Resumes are distracting you from finding great talent!
You want to find the right person for the job, but the hiring process is holding you hostage! Rather than enabling you to quickly pinpoint the best candidates, it’s forcing you to needlessly waste time and energy sorting through a pile of resumes, hoping you’ll stumble upon the right people. Worse, it leaves you at risk of filtering out great candidates and leaving you without a strong option.
The problem? The process starts with resumes not needs, and it’s costing you a lot of time and wasted effort.
The good news is it’s not too late to turn things around. The first step is to start by exploring what exactly is tying your hands.
The problem with resumes...
Imagine you want to buy a winter coat to keep you warm when it snows. But instead of establishing these requirements in advance and setting out to look for a coat that meets your criteria (like it needs a hood, made of wool, etc.), you do what you always do—go straight to the store to see if anything on the rack catches your eye.
By the time you’ve browsed every coat in the store, you’ve wasted half your day. You’ve also likely found yourself sidetracked by coats that aren’t what you’re looking for, but they’re so eye-catching! This raincoat doesn’t have a hood, but it seems really nice. That coat is made of quilted nylon when really you need wool, but hey, maybe it’ll work out fine. And then there are the impressive brands, stylish and enticing.
Before you know it, you’ve picked a coat that seemed great at the time—but when the first snow arrives, you’re left feeling the chill. Meanwhile, there are other coats that would have been ideal… But thanks to all the appealing but unnecessary attributes, you lost track of what you needed all along.
Crazy, right? Starting with a resume forces you to judge a person’s capabilities based on a piece of paper, making it all too easy to get sidetracked by something interesting but irrelevant (like what school they went to, or which prestigious company they worked at). By focusing on resumes, all those distracting tidbits will result in picking candidates that seem great at the time, but when it matters, could leave you out in the cold. People are a lot more complex than coats and resumes don’t even begin to capture the complexity of an individual.
So, let’s change our approach by focusing on the requirements without the distractions littered in resumes.
Requirements first, resumes later
Let’s go back to the winter coat analogy for a moment.
This time, let’s start by defining your requirements. What do you need in a coat? To keep you warm and dry while fitting with your lifestyle, it needs to be made of wool, have a hood, and be equipped with plenty of pockets. Now, when you hit the racks, you can quickly and effectively sift through all the coats, pulling out only the ones that meet your basic needs first.
With only coats that meet these needs to choose from, you can expand your criteria to include other desirable aspects like style, design, and comfort, whittling that list down to just a few top picks. Finally, you try your top picks on for size, safe in the knowledge that, whichever you choose, there are no wrong decisions—they all meet your needs.
Now imagine using this approach to hunt for candidates, evaluating them based on their knowledge and skills first before ever seeing their name or resume. This quickly and effectively sifts through the top layer of candidates, pulling out only the ones that meet your basic needs first. With defined metrics, you can expand your criteria to include other aspects and evaluate candidates with the hard skills, soft skills, and personality traits you need.
With a smaller batch made up entirely of qualified candidates, you can proceed to test the quality of their work and their fit with your culture, all before looking at their resumes and bringing them in for an interview. It’s efficient, cost-effective, and helps you make the right decision time after time, because the batch of qualified candidates already meet your needs.
At career.place, we’re pioneering this process. Our solution helps HR professionals fill roles faster and more effectively, all while safeguarding against unconscious and conscious bias. It isn’t like any other recruiting solution out there, and it’s not designed to replace any part of your job. Rather, it enhances your sharp instincts and masterful recruiting prowess, enabling you to make better decisions and empowering candidates to show you the best of what they can do.
Don’t let the resume hold you hostage any longer! Break free of reliance on the resume, and embrace a smarter approach. To find out more or to get started, contact us today.