How many of you have landlines? Maybe I should have first asked how many of you remember landlines?
At one point, it was all we had. You had to hope someone was home when you called them or you left a message on their answering machine (separate device). Sometimes you had to wait at home if you were expecting a call. You had to fight with your sibling or parent about using the one phone line in the house…unless you had a fancy household with multiple lines.
From the time the telephone was invented to when we finally forced it into retirement the foundational technology evolved very slowly and only with small incremental changes.
Then we started down this path of “mobile phones” but they were the briefcase car phones or “Zach Morris phone” (bonus points if you understand that reference). But it wasn’t until the late 1990s that mobile phones became mainstream. Since then, the technology has evolved quickly and with unbelievable innovation.
We’re at an inflection point in the talent acquisition world where we desperately need to make this move from reviewing résumés (old fashioned corded phones) for screening talent to automated applicant screening technology like SmartRank. It’s more efficient, more effective, less biased, more applicant-friendly, and makes the hiring managers happier.
The old fashioned telephone was a great tool and helped us for many decades. Resumes were our best tool for screening talent for many decades, but it’s time to embrace the newer and better way of screening talent. It’s time we bring job applicant screening into the 21st century!
Does anyone remember Netflix when they first came out? In the beginning they had a slightly different approach to renting movies (at the time DVDs). They would ship the movies to your house and you would ship them back. It was a decent idea. They got rid of late fees, had return envelopes to make the process easier, but they were also hemorrhaging cash and almost out of business. That’s why they approached Blockbuster Video with the hopes of being acquired for $50M. Blockbuster declined their offer, and the rest is history.
It wasn’t until they made the pivot to streaming that they truly became the disruptive Netflix we all know today. Why? Because they finally tossed out the status quo thinking of “needing an actual DVD” and began thinking how they could be fundamentally different.
True disrupters are rare, even in this technology-driven world we live in. But every once in a while a disrupter like Uber or Netflix comes on the scene at the right time and completely changes our world.
There is no department that needs disruption more than talent acquisition. Every other department in business like Sales, Marketing, Finance, etc. has upgraded their tools, technology, and processes over the past 25 years. It is time for talent acquisition to do the same!
At SmartRank we believe that we have the innovative ideas and technology to disrupt the talent acquisition market because we:
1. Ask a lot of important, detailed, and sometimes difficult questions to uncover the most important problems
2. Identify the root-cause of those problems
3. Put ALL assumptions, opinions, status quo, and the “way things have always been done” type of thinking to the side
4. Accept early objections and criticisms of our ideas because they are so different
5. Understand that sometimes it just takes time for everyone else to see the same vision
If your disruptive technology doesn’t scare people a little, then you aren’t even trying to be a disrupter.
“Our process is perfect, no need to make any changes.”
If you can say that you:
– Screen 100% of applicants ?
– Never ghost anyone ?
– Have hiring managers who are happy and engaged ?
– Consistently hire the right candidates with record time to fill ?
– AND have eliminated unconscious bias from screening ⚖️
Then you are right, that’s a pretty ideal ?.
If you can’t say all of those things yet or if you’re using 2023 to improve your hiring process… You might want to consider the underlying cause that you’re struggling.
RESUMES.
Using resumes as the main source of truth and building your process around them is a thing of the past. It is 2023, we can and should do better.
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.
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?
While many companies are making great strides towards implementing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) initiatives across their respective organizations, DE&I progress on the job applicant screening and selection process has still been largely ignored. But why? In one word…resumes!
Resumes influence recruiters and hiring managers both consciously and unconsciously. There are over 20 different documented biases that people engage when reviewing resumes. These include affinity bias, halo effect bias, contrast effect bias, recency bias, and many more. A simple Google search will show you multiple studies that prove these biases have real statistical impacts for job applicants.
These biases come into effect with resume attributes such as name, college attended, college not attended, year of graduations, previous employers, etc.
And yet the resume continues to be the most commonly used tool for screening applicants. How are companies addressing this?
Training and awareness: while these are great practices to implement, they are not going to completely solve the challenges associated with unconscious bias…because the bias is “unconscious”! In other words, people don’t know they are doing it
Artificial Intelligence: this is a can of worms I don’t want to open here, but I would encourage people to do some objective research on this topic. Many companies that sell resume scraping AI technology will attempt to prove that their algorithms are not biased. Some of these algorithms are extremely biased and some are less biased. Again, a simple Google search will show you plenty of studies on this topic. There are a lot of factors at play here such as the data they are using to teach their AI, the input data, how the algorithm works, and the person that wrote it. One thought for consideration is that algorithms are written by humans and humans are inherently biased
Resume “masking” technology: this is where companies invest in a solution that “masks” or removes the attributes (e.g., name, graduation dates, etc.) that typically create bias. This is certainly the best option, but unfortunately it is the least adopted
If companies really want to address DE&I, then they should start at the very beginning of the process, with how they are screening and selecting applicants for interviews. However if companies continue to use resumes for screening, and don’t mask any of the information that typically creates unconscious bias, then this problem will be very challenging to solve in the near future.
Yes, you heard that correctly, we’ve been using resumes for almost 540 years, or maybe even longer! Leonardo da Vinci is credited with drafting the first resume back in 1482 to get a job with the Duke of Milan and we are still using resumes today. At this rate we are literally more likely to have the human race step foot on another planet 245 million miles away before we stop looking for keywords in resumes.
Tell me if this process sounds familiar as a recruiter:
Step 1 – intake meeting, find out needs, wants, knock-outs
Step 2 – create, edit, or use an existing job description to identify keywords
Step 3 – go into the applicant tracking system (ATS), pull up the job vacancy, then open up each applicant in chronological order one at a time and open their resume
Step 4 – look for keywords in the resume that match the keywords in the job description
I realize I’m generalizing the process, but for most companies, I speak with, this is basically how it goes. Not only can this process be inefficient, but it can also be equally ineffective.
Recruiters have so many tasks they need to complete each day and going through resumes one-by-one is just plain time-consuming. They could make better use of that time by doing more passive recruiting or spending more quality time with qualified applicants.
What do these self-authored documents tell us about a person? Not much. Sure, resumes tell us where an applicant worked, what they did, and sometimes what their results were. But they are lacking the real context and objectivity usually needed to match a person to a role.
Let’s say your job description is looking for “proficiency in MS Excel.” You find a resume and sure enough it states, “highly proficient in MS applications, including Excel.” Eureka, we have a match!!! Or do we? The problem is, humans and even artificial intelligence can’t tell us what that applicant meant by “highly proficient.” Highly proficient could mean they know how to create Power Pivots or it could mean they know how to open Excel and put numbers in the cells. Unfortunately you won’t know until you ask the applicant.
Unfortunately for applicants, we don’t ask every single one of them detailed screening questions about every requirement because that would take way too long. Sadly we often miss the opportunity to ask detailed screening questions around requirements to candidates coming in for interviews. The risks of not getting this level of detail from applicants can be very expensive.
I think if he were alive today, even da Vinci himself would tell us, “it’s time to let the resume go.”
