immediately entered into our recruiting database, where recruiters can access the information and search the database for the best job matches in a fraction of the time it used to take them to sort through hundreds of resumes trying to find a fit."

In today's economy, a pre-screening tool is especially useful to hiring companies, because there is such a large candidate pool. According to a 2002 survey conducted by the Electronic Recruiting Exchange (ERE), 65% of the companies that responded use an online pre-screening process. Of those, 88% indicated that this process has made a difference in their organization by reduced turnover, increased teamwork, and higher productivity.

Job seekers who are the most qualified and suited for a particular job will have an added benefit if they are asked to submit a profile: The system will immediately note the match and push their names to the top of the recruiter's list. Without a profiling system, job hunters may not have the opportunity to answer the questions that would alert a recruiter to a match with a specific position, and their resumes could fall anywhere in a stack of countless others.

"The majority of people looking for jobs today are going to encounter some kind of pre-screening application process," Mallaney says, "and it's not something they're familiar with. Those who are used to sending out cover letters or carefully crafted resumes, will be challenged to find new ways to stand out."

updated September 2006