At this point you probably guessed the lie. In truth, vending machines are 2.5x more likely to kill you than a shark. I can’t wait to see that horror movie about killer vending machines comes out!!
It’s a common misperception that applicants just want the quickest and easiest applicant experience. Yet study after study disproves this assumption.
Does the application process need to be a reasonable time to complete, absolutely. Studies show that any applicant experience over 15 minutes will result in losing more than half of your applicants. I would suggest making it 10 minutes or less on average. When is the last time you personally took and timed your own applicant experience, both on desktop and mobile?
In this article (link in the comments below) data suggests that job applicants overwhelmingly see value in assessments. 94% of respondents said they felt assessments demonstrate their potential to succeed in a job either “very well” or “somewhat well.” Résumés just don’t tell the whole story!
74% of job applicants agree that assessments are a great way to highlight their full potential to employers, with 45% “strongly agreeing” and 29% “somewhat agreeing,” while only 6% “somewhat disagree” and 3% “strongly disagree.”
In addition, non-white job applicants were more likely to “strongly agree” that assessments demonstrate their potential beyond their experience and better their chances of getting noticed. Only 31% of white applicants “strongly agree” while 60% of Asian applicants, 47% of Black applicants, and 42% of Hispanic applicants “strongly agree.”
This disparity also holds true with younger applicants. 53% of applicants under the age of 25 “strongly agreed” that assessments demonstrate their abilities, while only 26% of applicants 55 and older felt the same way.
This is all great information, but here’s the conundrum…how do we have a reasonable (10 min. or less) applicant experience time-to-complete, that is easy, mobile friendly, and assesses qualifications for 100% of applicants equally?
Why?
If you have hundreds of applicants to shift through, can you say you screen everyone? Do you open each resume one by one? Do you have time to do everything else you need to do or do you turn into a professional resume reader?
When you read through, are you just looking for keywords? “Proficient in Excel”, what does that mean? What is the context? How do they compare with others who are “proficient”? What about those folks who are great at their jobs, not so great at writing resumes, shouldn’t they be considered if they have the right skills? How would you know who you’ve missed?
Resumes are FULL of sources of bias (age, education, assumed gender and ethnicity). Training and experience can help you with conscious bias, sure, but unconscious bias? It’s, you know… unconscious. It creeps in to your process right from the start. It shouldn’t.
Only using resumes because you don’t know what else you’d use?
Check out SmartRank. Resume-free screening is the future.
We’d love to debate about it, objections are very welcome.
Too many times in business, people want massive results with minimal effort or a willingness to try something different.
Resisting change is hardwired in our brains because we perceive change as risk. Thousands of years ago that thinking probably served us well, but we’re not facing the same threats anymore.
One of the areas I consistently hear people wanting to solve problems is talent acquisition. Almost universally I hear talent acquisition practitioners lamenting about the fact that they never have enough time. And I understand why. Tons of manual & tedious tasks, manually reviewing résumés, back and forth with hiring managers and applicants, and the list goes on and on.
For all the talent acquisition professionals out there….if you want meaningful time savings then you have to come at that problem with a different level of consciousness. For example, don’t try to figure out how to review résumés faster (“same level of consciousness”), instead just stop reviewing résumés all together!!!
If you have been in business long enough and been through a recession or two, you are probably familiar with the phrase, “we need you to do more with less.” We all know what that means. You are expected to do more work, as if you didn’t have enough on your plate already, and because times are tough, we also can’t pay you more money for that extra work. Well that seems like a raw deal.
There is no department that may feel this pain more than talent acquisition (TA). As a recession looms over the economy, we’re already seeing layoffs. While I will admit that the traditional business models of the past have been flipped upside down these past years, a recession usually means higher unemployment. Higher unemployment means more applicants applying to jobs.
Unfortunately, TA teams are some of the first to see downsizing as companies slow or halt their hiring. While this seems like it makes sense to have a smaller team when hiring slows, that’s not the entire picture.
First of all you have backfills when people quit. Next you have some companies that cut their TA teams at a faster rate than their slowdown in hiring. For example you cut your TA team by 50%, but only slow your hiring by 25%. Lastly, these TA teams have way more applicants to look at because of higher unemployment.
Worst of all, when we come out of the recession these teams are not equipped to handle the massive hiring expectations that companies put on them. And now the TA teams are being blamed for not hiring fast enough.
TA teams need a game-changing solution that TRULY (not marketing jargon) enables one recruiter the ability to do the job of many. That solution needs to solve BIG problems by addressing the root causes.
Last but not least, if you are one of the companies with a hiring freeze or a slowdown in hiring, and you are kind enough to not downsize your TA team, then this is the absolute best time to implement new solutions. Get ready for the market turnaround because it will be here before you can blink. If you don’t implement new tools and processes now to address the hiring onslaught that is inevitably coming, it’s going to be too late because everyone will be too busy to solve the big problems!
If you are a Talent Acquisition leader and your team is still using resumés to assess talent, then you should ask yourself some important questions….
How innovative is our talent acquisition process considering we still look at the same type of document to assess talent that have been used for the past 100 years?
How much time (honestly) do I think our recruiters and hiring managers spend on each requisition reviewing resumés, going back and forth about qualifications so we can find the “right” resumés, and interviewing non-qualified candidates based on resumés?
Are resumés really the most effective tool for assessing talent?
How much context, specificity, objectivity, and sometimes accuracy is missing from the resumé?
When screening applicants using resumes is there really much more than just keyword matching between resumés and job descriptions? Related…how ambiguous are our job descriptions? What does “knowledge of…” and “experience with….” really mean?
Is it fair to expect a recruiter who has likely never done the role for which they are hiring, to be enough of a subject matter expert that they can identify top applicants by quickly looking at a resumé?
How happy do I think applicants are about having to provide a resumé every time they apply for a job?
How can I honestly improve our DE&I initiatives when we are still using the single biggest source of unconscious bias, the resumé?
What type of feedback loop and data are we using or analyzing to better predict qualifications that are relevant for each requisition if we are using resumés as our input data?
