Uiba is helping our clients and career seekers finally move beyond résumés and ATSs (applicant tracking systems). But if you are submitting your résumé online to a company who’s not yet working with Uiba, here are five things you should be aware of:

1st – ATS SMASH!

Puny Resume

 

If you’re applying to a large organization in either the private or public sector, and you’re planning on making your résumé ‘standout’ by using graphics, pretty fonts, split page formats, etc., PLEASE STOP! This is a huge mistake. I can’t emphasize this enough: HUGE. FREAKIN’. MISTAKE.

Most companies have what’s called an Applicant Tracking System or ATS as its commonly known. This is software, often very old software, that scans résumés and other applicant profile information for internal recruiters and hiring managers to use during the hiring process.

Basically, the ATS scans the résumé and anything on the page it can’t capture properly will be left blank, return errors, or be rejected altogether. Either way that résumé disappears down a blackhole.

So if you’re submitting to a corporation, large company, or government agency, the most boring résumé style is the most successful. That means stick with Arial, Courier, or Times New Roman fonts and stay between size 10 and 12 with black or dark gray (or grey if you’re in the UK) letter color. No pictures or symbols, including accent marks, umlauts, graphemes and the like, even if they’re part of your name. Keep the sections to the basics: Professional Experience, Education, Skills, etc. Reverse chronological is usually the best format. 1 page only. It’s not an autobiography so don’t go over 1 page and don’t make it a two sided document.

If you’re submitting to a plucky little startup or NGO or something similar, it might warrant being a bit more flamboyant with your résumé, but again – if the submission is being done online there’s a good bet an ATS is involved. Plus, after decades of use humans are trained in reading the standard résumé format, which is why LinkedIn’s profile is laid out the way it is: experience, education, skills, etc.

One last thing – please save and submit your résumé as a Word doc file if possible. Unless the application specifically asks for a PDF do NOT submit your résumé as a PDF because most ATS systems can’t read PDFs and they’ll be rejected.

2nd – Spelling. Kind of Important.

I feel your pain lil guy

 

Please spell correctly. Seriously. If there are spelling errors a number of the ATS systems (and most recruiters and hiring managers) will mark the résumé as ‘fail’ and blackhole it.

For many people English isn’t their first language but fortunately there are plenty of spell check options to use these days and both Word and Google Docs have them built in.

For those who are dyslexic, I know this can be a brutal exercise because a number of my family members and friends are dyslexic. Thankfully there are apps out there specifically built to assist you.

• Here’s a decent one: http://www.ghotit.com/

• Here are a number of chrome extensions: https://www.noodle.com/articles/7-google-chrome-extensions-that-help-students-with-dyslexia

• If you’re really feeling old school there’s this little gem: https://www.amazon.com/Neo2-Alphasmart-Processor-Keyboard-Calculator/dp/B00T0ZG06O

 

3rd – Keywords…

-or- what happens when 20th century tech meets 21st century laziness

 

Keywords are simply words that are considered important by the hiring company and thus used to filter résumés. These could be school names associated with education experience (Stanford, Harvard, etc) or company names associated with professional experience (Google, Facebook, The White House, etc), or skill/ability words (Python, or certified public accountant, etc).

The problem with keywords is they are a pretty stupid way to assess if someone is qualified or not. Unfortunately, even though they yield poor results most companies still believe they’re the easiest & most effective way to screen candidates. So do recruiters. So does LinkedIn.

Some people try to fill their résumé with keywords to fool their way past the ATS. This strategy works with some ATS systems until a human sees it and realizes what’s up at which point the résumé is thrown away and the next one is picked up. A common scam a couple years ago was filling up one’s résumé or LinkedIn profile with a number of minuscule, white letter colored words to ensure the résumé or profile was flagged as relevant regardless of what the actual experience and education on the résumé were. Again, this works until the hiring manager sees it then it’s dismissed out of hand.

If you’re going to try to optimize for keywords, use the ones in the job description itself and realize that the ATS is probably just adding up all the keywords in the résumé and comparing it with those in the job description and general keyword index and ranking accordingly. (side note: this can have some tragically hilarious outcomes – the guy who worked at Harvard Donuts gets through while the valedictorian from another school doesn’t)

 

4th – Be Relevant Or Begone

Nothing beats generic stock images

 

If you’re using the same résumé with each job you apply to, you’re doing it wrong. The job descriptions, though usually painful to read, contains much of the info you need to shape your résumé. Ensure sure you’re qualified for the role as best you can and submit accordingly. If you’re applying to 2 different roles, you’ll probably have 2 different résumés. If 10 roles, 10 résumé. It sucks, but that’s the process – hence why we’re trying to change it.

Please note: job sites that say ‘click once and apply to a 1000 jobs’ are essentially scams for just this reason. Your résumé is never going to be read. Sorry.

 

5th – Keep At It!

Persistence really does pay off, even for designers of mock inspirational graphics

 

Make sure you follow up with the organization you submitted to about a week or so later because often times the résumés get misrouted or lumped together with 1000 other ones and everyone is busy so the résumés aren’t top of mind. So following up via email is recommended.

For most of us, applying for jobs is not the most pleasant process. It’s hard work, it takes a great deal of time, and it’s easy to become discouraged. So please make sure you’re keeping healthy: sleeping, eating, and exercising regularly. Don’t isolate yourself, spend as much time with supportive friends and family as works for you and keep at it. Perseverance wins every time. If you’re reading this you’re educated, have enough money to own a phone or computer, and know how the internet works. I promise you there are good jobs out there for you, it just takes some time to find them. We hope to be able to make that process much quicker and much better in the coming months.

Either way – stick with it! We believe in you!

The post How To Write A Résumé That Improves Your Chance Of Being Hired appeared first on Uiba.

Because hiring is risky and Risk. Is. Expensive.

Hiring someone entails a substantial risk for a company and that risk carries with it an equally substantial cost. It’s important to understand this because the ability to reduce that risk should be the primary focus of any jobseeker. Doing so helps hiring managers pull the proverbial trigger and make the decision to hire.

Let’s explore this phenomenon through a hypothetical hiring process to be more clear

Company X is growing successfully and generating many millions of dollars a year in revenue. A role opens that company X needs to fill with an external hire. The salary for the open role is $50,000 per year. This hire should be a no-brainer if they find someone fairly well qualified, right?

Not exactly, no.

You have no idea!

First, the cost to build the pipeline of talent so the hiring team has a suitable field of candidates to choose from is expensive. Posting jobs on sites like LinkedIn or other niche premium job boards typically costs $200-$600 per posting per site per month.

Since it takes, on average, almost 68 days to hire a salaried employee, this can get expensive if the company is posting on multiple sites for multiple job openings. If a recruiter is used, that’s a far more expensive proposition, with fees typically equaling 15-25% of the hire’s first year salary. In-house recruiters obviously require a full salary and benefits etc. None of this is cheap.

Second, the cost of machines actively reviewing, assessing, and storing applications and resumes, although archaic, is expensive. Depending on the size of the company this can cost anywhere from $1000s to $10,000s per month. Although this cost is usually defrayed across all applicants and roles, there is a definite cost to purchasing and maintaining such services for each role.

Third, the cost of people reviewing applications is expensive. If the company is getting hundreds or thousands of applicants for the role, and they’re not using Uiba, someone has to review them, that someone is being paid a salary whose job title is probably not ‘resume reader’. This is likely an HR person and/or the hiring manager.

Wait. How many applicants?

The average number of applicants for a corporate job is 250. Each resume takes a couple minutes to read (some are read closely, many are skimmed). So 250 resumes, at 2 minutes per average read time, is 500 minutes (8 hours) of salary paid to review resumes PLUS the 500 minutes (8 hours) of productivity lost because this person was reading resumes instead of doing their normal work.

Fourth, interviewing applicants is expensive. A typical goal when hiring for most salaried roles is to identify 5 strong candidates to interview for the role. Each candidate is likely to have 4-6 interviews, which typically last 30-60 minutes. For more critical roles there may be as many as 12 interviews. 

Each of these interviews is a productivity sink for the hiring team. Hiring is of critical importance to the well-being of any organization but team members aren’t hired and paid to interview people, they’re paid to do their primary jobs. Hence, the potential 5 hours of interviewing per team member comes at a significant cost in lost productivity for the team.

Ok that was a little more expensive than expected, but if you want to play you have to play – right?  At least the person is hired! So now that $50,000 per year is pretty easy to absorb, right?

Wrong.

The costs! They just keep coming!

That $50,000 salary? Yeah, it’s actually $75,000. Turns out, the average cost of actually employing the person is usually about 1.5x (actually, it’s anywhere from 1.25x to 2.2x) the cost of their salary: $50,000 x 1.5 = $75,000. Where does that extra cost come from?

• FICA taxes (social security and Medicare – this is a 15.3% tax, which the employer and employee split evenly at 7.6%)
• Insurance
• Facilities to house you (office rent)
• Equipment for you to use (telecoms, office supplies, the coffee machine with a mind of its own, etc)
• Corporate support
• Other general overhead costs.

Ugh! Ok, fine… but Company X is earning millions per year, so even paying 1.5x the cost for the work is still doable. Right?

Unfortunately, it’s a bit more expensive than just the hiring costs and the 1.5x cost. It takes a new employee quite some time to come up to speed with the new job. The biggest single hurdle is figuring out the culture and the political dynamics of the organization: who controls what, how do I get my job done, etc.

Everyone at the company is aimed more or less toward the same goal but there are a LOT of competing priorities. On top of that there’s the coming up to speed with the day-to-day demands of the job, the systems and processes, etc. This means it requires about 8 months, sometimes more, until the employee is optimally productive. That’s 8 months of paying for full productivity but not getting it.

Ok but now! NOW we can finally say that $50k, er $75k per year is affordable. Right?!

No. (oh come ON already!!)

Almost half of all new hires turnover in 18 months, which pushes the employer back into the expensive hiring cycle all over again. Plus, there is lost productivity since once more there is no one is in the role doing the work. Often times this creates extra stress on the team taking up the slack, which also reduces some of their productivity. The turnover costs are brutal – typically between 100% and 300% of the salary due to the factors above.   

But lets say the person actually stays (woo hoo! Now the $75k is gonna pay off, I just know it!), it turns out most employees end up disengaging from their job. This doesn’t mean they stay home and collect paychecks. It doesn’t mean they show up and play games all day. It means they’re only semi-productive. Web surfing, gossiping, facebooking, etc, – doing all the little things most everyone does while they’re at work because procrastinating is easier or more interesting than doing something hard or dull.

Definitely attended less productive meetings

Disengagement stems primarily from an employee being in a role that’s not a good fit, either because they were hired into the wrong role or the role evolved and the employee didn’t, or because their manager is terrible. The manager is usually terrible because they were hired into the wrong role or the role evolved and they didn’t, etc.

The costs associated with disengagement are high – 34% of salary is lost each year. So the $50,000 salary, which remember is actually $75,000, is costing the company $25,500 in lost productivity. If a department has 3 disengaged employees, the company is paying for 3 full time employees but only getting the work of 2 in return.

So let’s recap: you start with the cost to fill the talent pipeline, then the cost to capture and store the applicants, then the cost to review the applicants, the cost to interview, the cost to hire and train them, the cost to employ them, plus the lost productivity while coming up to speed, and finally have to account for turnover and disengagement.

Seems the most appropriate response at this point

That is why companies are so hesitant to hire people, even when the person has the qualifications. Although this reads like a riff on a Monty Python skit, the reality is genuine and it has an impact on how and why companies make hiring decisions.

The most obvious ramifications of this belabored and expensive process is that hiring managers try to hire from their personal networks and encourage new hires that perform well to refer their networks. Many believe this approach helps de-risk the hiring process. Unfortunately,  it doesn’t, it just changes the risk profile. However, it’s a time-honored norm and part of why LinkedIn was able to build a successful business. What it does do is hurt the competitive process, hinders qualified candidates from getting a chance to shine, and helps perpetuate biases.

So, the goal of the jobseeker is to figure out any way possible to prove not only are they a good fit for the role, but they’re a good fit for the team, they’re engaged by the work itself and likely to be focused and productive, and unlikely to be leaving in the near future. We’ll explore how jobseekers can begin going about that in a separate post.

The post Why You Aren’t Getting Hired appeared first on Uiba.

This last year witnessed an increasing number of stories coming out of the tech world about the lack of gender diversity and the harassment endured by women. Stories like this, this, this, this, this, and of course this, are not only disheartening but directly undercut the tech industry’s self-aggrandizing story that it’s a meritocracy. But it’s this intent to create a meritocracy without putting in place safeguards that likely created such environments.

A common refrain from the leadership of most tech companies is they hire only the best and only the best of the best are promoted. It’s not about gender, color, or creed, it’s about the quality of code, the ability to execute, the initiative to organize one’s fellows to push a project forward, etc.

It’s difficult to argue with such a philosophy since it’s fairness incarnate. Those who are qualified and work hard will be hired and advance. Those who don’t, wont. This approach isn’t specific to the tech industry, most elite organizations try to operate by this standard. Universities are particularly famous for basing their brand on meritocratic selection (cough, Ivy league, cough).

                No caption needed

Unfortunately, the focus on ‘meritocracy’ creates unintended gender discrimination. A study done by MIT indicates that organizations that focus on meritocracy actually “show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women in translating employee performance evaluations into rewards and other key career outcomes.” If companies only hire and promote based on merit, how can this be true? It’s certainly not because men are better educated.

As that MIT study indicates, the reason this is true is because meritocracy actually increases bias by giving people a ‘pass’ to make decisions informed by bias. Essentially, they believe they’re only rewarding the most deserving and as such they end up favoring certain candidates, despite, rather than because of, the actual merits of the person’s capability. As this effect compounds, it warps the system via a feedback loop – more men are hired, especially in engineering capacities, more men are given larger bonuses, more men are promoted, and so the feedback loop strengthens.

Who doesn’t love a good problem solving loop

Re-orienting this feedback loop is imperative if the organization is to achieve its full productivity potential. What that requires is a clear plan and some straightforward process implementation and measurement. The process should come together like any successful process does:

1. Set the Goal
2. Define the Problem
3. Determine the Process Necessary to Solve the Problem

•     3a – Root Cause Analysis – What’s Causing the Problem?
•     3b – Key Assumption Check – Do We Have the Data To Verify This is Correct?
•     3c – Identify and Build the Solution
•     3d – Identify How to Measure the Solutions Effectiveness
•     3e – Measure and Analyze the Solution’s Outcome
•     3 f – Adjust the Solution Accordingly

4. Scale the Solution

There are a couple of things that will help with some of these steps. Before a job description is ever posted it should be checked to ensure it’s gender-neutral so bias doesn’t impact applicant interest before the process even begins. This is a good checklist to use when building job descriptions.

Ensuring the pipeline is drawing on sources of talent that include women is key. Using analytics to monitor and adjust that is obviously necessary. For internal roles, especially senior roles, applying the Rooney Rule can help address potential bias. This is NOT a quota. However, it IS a useful technique for ensuring women are being afforded the opportunity to compete, especially if the organization skews heavily male.

As the applicants respond and the hiring pipeline fills, it’s critical to hire based on capability and potential rather than using education and experience. This may seem counter-intuitive but it’s critical.

Diversifying (pun sort of intended) your sources of information and insight is also helpful. For instance, the work done by Freada Kapor Klein and her colleagues at Project Include is quite useful, as is her firm’s focus on supporting female (and minority) entrepreneurs.

           How’s that working out for ya?

Finally, this is not a problem that throwing money at will help. For example, despite pledging to spend $265 million on encouraging diversity hires, Google’s overall gender diversity has remained flat. That’s a lot of money for very little outcome. Instead, it needs to be thought through and constantly measured and analyzed, just like every other business process. And just like every other business problem, this too is solvable.

Aubrey Branch has done an outstanding job at creating a healthy gender diversity at Atlassian, a preeminent tech company. I highly recommend reading about some of her insights and suggestions, which can be found here.

In the meantime, although tech is the industry garnering the lion’s share of media attention on this at the moment, the truth is the challenges of gender diversity and harassment are endemic to ALL industries. As such it’s something we should ALL be actively aware of and taking steps to mitigate. It’s a solvable problem, and as with any problem, the sooner we start to work on it, the sooner we’ll solve it.

The post Why Meritocracy and Gender Diversity Are Mutually Exclusive. appeared first on Uiba.

These articles and newscasts generally boil down to:

1. If you don’t posses a STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) degree you’re doomed to a life of under-employment and drudgery!
2. Any country that doesn’t produce enough STEM graduates is doomed to irrelevance!

The beauty of such narratives is that it pairs perfectly with the rise of the Internet and the changes in the economy caused by technology and globalization.

It’s by no means an American phenomenon, either; there are examples from the UK, Australia, India, China. Even Germany, Japan, and Singapore claim to suffer from a lack of qualified STEM workers.

Such stories actually began during the early Cold War when the U.S. government and citizenry were worried the Soviets were leaving them behind. They cropped up again during the 1980s as Japan’s economic growth was eclipsing the U.S., and they continue today with the rise of China.

But the prevalence of such stories became a global, supercharged phenomenon during the past 20 years with the exponential growth of the Internet and the ‘software is eating the world’ meme. Governments, corporations, schools, and everything in between increasingly use technology to make themselves more efficient. There is ever more technology available to us and most of the world’s population carries a smartphone.

It certainly looks like exponential growth

To build, implement, and support all of this growth requires science and technology, which (crazy as it might sound) requires scientists, engineers, and programmers. So naturally there’s a need for STEM graduates. If that were the whole story, all of the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching might be warranted. Thankfully, that’s not the whole story. Not by a long shot.

AND YOU GET AN ENGINEER, AND YOU GET AN ENGINEER, AND YOU GET AN ENGINEER…

The truth is most countries are not facing a STEM shortage. In fact, in many countries there’s an over-abundance of such folks. Here’s a graph from a terrific article written by Robert Charette for the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) a couple of years ago discussing this same phenomenon. The proportion of graduates to jobs remain roughly similar today.

That’s a lot of STEM workers chasing not very many STEM jobs

As you can see there is a significant over-abundance of STEM graduates considering the number of STEM-specific job openings per year. This ‘graduate bubble’ tends to drive them into other fields for want of suitable employment options.

STEM majors on the left side, STEM occupations on the top right

That’s not to say a particular job-type can’t struggle with a lack of qualified talent. This happens whenever a new field becomes hot. For instance, during the past couple of years data scientists have been in great demand. A couple of years from now it will be a new role, gene editors perhaps.

When most companies, especially market leaders, complain about a lack of STEM talent, they’re referring to the crème de la crème, the top .1% of their particular field. This is understandable and normal since these organizations are in a global battle for talent and fiercely competitive in their own right, so they’re seeking to identify every possible advantage to secure their success.

However, most companies should also realize they probably already employ a significant number of STEM types already, and should undertake an analysis of the knowledge and capabilities they have in-house before seeking external hires.

It’s also something that the broader workforce should be aware of and plan for accordingly, because a degree is a poor predictor of one’s career path. Building STEM skills is important because the global economy is increasingly ‘digitized’. But non-STEM skills are equally important and shouldn’t be dismissed because they’re ‘soft’. As shown above, most STEM grads aren’t in STEM related roles and a goodly number of non-STEM grads are in STEM related roles.

The truth behind all the scare stories isn’t anything scary, it’s something pretty fantastic, actually. There are many paths to the mountaintop, and what you study isn’t the most important factor in being able to create a viable, meaningful career. If you want to work for a tech company or bio-sciences company, there are other avenues besides being an engineer or scientist. If you’re trained as an engineer or scientist, there are many other avenues you can take if those paths aren’t working for you. The beauty of the modern age is the variety of options. The trick is figuring out which option is the ideal option.

The post No, STEM Skills Won’t Guarantee You A Job. Here’s Why Not. appeared first on Uiba.

This is indeed the very definition of exponential growth

The challenge associated with such a surfeit of information is finding what you need when you need it  – a.k.a. finding the needle in the haystack. A recent article that focused on the problems arising from the combination of massive content quantity and poor content quality got me thinking about the needle in the haystack problem with regard to work and careers.

We’ve written before about the challenges associated with hiring using resumes – trying to identify the right person for the role and team is rarely a straightforward process. Sometimes it’s a problem of not having enough applicants, but often times it’s not a quantity problem at all, it’s a quality problem, i.e. trying to find the needle in the haystack.

There are 330M people in the U.S. alone, of whom about half are in the workforce. There are plenty of people to choose from as potential employees, regardless of the role in question. It’s a matter of finding the right people, the best people, for the role. Best doesn’t necessarily mean Harvard graduates (although sometimes it does), it means the person who will be the right fit for the role and team in question.

Ok sure, hiring managers are looking for the best match for their needs, but there are a 150M or so people capable of working. Organizations don’t want to just hire anyone, they want to hire people who can not only do the job but excel at it.

So maybe these hiring teams are looking for graduates. Well, for the 2016-2017 school year, expectations were for almost 2M bachelor degrees, and another 1M masters and PhDs to be attained by students. That’s 3M people each year coming into the workforce with higher education degrees.

However, in 2016, the U.S. created just over 2M new jobs. If we have over a million additional people for the number of jobs that were created then maybe it’s simply a question of not enough graduates having the right degree. After all, we need more STEM grads, right? Turns out, that’s not the problem either.

In fact, it’s a selection problem – trying to identify the right person for the job from among all the available people. If the average job at a company is getting hundreds, thousands, or 10s of 1000s, of applicants, would the hiring team even know if the right person was applying? Worse, does the right person even know the job exists?

This same dynamic holds true for the career seeker. Depending on the data you source, there are somewhere between 146M and 153M jobs in the United States alone. Researching and analyzing all those jobs to find the right one is beyond anyone’s capacity. If we start with just the companies, perhaps that would be easier? (hint: nope. there are over 5 million companies and over 5 million people hired each month)

Again, it’s not a quantity problem. Since we all see the world through a soda straw, how do we know which job at which company is the best fit for our capabilities and goals since we may not even be aware of its existence? In other words, how do we find the needle in the haystack?

Most people see the haystack of applicants of available jobs, contemplate it for a little while, mentally gripe about how difficult this is going to be, then roll up their sleeves and get to work. This is a long, exhausting, boring process that only occasionally leads to success.

It’s a hell of a lot easier to just use a magnet.

You can also burn the hay or throw it in water. However, burning companies and drowning applicants might not be the best solution, so let’s not take the metaphor too literally…

The goal isn’t the process, it’s achieving a successful outcome: find the right employee, find the right job. Given the number of people in the workforce and the number of jobs available, both of these goals are attainable – it’s just a question of finding those needles in all that hay. Thankfully, that’s now possible.

The post All Hay, No Needle? appeared first on Uiba.

The Myers-Briggs test is one of those topics that tend to drive people into a tizzy about whether it’s ‘real’. If you’ve never taken a Myers-Briggs test this is what happens. You’re asked 93 questions. The questions require a simple yes/no answer. For instance:

Once you complete the test you’re then assessed and told your personality type and given a short description of it. There are 16 possible personality types. According to the Myers-Briggs supporters, every person on earth fits into those 16 personality types.

Just to clarify, that’s 7.3 billion people who collectively have 16 personality types.

Seems kinda fishy…

SHOW ME THE MONEY!

There are a lot of organizations that use Myers-Briggs for hiring, for team building, for annual reviews, and for any number of other reasons. From a semi-recent and very long Washington Post article about the test:

That is a lot of organizations! It’s proven lucrative, too. CPP, the company that owns the rights to the test, derives about $20M a year from it.

JUNK SCIENCE IS THE WORST SCIENCE

Here’s the thing though – the test? yeah, it’s all nonsense. There’s zero science involved in the assessment. There’s zero science supporting its claims as an accurate assessment tool of someone’s personality or their ability to succeed at something either. How could it? Most people don’t fall cleanly into a binary yes/no description (are you always very sensitive? are you never very sensitive?) and the questions are generic.

Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers created the test. Neither was a professional psychiatrist or had a formal background in the subject. In their defense, psychiatry was still young as a science and Briggs had a fascination with the field and Carl Jung, one of its founding lights, during her life. It’s upon some of his observations that the personality types were created. It wasn’t until World War Two that Myers formalized the system as a means for determining whether someone was a good fit for a role or not.

Unfortunately for test-takers, Jung’s theories in this matter have been dismissed. Furthermore, in the years since the test was introduced no significant scientific journal has ever published a research analysis of the test’s system. This despite publishing numerous reports about the many, many other systems that have been developed since the creation of Myers-Briggs.

Why the lack of coverage? It’s because there’s no science underpinning the test. It would be like an astronomical journal publishing articles about the effectiveness of using a pre-Copernican model of the universe with the Earth at the center of the solar system as a basis for research.

NO, SERIOUSLY, WHY IS THIS SO POPULAR?

So why does the Myers-Briggs have over 10k companies using it as well as significant elements of the U.S. government and institutions of higher education? Because it makes people feel good and it’s entertaining.

The test uses something called the Forer effect, which uses bland statements to persuade people the information about them is accurate. (scroll down to the ‘Forer demonstration’ at that last link) Fortune tellers and astrologers use this same technique.

Basically, Myers-Briggs is the equivalent of astrology.

OK SO WHAT’S IT GOOD FOR THEN?

So what’s all this mean? Well, for starters, if your organization is using Myers-Briggs as a basis for decision-making, it might be worth asking why you’re using it and what you hope to gain from it. If it’s being used for personnel decisions regarding team creation or career path discussions then it’s unlikely to be of much value.

A better choice would be technology based on scientific theory, computer science, and data science. That’s a much more accurate and effective approach to team creation and career path management, among other things.

If it’s to generate conversation during an all-hands meeting then it might be useful! People love comparing their Myers-Briggs personality type with one another. Just like they enjoy comparing their astrological signs. Funny, that.

The post Myers-Briggs Is Astrology appeared first on Uiba.

This is good advice! It accords perfectly with the world’s first known successful resume.

However, the advice breaks down when the hiring manager is having to sort through dozens, hundreds, or thousands of resumes not to mention when these resumes encompass a multitude of backgrounds that are unfamiliar to the hiring manager, which makes evaluation even more fraught.

Mr Reynar’s advice works best when the hiring manager understands the role, when the role’s description is clearly stated, and when the applicants are strong in their capabilities and clear in their understanding of the role’s requirements. It also needs a limited number of applicants. According to the article, this sounds very much like the experience at Facebook.

That’s not a surprise since it’s one of the most powerful companies on the planet. That surely helps attract the best talent, especially for engineering roles. Also, there’s very likely a screening mechanism between him and the applicants since he’s only seeing 50 – 100 resumes a year. These conditions, unfortunately, are not the norm for most companies.

It’s much easier and much more efficient to let software identify and rank the best people for each role and THEN review those applicants. That way you avoid mistakes, not to mention wasting precious time reading resumes.

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Marc Andreessen, he who created the Netscape Navigator and ushered in the age of the Internet, now runs a very successful venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. From time to time, Marc can be found on social media sites conversing about technology, economics, and any number of other topics. One these topics is something that a number of economists have been discussing for the last few years and the general public seems to be waking up to – the impact of technology on jobs.

Marc argues that technology isn’t a job destroyer but a job creator. A favorite data point of his seems to be the U.S. economy recording 5 million new hires each month (Marc mistakenly quotes this as per quarter in the article, it’s actually per month). This isn’t to say there are 5 million new jobs created each month, just that 5 million people were hired into existing open roles.

Marc’s point, which is valid to a degree, is that robots aren’t taking our jobs if 5 million people are being hired each month.The problem with this argument is it represents only one half of an equation.

WELCOME TO THE CHURN

Yes, 5 million people are hired per month, which is great! But, and this is the kicker, 5 million people are fired or quit each month. That’s 10 million people cycling in and out of work every month with no gain to the economy. After a year, that’s equivalent to half the population of the United States.

Feel the churn!

Taken together these two statistics show how inefficient (broken?) the U.S. labor market is for employers, employees, and those seeking work.

Essentially, there’s a giant churn going on throughout the economy. This is an enormous productivity drain for everyone involved (btw, everyone = all of us) not to mention the toll it takes on people’s well-being by working in jobs they aren’t qualified for or dislike.

So yes, Marc is right, the robots aren’t taking our jobs just yet. But we humans aren’t making it tough for them to do better given our record of getting the right people into the right roles and the right companies.

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THE ORIGIN

Beginning back in the 1980s with IBM and Oracle, (some of these are still in place, btw) and continuing to today, ATS vendors have tried to help companies manage their hiring processes. These systems store and filter job applicants and of late sync with calendar and email programs to smooth the interview setup process.

The 1980s called. They want their awesome back.

Capturing and storing applications is pretty easy – put a series of information gathering questions on a web page with fields where someone can type the answers, and store it in a database. There’s a bit more to it, but that’s the gist of it. Besides calculating numbers, this is about as basic a software program as can be imagined. The problems started when ranking and filtering came into the equation.

The hiring manager didn’t just want a print out or screen of a candidate’s information – that was only marginally better than handing her a resume (which most ATS systems still can’t process, but that’s for another post) – she wanted to compare the candidate’s qualifications against the role’s requirements, and then rank the candidates against one another to find the best so she could concentrate her and her team’s valuable time on interviewing the best prospects.

BITING THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU

That hasn’t gone so well. Turns out it’s REALLY difficult for a computer to understand language – like ‘let’s work on this problem for 70 years’ kind of difficult. The computer isn’t self-aware so it can’t understand whether what’s written is relevant or not. It’s at this point when language becomes so important that the ATS turns on its users and hurts both the hiring manager and the applicant.

Its bite is worse than its bark

ATS systems often apply a simple keyword filter. This is a list of schools, company names, certifications, etc, that the system attempts to find on a resume or in the data taken from the company’s application form page. Turns out, this is VERY problematic, which is why most ATS systems are called ‘black holes’.

If the ATS can’t read everything on the resume it will often flag and remove the resume from evaluation. Ironically, all those websites and coaches that tell people to ‘jazz up your resume to make it stand out!’ are doing real harm to the applicant’s chances of getting hired since it just increases the likelihood the ATS will reject the resume.

Most ATS systems do little to rank and sort candidates. The newest systems from Silicon Valley vendors offer a field for the interviewing team to give the applicant a score and let the hiring manager use that for their decision-making or sometimes do keyword ranking, which leads to the same problems discussed above.

Also, as previously shown, hiring managers and interviewers aren’t subject matter experts in everything under the sun. They’re also human, so they are inconsistent in the quality and execution of screening and interviewing. This means a lot of inappropriate people are brought into the process. That raises the chance for a bad hire. A bad hire results in high levels of turnover, which often proves quite expensive in time, lost productivity, and money or just as expensive – a disengaged employee.

TIME FOR WHAT WORKS

If you’re reviewing ATS systems, ask your vendors about how they account for these issues. Most of the time the platform will be a shiny version of spreadsheets and calendars. Useful to a point, but not ideal given today’s pressing needs for talent and constrained budgets.

If you’re looking for a system that identifies the best candidate for any role and ranks them all according to the role’s requirements, the team’s needs, and the applicants overall capabilities – then start here.

It’s about time technology helps organizations identify and hire the right people. Your team is too important (and too busy) to risk otherwise.

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The industry segment commonly referred to as Hiring, Staffing, and Development serves this market by helping employers (you probably guessed it) hire, staff, and develop their employees. It’s also concerned with helping people find jobs but because employers typically pay and the average working person doesn’t, the industry’s attention and resources tend to be spent on the employer side of the equation.

Technology has been a part of this industry since the start from flyers in windows, to newspaper want ads, to the job boards of the 1990s and early 2000s, to today’s LinkedIn/Indeed adverts. The problem, as previously mentioned, is this approach isn’t effective for matching the person with the right capabilities and drive with the right job. The ironic bit is the sign in the window is probably more useful for most companies than the online job advert, especially with things like this applying to jobs with a single ‘click’.

Technology companies adhere to the Pareto Principle (a.k.a. the 80/20 rule: 80% of the market is controlled by 20% of the companies) only more so. In reality, most of the tech industry’s various fields are dominated by a single company: search/advertising = Google, social networking/advertising = Facebook, networking = Cisco, e-commerce/everything = Amazon. This happens because one technology tends to win out over its peers and it creates a network effect that crowds out competition.

“The network effect, explained by a device that no one uses any more. Maybe this would work better as an explanation of irony…”

When it comes to hiring, staffing, and development though there’s been no dominant, winner-take-all company. Linkedin is typically thought of as that company but they have about 2% market share. 2%! In fact, there are over 20,000 companies competing in various parts of this industry. Some are massive, most are not, and none is dominant.

It’s a field ripe for disruption because no single tech has come along that helps companies significantly improve their hiring effectiveness or help hiring managers make better decisions, especially considering most companies still ask for resumes. Nor has a technology come along to help people understand, create, and manage their career paths.

Or at least not one that everyone is aware of yet

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

William Gibson

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