THE CHALLENGE
Although today’s hiring managers face challenges evaluating talent that the employers of old did not, the underlying logic remains the same. “I have a need, how do I evaluate whether this person can help address it.” Or better yet ‘I’m building a team, how do I evaluate if this person will make it stronger”
Unfortunately, resumes and LinkedIn profiles are rarely helpful in this decision-making process. The hiring manager must somehow infer whether an applicant possesses the capabilities to do the job based on a few lines of text about what the applicant did in previous jobs; jobs that the hiring manager likely hasn’t experienced first hand.
SHORTCUTS TO WHO KNOWS WHERE
This is why school name and previous company name are used as decision-making criteria so prominently. They’re a mental shortcut to speed things along. The person is thought to be smart enough/work hard enough to get into Stanford/Google ergo they’re qualified for this role.
That might work in a few cases, but it doesn’t really scale. Plus, the pool of Stanford/Google alumni is a pretty small percentage of the total global workforce.
No caption needed
The dirty little secret about modern hiring techniques is they often don’t yield effective outcomes. However, why they fail isn’t a secret at all, it’s quite obvious.
EVALUATING APPLICANTS ISN’T EASY
Corporate roles receive on average 250 applicants per role. Some companies will receive 100s of 1000s while others will receive dozens. For anyone that’s had to read a resume, 250 resumes is a lot to evaluate.
Comparing them for rating purposes is even more difficult as memory and bias inevitably play tricks.
Reading resumes vs rolling a boulder up hill for all eternity
HOW MANY TYPES OF EXPERTISE ARE THERE AGAIN?
Making this process even more difficult is the challenge associated with evaluating subject matter expertise. If the hiring manager, recruiter, HR rep, etc., isn’t a subject matter expert on the role they’re hiring for, their ability to understand the nuances involved in assessing the person’s ability to perform the role is limited.
Even if the hiring manager is an expert on the role, if the applicant’s experience is in jobs or industries the hiring manager is unfamiliar with then they’ll have trouble assessing the candidate’s potential. This is a major problem faced by people transitioning between industries or from the military into the private sector.
Finally, the resume itself is more a timeline of accomplishment that the hiring manager must interpret to understand candidate qualifications rather than a more straightforward understanding of the person’s capabilities and ability to evolve and excel. Ideally, a hiring manager wants a bit of both to not only understand the person’s potential but also see some proof points that they’re indeed able to live up to the hype.
The amount of information the hiring manager is being asked to interpret and apply for decision-making is considerable. When the number of applicants for a role scales beyond a small number, let alone 40,000, it becomes an impossible task. That’s the primary reason over 1/3rd of all hiring outcomes fail, not to mention how it contributes to employee disengagement and a whole host of other issues.
THE SOLUTION
The solution is enabling hiring managers to pre-sort applicants based on each applicant’s ability to execute the role’s requirements and also excel within the team and broader organization. The hiring manager’s time is expensive, their broader team’s more so. It’s imperative this time isn’t wasted reading & reviewing resumes and interviewing people who either can’t do the role, or can perhaps do the role but will never excel.
Sorta speaks for itself.
With a couple hours of instruction and some practice almost anyone can play basketball. Yet with a lifetime of practice, very few people can play like Michael Jordan. The art and science of hiring is finding the Michael Jordans of the world and building that championship team.