Inside Human Resources Departments
A typical Fortune 1000 corporation processes thousands of electronic resumes a day. Medium- and small-sized companies have also become increasingly dependent on the electronic transfer and storage of resumes, as they hook up to online resume databases or outsource job fulfillment to recruiters who use resume databases. Even nonprofit organizations receive more resumes through email than ever before.

This deluge of e-resumes requires companies and recruiting firms to employ data entry keyers to get the e-resumes into their databases uniformly. Let's look at what that data entry process entails.

Getting E-Resumes into the Database
E-resumes are entered manually into the company's resume database. Each resume is pulled up on a computer screen by the data entry keyer and, if necessary, cleaned up (e.g., the data entry keyer may group information such as name and contact information in the proper order and correct any misspelled words). Then the data entry keyer creates a database file for that job candidate, and copies and pastes information from the e-resume into the pre-assigned fields in the database file.

Depending on how the database is designed, there may be fields of the following types:

Source code (indicating how the candidate learned about the job)
Requisition number (or req number)
Name
Mailing address
City
State
Zip code
Phone
Email address
Education

After this information is transferred into the candidate's file, the resume itself is copied and pasted in its entirety into a field called something like “Body of Resume” or “Resume.”