When resumes no longer serve the purpose: The way forward for employers

What was considered the typical way for candidates looking for a new job? Updating one’s resume, followed by sending it out to contacts and uploading it to various career websites or company career sites, wasn’t it? Well, unless you have been living under a rock, you know that those days are long gone!

Resumes with reams of text are no longer serving the purpose for organisations. It is the proverbial needle in the haystack situation. It gets increasingly tough, even with application tracking systems or ATS that help to sift and sort through thousands of resumes to find the right talent for your organisation. In fact, even good resumes sometimes fall through the cracks if the words used in the resume are not the right ones, leading to some of the best talent going unnoticed.

Though resumes have traditionally been used as the starting point for any job search, they do come with their own set of limitations. Let’s look at some:

• Resumes focus on experience over skills – Typically, resumes list out the experiences that the potential candidate has garnered over the years. However, the fact of the matter is that resumes with long, winding sentences listing out one’s career journey do not help organisations spot the top talent. The experiences listed do not really reflect the candidate’s core skills, strengths and personality.
• Focus is on the titles held by the candidates – Resumes also generally list out the various titles held by candidates during their stint at various organisations. At times, a title held by a candidate might not reflect the responsibilities that are being carried out by the individual or the skills and competencies gained by the candidate.
• Going through tons of resumes is cumbersome in the gig economy – Applications for certain positions can lead to an avalanche of resumes. Going through piles of resumes is quite a task even for experienced recruiters and talent acquisition specialists.
• Resumes leave scope for bias – Resumes might trigger bias against certain candidates, thus leading to unfair hiring practices. For example, candidates might gain favour or disfavour if they are from particular regions or are of a specific gender. Even the background of candidates, such as educational institutions attended, can potentially create bias. In addition, a break in one’s career (for reasons ranging from childcare to eldercare to pursuing higher studies) could bias recruiters against candidates who are otherwise highly qualified.

  

What can be done about these issues with traditional resumes? What is the way forward for employers when resumes no longer serve their purpose?

• Use tailored assessments

A tailored or customised assessment solution is a comprehensive set of exam software and services that is used to assess potential candidates and zero in on the right talent for a specific role. Vendors use their basic assessment solution and collaborate closely with the client to tailor the assessments as per client requirements.

At Hirepro, we offer customised assessments that meet the specific and unique needs of the client. As a hiring manager, you can use these assessments to test candidates on personality, aptitude, technical and domain skills and behavioural competencies.

• Seek proof of competencies and skills

Recruiters must seek proof of competencies and skills to find the most promising candidates. Instead of focussing on a candidate’s experience, hiring teams must deduce the competencies and skills that the candidate has gained through those experiences. These competencies and skills are what would stay with the candidate across tasks, projects and organisations.

• Embrace data-driven recruiting

Make smart hiring decisions based on a variety of data sources that go beyond the usual resume screening and interviewing. HR teams are now relying on data-driven recruiting to make informed hiring decisions, in turn reducing costs and improving hiring efficiency. Notably, with advances in technology, hiring teams now have at their disposal software that is able to predict the need for workplace expansion, trends in the workforce, a candidate’s longevity in an organisation, a candidate’s fit into a company’s culture and many other decision factors.

• Use algorithms

Developing suitable algorithms can help talent acquisition teams identify potential candidates who have similar profiles to those of the most successful past hires. These algorithms have the ability to evaluate resumes and job experiences and process behavioural compatibility and other attributes of every applicant in order to provide a score that signals their potential fit for given roles. The good news is that these algorithms even have the potential to eliminate unconscious bias while scanning resumes and accurately identifying candidates whose skill sets best match what is needed for every role, regardless of gender, race or other areas of diversity.

It is clear that the way forward for companies looking for stellar talent is to think beyond resumes. Game-changers that use the power of technology — customised assessments, data-driven recruiting and algorithms tailored for hiring — are helping organisations embrace the right talent and transform the way their workforce is recruited and sourced.