February 19, 1999 Web posted at: 8:30 p.m. EST (0130 GMT) by Perry Glasser

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Have you modified your resume to be "scannable" by OCR software? Yes No View Results

(IDG) -- HR Directors weep about churn rates of 20 percent to 30 percent for high-skill positions. Searches for middle- and upper-level managerial candidates can drag on for months. "Typically, we try to complete an executive placement in 90 days," says Jeffrey Leon, managing director of Russell Reynolds Associates Inc., an executive recruiting company in New York City. "But it's not unheard of to have the cycle run as much as six months."

Entry-level employees with hot technology skills demand—and receive—salaries that are double and even triple their age in thousands per year even though their most recent working experience was to organize a bake sale that sent the marching band to the state finals. In fact, last June HR Magazine reported that 30 percent of computer-related vacancies take a half year or more to fill.

When such statistics abound, it is easy to forget that the so-called staffing crisis—not to mention a national unemployment rate under 4 percent—is a crisis of skills, not willing workers. In hot labor markets such as Boston, Silicon Valley and Houston, every job announcement draws a ton of resumes into the mailroom.

The hiring problem: Can you separate the gold from the dross quickly

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Overburdened human resources executives have begun to smile through their tears at what seems to be a made-in-HR-heaven solution. By coupling scanning technologies with optical character recognition (OCR) technologies, the résumés that cascade into companies can be stored digitally and read electronically.

A sharp laser eye can identify the top 10 or 20 candidates by searching for key words that match the skill requirements of the position. Those resumes can then be delivered digitally to your desktop or on paper to your desk. Better yet, if you find the thought of one more mechanized process in your office too overwhelming, you can outsource the whole operation.

At a June 1997 HR management conference in San Diego, more than 300 vendors eagerly displayed résumé-scanning systems and services. The HR management tools arena is a buyer's market.

But while OCR programs perform well at searching for key words such as database, manager and sales, smart applicants know the limits of these programs. And the cagier among them are not above using that knowledge to their advantage. Job placement services are advising folks on how to catch the computer's eye with scannable résumés that feature no graphics, simple fonts and a key-word box that lists hot skills.

If you're amenable to reviewing such résumés, remember that allowing a computer to take the first pass at culling through résumés will be sure to garner premasticated, fully homogenized candidates who know how to feed the scanner what it wants to eat. Meanwhile, the credentials of the possibly creative and eccentric types who might breathe fresh life into your workplace wind up shredded on the HR office floor.

Are you willing to forego seeing the applicant who indicated managerial history while some OCR-savvy tyro put the more obviously searchable word, manager, in the key-word box? No machine can read cover letters; no machine will discover a flash of personality. Do you really want an applicant pool that has imp