Resumes can emphasize the wrong data for screening. As a result, candidate pools shrink because recruiters use inappropriate yet conveniently available data.
This makes for an easy query but isn’t necessarily an effective way to find the best candidates. The following video explains more about what absolutely to avoid in resumes:
Resumes have made life difficult. Example: Company A. This company had historically received 500 unsolicited resumes through the mail each year.
After putting an “e-mail your resume here” button on their website, they received about 5,000 unsolicited resumes the next year. No changes were made in recruitment advertising…
The unintended consequences were resume spam, higher candidate expectations for communication, data storage and retrieval challenges, and the need to create a labor-intensive, manual process to sift through large numbers of resumes.
Now let’s look at Company B: This company’s Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) database averages 1,200 resumes per opening/hire.
Through searching and screening, they found that, in most cases, only about 15% of candidates meet the minimum qualifications. The unintended consequence was that the remaining 85% of the resumes placed a significant demand on recruiting resources.
Time and dollars are spent on irrelevant data, increasing the cost per hire. In addition, this volume of poor-fit resumes increased data storage costs, placed greater demands on the search engine, and expanded the scope of maintaining data quality and usability.
The industry’s current response is to create more complex methods for searching resumes rather than changing or eliminating the resume. This has led to more sophisticated ways of trying to discover candidates who are a good fit for the job, even from data that is of little value for predicting job performance.
At a national conference of employment specialists, a VP of Recruiting for a large firm expressed delight in resume cloning. Her example was having the ‘black box’ find perfect resume matches for a long-term valued employee who needed to be replaced. However, what does a resume say about 15 years of context knowledge, collaborative relationships, applied learning, and cross-functional teamwork?
Not much. Application Tracking Systems (ATS) and Candidate Relationship Management System (CRM) vendors are touting that they can search for and find the needles in the haystack. That’s how recruiting agencies work. A more appropriate approach is to build a process that only lets needles into your applicant flow and then helps you find the best needle. Resumes are a poor vehicle for this model.
Grasping New Capabilities. Many practitioners are still looking for the elusive silver bullet, but it doesn’t exist. Instead, we suggest a multi-method approach that combines screening and assessment to create an objective path for candidate flow and decision support.
Screening can use standardized, scorable questionnaires on work experience, minimum qualifications, specialist knowledge, and biodata. Knockout factors can help quickly remove those candidates without key qualifications. Especially for those just starting out in business, this can affect interview success.
Self-scheduling software can advance candidates into an online or proctored assessment session. Assessment science has evolved into simulated work samples and virtual job tryouts. These methods can embed situational judgment, reasoning skills, and workstyle preferences to yield a person-job fit score.
Candidates find this approach more engaging and job-relevant than submitting resumes into the black hole of job postings. Based upon assessment results, recruiters can then invite best–fit candidates into the interview stage.
At this point, the resume becomes useful and valuable as context to guide the interview in a face-to-face meeting. Job applicants should, however, research the company well. That’s key!
Case in point, one organization freed up two days per week per recruiter for resume sifting and phone-qualifying work by automating the screening and assessment process for one position. The resume was fundamentally removed from the front end of the process, and decisions to advance candidates were made on more objective data.
The recruiter spent little time with candidates until after they completed four levels of interactive, two-way information sharing. The quality of hire went up, time to fill went down, and the interview-to-hire ratio went down. As a result of this change, the recruiter’s job underwent a major transformation.
Recruiters shifted from administration (searching, sorting, and phone tag) to community relations (building the employment brand to improve sourcing). They use the resume to guide the interview, a more appropriate use. Now, instead of searching for needles in a haystack, recruiters are pulling needles from a pincushion, dealing with fewer but more qualified candidates.
We aren’t there yet. While the opportunity exists to embrace new capabilities, practitioners are slow to adapt. For example, in a 2023 survey of recruiting professionals, 65% of respondents said they had an online application, yet only 5% said they had a scorable application. This also counts for high-paying positions in basic industries.
On the surface, this suggests that online computing power is still underutilized. When we merely migrate papers to digital forms, we do not benefit enough from the power of online media. Assumptions that use the resume as the basis for screening assume that the listed experiences predict the best candidates.
In fact, experience is proxy data for underlying skills, abilities, and competencies. Resume experiences are more subjective and less consistent. This data falls prey to the spin and document word-smithing so common in resume writing. People often question faking work style or personality profiles, yet rarely doubt wordsmithing and inflated resume experiences, so make sure your interview is professional. That matters!
Christian & Timbers recently published research findings indicating that 23% of executives had misrepresentations on their resumes.
I would bet next week’s paycheck that resumes are more distorted than how a candidate responds to a work style profile questionnaire, scorable biodata, and situational judgment questions.
A key Anecdotal Point: College career centers help with resume wording that increases the likelihood of being found in a resume search.