Resumes are dying

Did you know that the average recruiter spends about six seconds reviewing each resume?

Yikes. If you’ve worked in recruiting or talent acquisition, this should come as no surprise. The average job opening receives as many as 250 applicants, so it only makes sense to rush things.

However, it’s more than a time issue. More and more talent acquisition experts are realizing that resumes don’t actually help us select the right candidates. When we don’t select the right candidates, we suffer from poor employee engagement and retention.

We might hire someone who turns out to be a bad fit for the role – and they drag down the performance of the team. Profits and productivity alike fall short.

Maybe a candidate leaves after a few months. Now we’re back to square one, and we’re losing precious time while we scramble to make another hire.

There’s a better way to hire – but first we have to understand where we go wrong in the first place.

Resumes Are Not Strong Predictors of Job Success

Resumes are helpful for learning the basics about a candidate, but their value ends there– hence why we say resumes are dying.

Take education, for example. We may rank candidates by quality and quantity of education. However, education has been proven to provide only 1% predictive ability for job performance! A degree from Yale might look awesome, but it provides virtually no insight on how well someone will perform in a role.

Relevant job experience is a more significant metric, but is still of limited value.

In fact, researcher Frank L. Schmidt noted that work experience was only a useful metric up to 5 years. After that, professionals learn at a much slower pace.

In other words, it is highly difficult to ascertain whether a candidate with 15 years of experience is really any better than a candidate with 7.

We Need Better Candidate Selection Tools

So we’re not recommending we get rid of resumes altogether. It’s nice to have a condensed summary of a candidate’s skills and experience.

However, it’s high-time we moved past resumes as a focal point in hiring processes. We have to incorporate other tools to ensure we’re getting a good look at the people we’re bringing in.

Interviews are helpful in this process, but they still only leave us with 34% predictive ability (and that’s if you are doing everything right). Without other tools for selecting candidates, we’re taking a huge gamble every time we bring someone on. That’s no way to run a business – especially when the cost of a bad hire is at least 30% of the employee’s starting salary.

With People Analytics, We Can Better Predict Success

If we want to make great hires, we have to learn more about our candidates. Interviews and resumes only take us so far.

When it comes to understanding how a candidate will behave in a role, mesh with a team, and align with a manger, we resort to guesswork. We go by our gut. And then we wonder why new hires don’t work out.

When we rely on guesswork, we misalign employees with the above elements. This is an issue, as these misalignments are the most common reasons why an employee will be fired or quit.

That’s where people analytics comes in. The resume is dying, but we’re strong believers in behavioral and cognitive assessments. We like to talk about how there are three parts to every employee.

The Three Components of Every Employee

The briefcase is their professional history, skills, education, etc.

The heart is their motivations, their drives, what they care about and what they enjoy.

The head is their cognitive abilities, such as how they process complex information and how quickly they can adapt to change.

The briefcase is what we learn about someone through interviews and resumes. When it comes to the head and the heart, we’re usually in the dark. We hire for one third of a candidate – but the whole person shows up to work.

With behavioral and cognitive assessments, we can get hard data on these parts of a person. We can make decisions based on science, not just what our gut tells us.

Making Hiring Decisions Based on Science

When combined with structured interviews, these assessments almost double our ability to predict the success of a candidate compared to traditional methods.

When we know how a candidate behaves in the workplace, we can predict whether they’ll be a good fit for a team. When we know what motivates a candidate, managers can properly encourage them to drive better performance. And when we have details on their cognitive ability, we can determine whether they have the mental capacity for a demanding role – or even whether they’ll be bored with a role that’s too repetitive.

In short, with the aid of scientifically-validated tools, we can better predict whether someone will be successful or not! It’s an invaluable tool for hiring and candidate selection.

People Analytics Allow Us to See the Whole Human Being

Resumes are dying– and that’s OK. People analytics give you a deeper understanding of the candidates, which means better hires. With better hires comes better engagement, higher retention, and stronger performance. In short, it enables organizations to reach their full potential.