You Have a Résumé? How 2010 of You

“The internet has led to the widespread availability of social profiles and data, making it easier than ever before to identify qualified talent across the web,” says Leela Srinivasan, CMO for Lever, a recruiting software company. That data volume has spawned a generation of tools for proactive sourcing and candidate generation.

Recruiters find job candidates from many sources, with referrals naturally remaining the most effective source of quality hires. But social networks are now the No. 2 way for people to find a job; 56% found a job using one, according to a 2015 Jobvite survey.

When is the last time you took part in a job interview—on either side of the desk—without using a search engine? If you’re considering hiring someone, you do a web search to learn more about him. You look at his blog posts, his social media profiles, whom you know in common on LinkedIn. That raises issues of personal privacy and changes the way some individuals conduct themselves online, such as posting messages about politics only using a pseudonym.

On the other hand, it also means a hiring manager can discover important information about a candidate before she even knows she’s a candidate. Employers and recruiters find candidates more easily using technology and can perform quick research on a potential hire. By the time the phone interview comes around, the employer knows the candidate’s accomplishments in detail.

Eyes-Open Employer Research

The visibility also works in the other direction, given that would-be employees have an equal opportunity to learn about the company. According to a Harris Interactive Survey for Glassdoor, two-thirds (67%) of employers believe retention rates would be higher if, before taking the job, candidates had a clearer picture of what to expect about working at the company. That’s more than gossip about promotion opportunities and company culture. “Job seekers need a deeper level of understanding of the hard and soft skills needed for success,” says Karl McDonnell, CEO of Strayer Education. “They also want to know about the company’s identity and how it connects to the industry at large.”

“It’s never been easier for candidates to explore a company’s employer brand and find out what it’s really like to work there,” agrees Lever’s Srinivasan. “Rising demand for technical and highly skilled talent, coupled with supply that doesn’t meet that demand, has made this a candidate’s market.”

More Ways to Strut Your Stuff

Everyone hates to look for a job. Even when you’re confident of your skills, the application process and job interview experience is stressful. The way we present ourselves during an interview process (perhaps displaying uncharacteristic shyness) might not be who we are at work, 40 hours each week. However, the ability to demonstrate our expertise online (deliberately or otherwise) can sidestep much of that painful experience.

Today, it’s easy to demonstrate one’s unique skills and interests and share achievements. Someone who contributes to an open source project can share a link to his work on GitHub. Writing a blog shows where a techie’s interests lie, demonstrates an ability and willingness to write and communicate, and creates a professional network within its reader community. Quora conversations in which a programmer explains how she’d solve a problem permit a recruiter to identify the people who know a subject in depth—and to reach out to those individuals to gauge their interest in a new job.

Another aspect of online participation is in learning new skills and supplementing a college degree. Need a new programming language to qualify for the coolest new jobs? Anyone can turn to coding boot camps or more formal training through massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as Udacity and Coursera.

That gives everyone more educational opportunity in terms of useful knowledge, and also should enable us to find better jobs—assuming that employers recognize that “education” isn’t only acquired from a brick-and-mortar university. “The companies with the massive advantage will be the ones who can figure out how to hire engineers without relying on traditional channels like résumés and pedigree,” says Aline Lerner, CEO of interviewing.io, which provides a bias-free platform for interviews.

Paying Attention to the Wrong Signals

“Credentialing, or the standardized type of information we can use to predict good hires, is changing particularly quickly,” says interviewing.io’s Lerner.

How do we know that someone is good? Often, we look for affirmation from applicants’ previous experience, starting with their school grades. That’s particularly true of high-tech fields such as programming.

Established fields such as law and medicine have credentialing exams (the bar and the board, respectively). But, Lerner points out, “Software engineering is an extremely young profession. In lieu of well-established credentialing methods like exams, employers have had to rely on an evolving series of proxies”—primarily a college degree from a top computer science school. “Where someone went to school is lauded as the gold standard when companies decide whether to interview a candidate,” Lerner says.

“Many employers recruit from the same 10 to 20 colleges and use GPA cutoffs. Why? Because it’s what they’ve done, and they believe GPA is a predictor of performance,” agrees Koru’s Hamilton. “But there’s a great deal of research to show that GPA isn’t a predictor of performance; it’s just an easy signal to grab. From a great deal of primary and secondary research, we know that performance is not just cognitive and technical ability, but also noncognitive skills.”

That’s reflected in both job performance and in the separate skills of getting-the-job attributes. “At interviewing.io, we regularly track how well candidates from all walks of life perform in technical interviews,” says Lerner. “After thousands of these interviews, it’s become clear that a college degree has no correspondence to interview performance.”

But when businesses look only at graduates from top schools, they miss out, says Harj Taggar, CEO of Triplebyte, which does skills-based recruiting. “Companies complain they can’t hire enough great people while only looking within a restricted pool of candidates,” says Taggar. “They miss out on great people who didn’t go to a name-brand college or work at a well-known company.”

Replacing Relationships with Impersonal Technology

We’re all attracted to shiny things, especially in high-tech fields. That includes technology that purports to help us hire the right people. But the first thing lost is a personal relationship. None of us are SEO terms, buzzwords, or database fields: yet so many “solutions” treat job applicants as if we were.

“What works, as either a candidate or hiring manager, is surprisingly low tech,” says Stephen, a software professional. “What’s broken, as either a candidate or hiring manager, appears to be anything high tech.” For example, he’s been spammed by recruiters who found one key word on his LinkedIn profile that matches something in a job description. “This is obviously an automated process on their end, as any human would see that I’ve never held a relevant job title for 90% of the positions I get spammed about,” he says. “Data analytics, automation, and machine-driven profile scraping are making this process terrible. There is a ridiculous amount of noise that technology is generating, and very little signal.”

“While finding people is easier, paradoxically it’s become harder to engage qualified talents, now that the novelty of receiving an InMail or email from a random recruiter has worn off,” says Lever’s Srinivasan. “The true art of recruiting is in building an emotional connection with the candidate. It’s the recruiter’s or hiring manager’s job to understanding the candidate’s motivations, listen, and encourage a conversation. “We may be drowning in technology and science, but recruiting at its core is still incredibly human and relationship-based,” Srinivasan says. “So, we’ve seen the rise of candidate relationship management—the other CRM, if you will—and solutions to help companies nurture, engage, and pipeline candidates for future roles.”

The result is that the people doing the hiring have very little intersection or understanding of those whom they aim to serve. It’s one reason they rely on proxies like college degrees and past employers rather than actual ability. “Recruiters are, generally speaking, not technical,” says Lerner. “Instead of relying on some internal barometer for competence, they have to rely on quickly identifiable attributes that function as a proxy for aptitude.”

One proxy for knowledge is to quiz job candidates on random knowledge that has no relationship to the “real world” of the actual position. Even well-known techies object strenuously to being asked to rattle off programming or networking trivia.

Diversity Is Hard

Plenty of data has demonstrated that product quality is improved when it’s created by diverse teams, and companies want their employees to reflect their own customers and clients. But the usual hiring practices get in the way of diversity.

“Recruiting has traditionally been a profession driven by gut feel and subjective judgment,” says Ji-A Min, head data scientist at Ideal, whose software uses machine learning to screen résumés and match candidates to open positions. Using subjective judgment relies in part on unconscious bias, which contributes to the lack of workplace diversity. “Studies have found that résumés with white-sounding names receive requests for interviews 50% more often than identical résumés with African American-sounding names; résumés with English-sounding names receive requests for interviews 40% more often than identical résumés with Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani names; and résumés with male names receive requests for interviews 40% more often than comparable résumés with female names,” says Min.

Diversity isn’t only about gender or skin color; it’s an effort to attract people with different viewpoints. “In the face of high volume and a lack of clarity of what really drives success in a given role at a company, teams can resort to hiring a former version of themselves,” says Koru’s Hamilton. “Employees have their own opinion on what drives performance and they hire to their own opinions. This results in inconsistent hiring and also hurts diversity.”

Even with an ostensibly level playing field, the other social changes benefit some communities more than others. Consider ageism: employers reaching out to candidates via social media (such as Twitter and LinkedIn) can get a chance to learn about the real person behind the résumé, says career advancement coach Lauren Milligan. “But it also tends to weed out older employees, who are not accustomed to running their job search through these platforms,” she adds.

Part of that “mini-me” is reflected in a reluctance to consider different work locations. “Leaders need to support and nurture diversity and countries need to make immigration easier so knowledge and the flow of ideas can thrive globally,” points out Karoli Hindriks, CEO of Jobbatical, a job search site that facilitates professionals going on one-year “job sabbaticals” to work at companies around the world. Because today, technology and infrastructure makes it possible to find and accommodate people from all over the world. Why place artificial limits on who can contribute?

However, several studies have demonstrated a distinct bias in hiring, even (or particularly) in tech firms, and it starts with problems in the technical interview. Writes Lerner, in You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview: “Though impostor syndrome appears to hit engineers from all walks of life, we’ve found that women get hit the hardest in the face of an actually poor performance.”

That’s backed up by an article in The New Yorker, which argues that “building momentum for social change is nuanced and painful and slow.” Worse, writes author Anna Wiener, those issues are reflected in the hiring companies’ products, such as a subtle gender bias entrenched in the data sets used to teach language skills to AI programs. Even if that bias is a representation of the real world, don’t we want to do better?

But Mostly: Automated Application Systems Fail Everyone

Online job postings make it easy for anyone to apply for a job—and that’s the downfall, too, because it’s so difficult to get noticed. Although the average job posting receives 50 or fewer résumés, a job posting for a high-volume role such as hospitality receives more than 250 résumés on average.

One of Koru’s clients received 12,000 applicants per cycle, and only reviewed about 3,000 of them to boil down to 120 offers, says Hamilton. “In addition to an inefficient recruiting process, only 44% of hires ended up as strong performers,” she adds.

With that kind of volume, most companies turn to application tracking systems (ATS’s) to collect résumés and cover letters, measure legal thresholds, perform a first-level triage (What salary does the applicant expect? Is she willing to relocate?), and, essentially, reject the obviously unworthy. The initial systems, little more than glorified digital filing cabinets, were designed back when hiring was a transactional, administrative task performed largely by HR, before CEOs talked about talent in the hushed tones that they do today.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with automating the initial sort—except that it doesn’t work effectively for anyone. Not for the HR departments, not for the job applicants, and ultimately not for the employer.

Creating Better Matches

Like many recruiters, Sharon Powers de Vries is always on the lookout for talented, loyal, successful, and passionate colleagues—many of whom are employed, due to that talent and loyalty. “It would be great to have a Match.com [for jobs] where everyone has a profile,” she says, which would let those people “date” other companies to find a perfect fit, says the talent recruiter at Referral Exchange. “I understand the downsides, as well, like poaching employees or encouraging job hopping,” de Vries says, “But it will give both employees and employers a better overview and understanding of what is out there.”

She’s not the only person to contemplate ways to improve the matching process between job applicants (even passive ones) and hiring firms. Several companies are developing solutions that rely on big data, AI, and other algorithmic tools. Some aim to replace the legacy ATS’s; others work in conjunction with them.

These vendors have many commonalities—and unique differentiators, as well.

Attract Job Applicants

You can’t throw a computer mouse without finding an article about the dearth of qualified techies available for IT organizations to hire. Usually that article is right next to an essay about the difficulty that techies encounter in finding jobs that pay a fair wage.

Nonetheless, quite a few companies promise solutions that aim to improve hiring firms’ ability to attract the “right” people to work for them. Frankly, some appear to be attempting to surf a buzzword wave (Gamification! Virtual reality!), but there’s value in the tools nonetheless.

For instance, a Dutch startup called IamProgrez demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Conference its gamification technology, which it claims can accurately profile millennials entering the workforce. IamProgrez measures everything from candidates’ soft and hard job skills to company culture and work environment to ensure that every business gets the employees they need, said Linda Frietman, IamProgrez CEO, in a statement.

For instance, an IamProgrez Ready4Work game operates within municipalities, with the intention of helping (unemployed) 16- to 28-year-olds start on the labor market with a measured and enhanced résumé and a more accurate view on the skills they possess. It promises: “Play company-specific games, designed with quests and challenges crafted to reveal the types of people they are searching for, and showcase your talents to enthusiastic recruiters: This is the world’s first gamified job interview!”

Another shiny tool for companies showing off their advances is virtual reality (VR). For instance, the British Army uses VR in its recruitment process, and Cleveland-based Lincoln Electric Holdings has used VR to let young people test their welding skills. Whether these are any more effective than interactive websites is yet to be seen.

However, it’s always a good thing to give job candidates accurate expectations of what a company offers its employees. One tool to assist in that endeavor is PathBoost, an online skills training platform that helps candidates learn the job-specific skills needed to land a position prior to applying and helps employers screen and train applicants prior to being hired.

“Job candidates click the PathBoost button from a company’s career page and gets started by building a virtual résumé,” explains Karl McDonnell, Strayer Education CEO. The job candidates can watch a series of documentary-style videos to learn more about the company, core job skills, mindsets, and behaviors needed to excel in the position, and interview preparation. They might also be asked questions along the way, with the answers sent to a hiring manager who gauges their fit for the position. If the story has a happy ending, candidates are invited to apply and schedule the date and time of their interview.

Improve Skills Assessment

After a business identifies which applicants are worth an interview, the next issue is how to judge whether which candidates are suitable for the open position. As discussed earlier, success isn’t guaranteed by someone’s attendance at a top school, college major, self-confidence in an interview, or ability to answer trivia questions. Nor is diversity served by testing how well candidates conform to an arbitrary measure of “team fit.”

What to do instead? These companies have several answers.

Changing the Human Process

Ultimately, most objections to the existing ways to hire people is that it removes any personal touch or compassion from the process. Some suggested solutions stress thoughtfulness rather than technology.

For example, Scott Wintrip, author of High Velocity Hiring: How to Hire Top Talent in an Instant (McGraw-Hill) and president of the Wintrip Consulting Group urges leaders to plan ahead and to line up talented people before they’re needed. “Instead of waiting until a seat is empty to search for talent, the new way of hiring starts the talent search before that job opens,” Wintrip says. That permits organizations to fill jobs the instant they become open.

Wintrip’s process includes creating blueprints for the ideal person for each job, generating a continuous flow of quality candidates who are ready to hire, and employing better interviewing methods to improve precision and speed. “An effective interview is a reality check—a real and efficient experience that allows an interviewer to see proof that the candidate can do the job,” he says.

HR specialists might know about legal thresholds and the best way to write a “We’re hiring!” tweet, but few of them understand the tech details of what a hiring manager is actually looking for. That’s how we end up with job requisitions asking for five years of experience in a technology that’s only three years old.

Chuck Solomon has one simple answer to reduce this frustration: move their chairs. “My bold proposal is for companies is to decentralize their recruitment departments,” says the recruitment strategist and cofounder of LineHire.com, a recruitment product. “Move their recruiters to sit with the departments that they support and make them part of the team, attend team meetings, eat lunch with team members, participate in team-building events, and most importantly have them report directly to the Team Leader.”

Doing so helps everyone in the company, says Solomon. “The recruiter will be a team member and not some faceless individual in a far-off office. A decentralized recruiter will get to know what the teams’ current and future talent needs are and can thus become more proactive in seeking the right talent. And finally, much of the ‘friction’ between all departments and HR will dissipate.”

Not everyone is in favor of machine learning solutions, seeing them as another impersonal barrier for the job applicant. It’s important to add a human element—or to add it back. (Coincidentally, these people often work in recruiting companies.)

“For large companies, automation is an efficient way to provide a simple first cut of applicants to see if they have the basic attributes for the job. At that point, the surviving pool should be turned over to recruiters who can then consider them carefully for hiring,” says Nicole Smartt, author of From Receptionist to Boss: Real-Life Advice for Getting Ahead At Work (Advantage Media Group) and co-owner of Star Staffing. “A recruiter adds the personal touch needed for job seekers.” For instance, a recruiter can send a personalized email message to let candidates know where they stand in the hiring process, or a candidate-experience survey afterward. A human has a better chance of remembering the person who wasn’t right for this job but may be a good connection for future openings, she adds.

“Salesforce does the hiring process well,” says Smartt. “They use recruiters to screen candidates, keeping hiring managers in the loop. The managers use Talentforce to review résumés and offer feedback. The managers then choose experienced interviewers who know the position best and can provide diverse perspectives on the role.”

It all needs to be part of a human process, not wholly automated. “Managers define who will cover which job competencies to ensure a consistent candidate experience,” says Smartt. “Afterward, managers meet with their team to integrate candidate information—same day if possible. At the end of the experience, Salesforce looks at every decline to find out how they could have made a more positive candidate experience.”

Ronni Beckwith, principal at ihouse, is another who seeks a balance between automation and personal recruiters. She oversees the strategic direction of the ihouse human resource information system. “You need personalization through networking to enhance your applicant pool, but you also need strong technology to automate the administrative work that goes along with the hiring process while ensuring compliance,” Beckwith says. “People are attracted to an organization’s culture. This culture needs to shine through during the recruiting process, whether it’s through the branding in the tools being used, personalized messages, or the conversations had with the firm.”

Another element in the job search is expanding the notion of who’s qualified for a job. For example, a help wanted ad that insists staff be onsite in the office can limit the organization, when telecommuting would enable the company to discover the right fit. (That’s a topic we explore in depth in another white paper, “The Remote Worker’s Survival Guide”.)

Nor should job seekers limit themselves. “The internet leveled the playing field,” says says Karoli Hindriks, CEO of Jobbatical. There’s an entire virtual world where anyone with an idea can start a business or make their voice known. “Jobbatical builds on that principle, translating the great level playing field into a global, physical landscape,” Hindriks says. Its platform connects employers with a database of 70,000+ tech, business, and creative professionals who are ready to relocate for the right career opportunity.

“As talent, you don’t have to have a trust fund, tons of connections who will help handle immigrations, or a nearly perfect passport to go abroad,” Hindriks says. You just have to be one of the best people in the world at what you do. If you have the skills and determination to be dynamite at your job, the world will literally, tangibly, be at your fingertips. Companies will pay you to take a trip halfway around the world, wherever you want to go.”

This also means that employers don’t have to relegate a talent search to the local market. “You can search the entire world for your next killer developer, designer, salesperson, or marketing director,” says Hindriks. “The power of this is unprecedented.”