Maciej Bednarek

What does a traditional CV tell about a candidate?

You’re a hiring manager. You have carefully prepared a job description, your recruiter know whom are you looking for. Finally, after waiting for a while, you get a short list of best candidates. You browse through the CVs and have a feeling that they are all version of one and the same profile. Similar career, position names, skills. You start wondering “how am I to choose the best one out of them?” and maybe also wishing, that you’d have a wider choice. The question that’s lurking is, why do recruiters select based predominantly, if not only, on past experience & keywords?

Why do companies hire based on experience alone?

The answer is very simple – safety! By choosing a pool of candidates for a round of interviews, with “just the right experience” the recruiter is making sure the hiring manager cannot complain they’re not getting skilled candidates. And with all likelihood the job will be done with yet another similar colleague.

So why is it dangerous?

First of all this approach completely neglects the benefits of diversity. If the manager always hires people with a very similar background, the chances for out of the box thinking, innovative ideas or ability to adjust in times of change will be negatively impacted. There is so much research proving increased success (and typically less risks) with more varied teams: gender, age, skills, background, origin, industry etc.

2 predictors of success in a job

From my perspective there are 2 main areas a hiring manager and recruiter should focus on during the recruitment process.

Firstly: the brainpower. It’s the ability to think fast, to learn efficiently, to ask the right questions, to figure solutions independently that makes the difference between someone who’ll keep growing in the job, even if starting from a lower skill and experience level and someone who has all the experience for the job on day 1 and is ‘just doing it’. It’s the brainpower that allows a new employee to understand the tasks, learn how to do them, often improve the processes, and then teach them to their colleagues. All of that typically with a limited input from boss and peers, but with unlimited eagerness.

Secondly: the personality traits. How does the person treat direct reports or peers? Are they helping them become their best or are they micro-managers? Does the candidate have a sharing mindset or do they believe that knowledge is power and thus best kept secret? Do they respect other cultures, diverse minorities, other peoples’ opinions, animals? Are they environmentally friendly? To simplify, are they a genuine, compassionate, sharing and caring individual or a career-focused jerk, who from senior managers perspective is doing 200%, but due to the way they behave with peers and reports is causing massive (hidden) problems across the organization?

What shall we be asking the candidate to provide?

This of course depends on the position. In order for the recruiters / hiring managers to be able to actually have the time to assess each candidate the number of candidates needs to go down. I therefore think that the application process shall be more demanding – instead of 1 button let’s make sure that the candidate has to provide valuable information about their soft skills, past performance and capabilities. Why not ask candidates to solve a couple accounting problems, right a simple program, take part in a personality test or record a video answering the why / what questions? I think that the requirement to spend 15-30 minutes to apply is fair as long as there is a guarantee that the employer will also spend a fair chunk of time reviewing the application and not delegating the task to an ATS.

Outcome

The recruitment managers will have less applicants that way. But the ability to choose based on much richer profiles will more than compensate for the lower application number. And it’ll make the recruitment process so much more humane.