Before a comment of my own, and in fairness to Mr. Boersma who I don’t know from Adam, here is the departed post in its entirety

“In an effort to cut down on the significant increase in unqualified candidate traffic, ResuWe Employer companies can charge job seekers $25 to apply to a job.  ResuWe Employer clients have been asking for this feature to reduce the time required to sift through countless resumes and to ensure each job applicant is pre-qualified.

Here is how it works:

Job Applicant views a job online and uploads resume.  Resume is parsed and job specific algorithm determines the candidate’s percentage fit.  Job seeker can only apply if they are a 75% match or above.  Candidate is than prompted to answer up to 8 specific job related questions.  Provided the candidate is a 75%+ fit and answer an acceptable amount of the questions they can apply for the job.  Candidate than is allowed to pay for the application.

What’s the benefit?

Once the job application is complete the job seeker is able to view a dashboard which gives them detailed analytics about each applied job.  On this page the job seeker can view how many total candidates applied, how many people at the employer company viewed their resume, where the company is in the job search (how many interviews) and view feedback from the company hiring managers and human resources.  Companies also have a limited number of applicants who can apply to each job…so the job seekers knows he/she is one of several (versus hundreds of) candidates.

In addition, the job seeker who lands the job receives a sign on bonus of 50% of the revenue from each job.  For example, if the company maximizes 25 applicants for a job at a cost of $25 per applicant the job seeker earns a sign on bonus of $312.5 paid on their 90th day of employment (25×25=625/2=312.5).

To learn more about ResuWe and our innovative line of recruiting software products visit our website at: www.resuwe.com/“

First, I don’t know what a “job specific algorithm” is but it sounds like a keyword matching masquerading as something more technical than that. As far as “candidate’s percentage fit” goes, I suspect that is a similarly meaningless turn of phrase.

Unfortunately, one of the last things that should be used to measure a candidate’s “fit” is a paring of keywords from the job posting to the resume, or vice-versa. If it isn’t bad enough that the majority of job postings are nothing more than regurgitated job descriptions that fail to articulate who the “ideal applicant” could be, or what the real nature of the job is, most resumes are similarly nondescript as far as revealing a candidate’s true make-up and possible fit, job-, organizational-, cultural-, departmental-, or otherwise.

I have yet to see a resume accurately reflect the required attributes over and above “job-fit” as defined by matching keywords. What about the person’s behavioral style, core attitudes and values, cognitive ability and problem solving skills? What about general, corporate, industry and cultural types of disposition, demographic profile, documented results and past achievements, true motivations and underlying interests, and blah-blah-blah? And even if all that could be conveyed on a resume, could you trust it? I doubt it.

Based on this assertion then, only allowing people who score 75% or better to proceed is no more certain to skim the cream off the top than it is to sink the dross back into the applicant pool. Keywords are keywords, nothing more and nothing less.

As far as eight knock-out questions go, bravo! Why not just start with that as the first step in the screening process and have done with all the job-specific-algorithm-vendor-speak? Hey, you could go really bonkers and have the language in your job-posting help people self-select before hitting the apply online button. How’s that for innovative? Or maybe I’m just missing something in ResuWe’s value proposition. Again, I don’t think so.

“Provided the candidate is a 75%+ fit and answer an acceptable amount of the questions they can apply for the job.  Candidate than is allowed to pay for the application.”

I love that: the candidate is “allowed to pay for the application.” Not invited, not encouraged, not prompted, not requested, but “allowed”…to pay!  Well, tank you, tank you, Bwana! Tank you, ResuWe employa sa!

Assuming we have managed to get through the preliminary meat-grinder what is our validated candidate greeted with? A dashboard with detailed analytics about each job applied for. Brilliant, very engaging.

The candidate is not only treated to seeing the number of candidates in the offing for each job [and perhaps he or she is the only one!] but also the employer’s arse-backwards thinking if they do play that stupid “standing room only” game. After all, if this process is designed to ensure only the best qualified candidates get through, why limit the number to be shortlisted before we’ve decided who among them is unacceptably fat and/or ugly and/or too old? That kind of discriminating judgment requires eyeballing everyone…unless there’s an algorithm for that too.

Truly, I cannot say that having $25.00 or not qualifies a surviving candidate for anything other than highly questionable judgment.  Anyone who has posted on the TheLadders can attest to the fact that, more often than not, the only difference between post-and-pray and pay-to-play operations is the amount of money a candidate believes they should have to shell-out for intercession. Baksheesh has no bearing on a candidates credentials for the job.  For employers, “pre-qualification” should mean grease the skids, not grease my palms.

So, on the “my-algorithm-is-better-than-your-algorithm,” and the “your-50% bonus-reward-is-in-heaven” posturing, who can say if this more crap being shoveled onto the ATS compost heap or if there is anything truly innovative here? I am afraid I was lost at “charge job seekers $25 to apply to a job.”

I visited another of the author’s interests, Laguna Source – a search firm that showcases ResuWe. It appears that another innovation is having candidates apply for jobs that could easily be scraped from any number of other places. Now, of course, I could be wrong and I am happy to stand corrected, but it would be a clever move to dull the mind of an unsuspecting candidate with the enticement of a really great job to then whack them for $25.00 to offset the cost of marketing them to another client or even an unrelated employer, don’t you think?

Oh, Monsignor Recruitomatico, what are you suggesting? Surely not everyone is as self-indulgent as you!

On the same day Jim Stroud posted his interview with Sumser, Shally Steckerl posted his reflections on his year doing the conference thing, linking to one of the posts I wrote on the subject: From the Frontlines to the Home Front: A Different Kind of Conference!

The lessons learned form all this? Well, altogether too many for a quick missive but the most important lesson was maybe this:

Those of “us” who are bound by the niceties of political association, cliquey affiliation, fat-cat business, product to push, thought-bleedership, social status, blogebrity or whatever — those of us who collectively make up the industry’s self-appointed infrastructure — need to get out more. There is nothing quite like seeing 98% of a Roadshow audience — representative of the local recruiting community — bemused by talk of the social networks, blogging and search engine stuff to put things in perspective. Video resumes? Give me a break! Skype? Isn’t that a skin disease?

In a hard, hard world where people still run help-wanted classifieds and equate sourcing with Monster page views some of us could do a lot worse than get to know the people who we are supposed to be serving, then actually serve them — why not?

Lesson learned? Hit the road, Jack — or whatever your name is!