The legality of key word search as a personnel selection tool

One of the most difficult problems that companies face when they use Internet recruiting is the volume of résumés that they may receive. This large volume of résumés along with the pressures to identify the best applicants have caused companies to use electronic scanning to sift through the résumés and identify those key words that may relate to the qualifications required for the job. Résumés that contain the desired words are selected for further evaluation while those that do not have these words are removed from the selection pool. As such, key word search (KWS) performs as a selection tool. This paper examines KWS as a selection tool and the strategies that can be used to improve its validity.