The ever present resume still remains an essential part of any hiring process. Yet, as an accurate source of predicting job success, it ranks among the lowest. Resumes do have a place, albeit small, in the hiring process. They are a great tool for screening out candidates on a high-level go or no-go decision. They are good for telling you whether a candidate has the required needed-at-entry experience, and whether they can organize written information. But that’s about it.
Consider the following scenario: a restaurant is looking for a Culinary Manager with experience working in high-volume fine dining establishments. This position is not a training ground, so this person needs to have all of the previous experience necessary to perform the functional aspects of the job. In addition, they need to be service-oriented, fit with the team, think critically on their feet, successfully plan and direct activities, coordinate assignments and schedules, coach, develop and motivate staff, make decisions and resolve conflicts. A manager reviews a resume where the candidate’s previous experience is only with waiting tables. No thank you, I will pass. Another resume comes through and the candidate is a current Kitchen Manager at a competing restaurant. It’s a dazzling, well-written, organized resume. Score! But is it really?
What’s wrong with bringing this candidate in for an interview based on that information alone? Besides the fact that interviews take critical time you don’t want to waste on candidates that are not truly vetted, well…just about everything.
What did this resume tell you about the candidates’ emotional intelligence, culture fit, attitudes, behaviors, motivators, ability to manage people and make decisions; i.e. how will they execute your brand? Resumes are unstandardized self-reported information, making it hard to consistently assess candidates.
It’s well-known that a large percentage of candidates tend to embellish information on their resumes, and even if someone has performed the functional requirements of the job, a resume won’t even tell you if they have performed them well. In a nutshell, resumes contain lots and lots of unreliable information that can lead to some seriously invalid assumptions.
There are so many missed opportunities to gather critical information about candidates between the stages of resume and interview. First, resumes can be useful for screening on basic qualifications. Create a checklist or scoring form for rating resumes. In our example, kitchen manager experience in fine dining would be useful for screening.
Second, and most important, one of the most proven effective and efficient ways to gather that information and leverage your decision-making power is to integrate assessments into your hiring process. Hiring assessments that have been designed to measure those characteristics most important to job success will drastically improve your odds of finding someone with the right fit, attitude, motivation and behaviors that will enhance your brand. Almost 100 years of research has proven exactly that – appropriately used and validated assessments have proven to be the most predictive tools for evaluating job performance. Put your seemingly perfect paper candidate through a battery that measures these soft but critical requirements, and they may not look so perfect after all. Find one that has all of the experience you need plus all of those characteristics, well…now you are talking!
Hiring assessments can absolutely help identify the right employees – but they are just one piece of the entire hiring process. Designing on effective, structured hiring process can be a daunting task – so we’ve developed an eBook to help you through the process.
Featured image photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash