You Landed the Perfect Resume!
(But, You Missed It…)
Recruiting for the best talent in an industry is hard work. It is by no means a science, as much as many job sites, even recruiters themselves, profess to ‘have it down’, whether by their keen eye, or the software and tracking systems they use to make such determinations. Recruiting the best talent is, and will always be, an Artform. As advanced as Artificial Intelligence is today, it is not so sophisticated that it can replace what people see in other people, whom they strike a connection with, through which each side of the equation arrives at their decision to join the company or for the company to offer a person to join their team. Still, companies rely on such software, including roughly 90% of the Forbes 500 Companies, believing it to be more cost-effective, time-saving, requiring less manpower, and better able to target that perfect candidate.
Is the Current System Working?
According to a LinkedIn, only about 10-15% of applicants are qualified for the jobs they apply to based on their valuation system of matching candidates to job openings. This is based largely on the results of the algorithm that looks to match specific qualifications from a candidate’s profile to the necessary qualifications and skills of the job posting.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ready-stand-out-dont-let-high-numbers-applicants-hold-you-back/
Still, companies continue to receive hundreds of applicants for nearly every job opening and face the challenge of determining which among them may be the right candidate for them. As much as the various algorithms effort to weed out the truly unqualified, there are many highly qualified applicants that are also filtered due to a missing keyword or any area that may be stated differently than what the algorithm is scanning for. It is not yet the science companies believe it to be, nor what the largest job sites claim it is, and until then, a smart company needs to put in the work to do their own assessments to feel confident about those to follow up with and those to exclude.
The system in place for years has prompted a shift in the focus of many companies from examining the quality of the individuals in the candidate pool to simply ‘getting through’ what is often very high applicant volume. It has put the hiring process in a precarious position, victim to self-inflicted wounds, most often muddling through the hiring system in place instead of rethinking their approach and reallocating their budget or money and resources to something more effective.
If nothing changes, and companies and job-seekers continue leveraging the platforms and process most have been using, think about the numbers shared in the LinkedIn article above. Although 10-15% of anything may seem low on the surface, remember the average number of candidates a typical job posting brings to a company. The response is actually impressive, generating about 250 applicants. That translates to approximately 25 to 35 qualified applicants per posting, which is a great number of qualified candidates for a company to more seriously review and consider for the role they’ve posted. That brings us to the real challenge, which is the same challenge for companies, starting with how to work through what resumes were passed along from the software that may have already filtered out many candidates. Some questions the company has to ask itself:
- Did the right resumes get through to us?
- Did the algorithm, whether the job site’s or the hiring company’s, work to identify or exclude the most and least qualified people accordingly?
- Was our ‘perfect fit’ missed altogether due to missing keywords or differences in structure or phrasing, which happens quite a bit between the average homegrown resume and those done professionally.
These questions are among many that the system in place today that companies are using do not easily provide answers to, creating a great deal of guess-work, and second guessing, the process used to hire the right people. Let’s look at sourcing, and why the job-seeking and job-site industry specifically was started.
Sourcing – Not what it used to be
What most job-sites and recruitment teams agree was once the biggest challenge to good hiring, sourcing good candidates, is as important today as it ever has been. But it no longer means what it once did, nor does it reflect the current environment with how people conduct their lives today. The fact is people have become incredibly technologically savvy, not only willing to self-serve, and transact their business and much of their lives online independently, but increasingly preferring to do so. What we have seen for years, as both companies and job-seekers actively or passively look at opportunities, is that everyone is online putting their jobs, their resumes, and their interest in finding something or someone new. The long-held belief is that the only way to get candidates is to put a job on a big jobsite and let the candidates roll in. That worked just fine years ago, and still works in large part today to generate applicants, but it is far from being the best, nor the only, path to good hiring.
Social Media has become an increasingly effective tool for companies to put themselves out there, share who they are, what they do, and what they’re looking for as a means to build their brand and attract talent. Companies with a strong social media presence are able to save greatly on the cost of posting their jobs on multiple sites which often climbs into the thousands of dollars for monthly fees and pay-per-click options, and even more for priority placement, and other premium-type features and add-ons that many companies use. Whether all of the bells and whistles are used, or just a simple posting itself, the applicants flock and the resumes roll in. With a good social media strategy, which is incredibly low-cost to a company, the opportunity to gain significant interest in a job opportunity is much easier than it once was, and may ultimately shift from today’s ‘job site’ approach to almost entirely a ‘social media’ approach. In either case, Sourcing which once was incredibly challenging, is no longer the biggest issue as it relates to hiring. It is what to do with, and how effectively, a company can manage the volume of applicants that roll down the mountain like an avalanche.
The Overload Challenge
Recruiting teams and hiring managers often find themselves inundated with resumes and applications for open positions. This flood of interest is a testament to the belief in the necessity for online job boards, whether those with networking components or simply sites that post open jobs. While these tools have expanded the candidate pool, they have also created a dilemma for recruitment and a company’s talent acquisition and HR teams, now faced with the daunting task of sifting through overwhelming numbers of resumes. The result of this overload is a great deal of ‘skimming’ through resumes by those at the companies with the opening just to feel that they have given a decent measure of consideration to all applicants. But have they?
The industry average for recruitment teams to review a resume is 6 to 7 seconds. The likelihood that in less than 10 seconds any person can accurately determine the quality of a candidate, is slim to none. Thus, it is no surprise that this shortcut, while allowing companies to go through all resumes quickly, leads to missing many good, qualified candidates. Instead of reducing workload for the hiring team, and minimizing time to hire, it has the opposite effect on both. The more that good candidates are missed, the longer the job remains open, the more resumes that need to come in, and the more time needs to spent reviewing, even at 6 to 7 seconds apiece. Additionally, the lost productivity due to the rest of the team now responsible to care for the tasks of the open position until the new person is on board, as well as significant monetary costs to the business having to keep their job posting up longer along with pay-per-click charges, compounds the overall costs well into the thousands of dollars.
Overall Cost & Impact
- Time & Manpower as it does fall on specific people from HR and TA teams to the department lead hiring for the role. The time a hiring manager spends on the hiring process is time not running the team which, even with the best partnerships and cross-coverage and leadership comes with a cost in productivity.
- It can’t be understated how quickly a hiring manager can be spread too thin, impacting a team’s ability to complete projects, and deliver products and services on time during this time period.
- Overworked Recruitment/HR Teams are victims of their own process, or more accurately the process they, and many, have adopted with the belief it is the right, if not only, way to go to hire people. As rounds and batches of resumes flow into these teams, such a high percentage are quickly, often too quickly, dismissed prematurely. The quick thought may be ‘great work getting through all of those’, but it only serves to perpetuate the broken process that leads to the increased need for more resumes and more candidates, many of whom will again be passed by without sufficient inspection and consideration. For companies hiring at a higher rate, overwork easily becomes stress and burnout, which brings greater negative impact and productivity loss to a business.
Despite all of the negative impacts that can result from the current process of hiring, most companies would be willing to accept it without change if it yielded the right candidate consistently. Without closer inspection of how well it is working by the companies paying for and managing the outcome of their job postings, the system will stay in place, which will continue to lead to the actual biggest cost to both companies and job-seekers in the end – Missed Talent.
- Missed Talent: Highly qualified candidates often fall through the cracks due to a lack of time for proper evaluation. Resumes that are substandard or poorly worded may be dismissed prematurely, causing companies to lose out on potentially exceptional hires. These candidates might not excel at resume-writing but could excel in the roles they’re applying for.
- The hurried dismissal of candidates based on surface-level inspection, is the byproduct of an overworked team feeling the pressure to not only hire quickly, but to get it right. Of course speed and accuracy the goal for everyone, but it does put the average recruiter in the difficult position of ‘trying to be too precise’, and only consider those resumes that include the perfect keywords, much like the algorithms do. Until that is achieved, the posting remains live, and the cycle of skimming more and more resumes continues. This only delays hiring, continued missing of great candidates, many of whom are very likely to have already come to them amidst the original batch of resumes received.
Where Change Begins
The first step of any change, whether in business or in life, is to acknowledge the need. The recognition and awareness of a problem, or a challenge that can be improved by driving change is the only path to improvement. While the industry is made up of companies and job-seekers, the companies are the ones paying the bills, and thus in the best position to drive change. As a business, think about what goes into your hiring in today’s hiring environment:
- The monetary cost is significant; Higher than it needs to be
- Resources used to manage the process is greater than most companies are staffed to handle
- Overload on those responsible internally to lead the process reduces productivity and creates stress and burnout
- Other avenues like social media, show that there are other options to solicit interest in a job opening
- A bad hire is too easily put on the newly hired employee, rather than examining the process used to bring in the candidate. Was it just a poor fit, or was the process used to identify the candidate inaccurate? Without proper review of both the candidate and the process, the likelihood of knowing and determining whether there is reason for change, will only maintain the status quo.
Reaping What We’ve Sown
An article by the Harvard Business Review cites industry data that suggests only about a third of companies even look at the process they are using to hire.
https://hbr.org/2019/05/your-approach-to-hiring-is-all-wrong
This makes sense, and reflects the ongoing cycle where an avalanche of resumes are being sent to companies for each job posting, where upwards of 90% are shown to be unqualified or under-qualified candidates. Thus everyone is stuck in a process that yields little success for all involved. The same article also shows that approximately 40% of companies have opted to completely outsource hiring, which puts what most would agree is the most important part of the success of a business in the hands of people who are paid to get candidates, while bearing little responsibility for how well they may work out.
Overall, it makes perfect sense that hiring is an ongoing struggle, creating chaos for businesses, and frustration for job-seekers and hiring managers. With only a few forward-thinking and innovative companies looking to change the process, each of whom faces an uphill battle to drive change and unseat the job-site industry giants, the system will not change. This unfortunately for those truly looking for career movement, or looking to bring in that perfect fit candidate, is exactly what the job-site industry wants, which is to maintain the status-quo. All of the bells and whistles, the ‘easy/one-click’ applications, cutting-edge systems to perfectly match candidates to jobs, and the ‘networking’ components, appear more like a smokescreen than a value to the user. It seems designed to lull everyone to sleep, clicking away, and paying all the way, hoping for good things to happen. Until enough people and companies can snap out of this dream-state and see just how ineffective the system used today actually is, it is hard to picture real change coming anytime soon.
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