Industry sector: Energy efficiency

By Katie Johnston Chase
Globe Staff / December 14, 2009

WESTBOROUGH - Every time recruiter Sharon Gilbert rejects a job candidate’s resume, it weighs on her.

“You’re changing somebody’s life a little bit,’’ said Gilbert, director of recruitment for Conservation Services Group, an energy efficiency company in Westborough.

And with as many as 578 resumes flooding in for a single opening, Gilbert has had to click the reject button a lot more than she used to. One person applied for 35 positions between February and August and landed three interviews, but was never hired. But the worst part is turning down overqualified applicants, such as the former chief financial officer and bank executive who applied for a $60,000-a-year financial administrative position that involves processing invoices and filling out expense reports.

“It breaks my heart, honestly,’’ she said, “because I know that they just need a job, but I feel like they’re not going to be happy.’’

With 10 percent of the country looking for work, human resources professionals are bombarded with applications - as many as six to 10 times more than before the recession, by some estimates.

And this big pool of candidates does not make hiring any easier. More interest means more applications to comb through, some of them from people with little experience in the field who are desperate for a job.

And dealing with disgruntled job seekers who want to know what happened to their resume is only part of the problem for HR staffers, many of whom also have to deal with layoffs.

Sometimes, applicants don’t even seem to want the jobs they have applied for, said a Boston University employment specialist, Shawn Flynn - they just want something, anything, that will pay the mortgage and fulfill the state’s unemployment insurance requirement to make three work-search contacts a week. But this scattershot approach can backfire, said Flynn, who has talked to candidates who do not remember that they have applied for the position he is calling them about.

“It definitely makes the job harder, because you’re trying to find out if the person not only is a fit for the position but if they’re really, truly interested in the position,’’ Flynn said.

Some people apply for several jobs at once at BU, which has about 241 job openings, and when Flynn calls a person back about one of the lower-level positions, the candidate will immediately start making a pitch for the better-paying job. Rushing to apply for as many jobs as possible leads to more mistakes, as well, he said - misspelled words, half-thought-out answers, cover letters with the wrong job title, or no cover letter at all.

Erica Pellegrino, a human resources representative at Faulkner Hospital, can weed out the resumes that don’t fulfill a job’s requirements in seconds - a skill that came in handy when 800 newly graduated nurses applied for four nursing positions last summer. To keep up with the demand for the 40 open jobs Faulkner currently has, Pellegrino has started logging on to work after she gets home at night and giving candidates her cellphone number.

The prevalence of layoffs has also changed the way she reads resumes. The term “present,’’ for instance - as in employed “May 2008 to present’’ - does not necessarily mean the applicant still has that job. “People don’t want to put that they’re laid off on a resume,’’ she said.

This fuzzing of the facts raises a bit of a red flag for Pellegrino, but she doesn’t hold it against them. “I think it’s kind of the new reality,’’ she said.

Another new reality: Two jobs in two years no longer indicates a job jumper; it shows the applicant may have been laid off.

Gilbert, 39, joined Conservation Services Group, known as CSG, in July to be its first director of recruitment. After doing some jobs in both accounting and recruiting, she realized she was more of a people person than a number cruncher and made the switch to full-time recruiting 11 years ago.

Dealing with people who are out of work means she hears a lot of sad stories about layoffs, as well as about moves made to accommodate elderly parents, sick children, and divorce.

“Their resume really is the story of their life,’’ she said. “Before you realize it, you know everything about them.’’

CSG, which conducts home-energy assessments, has doubled in size in the past three years, to 550 employees nationwide. Last month, Gilbert had a hand in hiring 20 employees. Working from home, she can go through as many as 300 resumes in a day, often finishing at around midnight, sitting bleary-eyed at the computer after she puts her 6-year-old son to bed.

Gilbert zeroes in on the tiniest details when she dives into the mountain of e-mailed resumes for the company’s 60-plus open positions for regional program directors, air-sealing technicians, and everything in between.

A term as secretary of a Maynard dog owners’ group included under the heading “leadership’’? Gilbert laughs, and moves on.

Dean’s list in 2002, at the top of a resume in 2009? It probably means their recent work history isn’t that impressive.

Gilbert tries to give everyone a chance, though, even the Raymond man who listed his oldest job first - UPS driver from 1985 to 1997 - which at first made her think he had not worked in 12 years. But she kept looking and, sure enough, at the bottom of his resume she saw that he ran a weatherization company in Uxbridge - good experience for a different job than the one he was applying for - and she printed out his information.

Forty-five seconds into a promising resume, Gilbert gave up when she could not find any dates of employment. In the past, she might have sent an e-mail to get more information, but these days she doesn’t have the time.

She tries to find five or six candidates to send on to the hiring manager for each opening, and her least favorite part is calling back the ones who don’t make the final cut. A generic thank-you-for-applying e-mail goes out to the people she has not contacted directly, some of whose resumes she never had a chance to look at. Nearly 300 people applied for a $12- to $15-an-hour receptionist position in Westborough, for instance, and she didn’t get past number 92. But the applicants don’t need to know that, she said.

“I don’t think they want a note saying, ‘Thanks for your resume, but I didn’t have time to read it.’ ’’

Katie Johnston Chase can be reached at johnstonchase@globe.com.
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