This is a comment made to Lou Adler’s online article Why we should ban resumes! February 21, 2013
Lou Adler (@LouA) is the Amazon best-selling author of Hire With Your Head (Wiley, 2007) and the award-winning Nightingale-Conant audio program, Talent Rules! His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, is now available as an Amazon Kindle eBook.
Matching a qualified candidate’s resume to a job description is like sending a transaction through an application system with virtually no edits and expecting to store the results for effective retrieval and evaluation – NOT!
The root of the problem in my estimation of nearly 24 years of IT recruiting is that the hiring authority rarely defines the business challenges or opportunity to be measurably solved. Further, the ‘grocery list’ of requirements has little ranking such that a top candidate can be evaluated for the critical attributes while highlighting some professional growth for an otherwise employed professional to move.
In a correctly designed information system, the quality assurance testing is defined in advance of a line of code being composed. We even know the ROI of why we are even building that system over resources applied to any other. Historical hiring has been tantamount to creating a grocery list and going shopping when we aren’t even decided on what we are cooking for (a wedding or a funeral), and how the attendees will effectively be sated.
I’ve often joked that if people could pick people, there wouldn’t be a 50%+ divorce rate. More bewildering is experience doesn’t help in 2d and 3d marriages as the divorce rate only increases. Even the high costs of separating don’t seem to be a proper incentive for a better decision filter.
There is a multi-dimensional approach with proven success in my retained search practice that was based on my USC Masters work in decision science. A 100% success rate with this approach might bear considering. It all begins with the business challenges or opportunity to be measurably solved: http://tinyurl.com/amavn43
Comments are closed.