I just finished speaking with a long-time client who had a pretty straightforward question, or so she thought. She wanted to know if the results that she was getting from her resume searching efforts on CollegeRecruiter.com and other career sites was typical of the results that other employers get, better, or worse. Her suspicion was that she was not getting her money's worth from her resume searching packages because the majority of matches that she was seeing were of no interest to her when she scanned the search results pages, which display summaries of the candidates.

I asked her to provide to me some sample metrics so that we had quantifiable information with which to work. She said that when she first runs a search, she might get hundreds or even thousands of matches because she tends to start the search off broadly by only including their location and category. She'll then narrow the search results by adding additional qualifiers such as experience level, education, and keywords. She'll add those additional qualifiers one-by-one so that she can see the effect on the results. She usually saves keywords until the end because if she runs into a problem with creating a search that is too narrow, that's where the problem usually occurs.

When she's finished setting up the search, she's spent about 15 minutes and usually ends up with about 50 matches. Simply by scanning the search results, she can tell that about 75 percent of those are of no interest. They're a match because the objective criteria that she's entered lines up with the objective information that the candidate entered, but the subjective and objective criteria that she hasn't entered do not line up with the information that the candidate entered. So she's left with about 12 resumes to view. When she views them, she immediately dismisses about 75 percent of the resumes. She can understand why our engine matched them to her search and why she thought enough of the summary to view the resume, but her experience allows her to see that the candidate is not a good fit for the position. That leaves her with about three candidates to contact.

She said that when she contacts the three candidates, she's usually able to reach two and not the third. One of the two will be interested enough to come in for an interview but not the other. She usually hires about 25 percent of the candidates that she interviews, so a search like the above only yields a hire about 25 percent of the time.

So is my client good at searching? Based upon my conversations with other clients, I believe that her results are normal. Not great. Not terrible. But normal. What are your results like?