Drilling for talent

With the U.S. unemployment rate hovering just over 4%, competition for qualified college graduates is fierce. Oil giant Chevron is modernizing its college recruiting program, which had previously relied on paper-based input into mainframe hardware and software.

College recruiting populates this management-development pipeline, but Chevron's candidate recruiting process had been based on a system of manual, paper-based input into a mainframe system. That system--and those recruiting procedures--were ripe for change. Recruiters are sent to campuses in the fall based on the total number of job requisitions sent in from the various hiring organizations--refineries, chemical plants, oil field operations, laboratories and more. Dependent on the needs of the local Chevron facility, teams of recruiters descend on college campuses in the general area of the Chevron operation. Each recruiter may conduct up to 12 half-hour interviews in a day to derive a comprehensive grasp of the talent pool.

Under Chevron's old college-recruiting process, recruiters filled out an interview record by hand. This old way was based on their Candidate Tracking System, where candidate information was gathered on hand-written carbon forms, mailed to Chevron in San Francisco, then transferred to a third-party service, where the data was entered.

Chevron realized it needed a system where an electronic form could be e-mailed from field recruiters to the company's headquarters and immediately uploaded into a recruitment database. Position searches and matches could then be done and sent to relevant hiring managers.

Chevron has adopted a resume processing system from Resumix. The system has cut the time between producing the candidate records to transferring them to hiring managers. The file is input once and resides on the Chevron server. The process has shortened the time-frame between records received and relevant records forwarded to hiring managers.

As Mark Witzke, a college recruiting manager for Chevron explained, "Cycle time is critical --the students want to know as quickly as possible what your decision is. Using Resumix, we've cut two days off the cycle time. The recruiters just love not having to write in longhand."

"When those records come in to us, we run a search against the open jobs, which will have very specific requirements,” he said. “For instance, the Pascagoula refinery might need six chemical engineers with a GPA of a certain level, rated by the recruiter at a certain level, and might desire that the candidate be from a fairly local campus. We run the searches first thing in the morning, and forward any matches immediately to the managers.