Innovation in Recruiting: Breaking Away from Resumes

What if we told you that the traditional resume you hold so dear is likely standing between you and the best talent? That's right. Join us, Max and Mike, as we question the long-standing use of resumes, explore how the hiring process has evolved, and discuss the inherent problems in the resume format that introduce biases and lead to unwarranted disqualifications. 

We promise an intriguing discussion about the future of hiring, where we suggest a shift to a more targeted and direct format. We also touch on the latest developments in AI and its potential impact on hiring. Listen in as we bring you insights on how to make your hiring process simpler, faster, and more focused, moving beyond the resume to a deeper understanding of applicants. We wrap up with a look at the challenges of high-volume applications and offer practical suggestions on how to effectively handle them. Brace yourself for a thought-provoking conversation that could revolutionize your hiring experience!

We love to hear your hiring experience, whether you're a hiring manager with 100s of hires, about to make your first hire, or an applicant that has a story to tell. Share your stories with Max & Mike at hiringexperiencepod@gmail.com

This podcast and the matters discussed herein are for informational purposes only and should not to be construed as advice for a particular company or person. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional or legal advice.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

This is the Hiring Experience the podcast that helps you break down the art and science of hiring. Hosted by Max and Mike friends, founders and creators of rapid hiring, on a mission to bring an end to the resume, bringing you tactical advice to help you attract, select and retain the best talent. This podcast and the matters discussed herein are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as advice for a particular company or person. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional or legal advice.

Max: 0:37

All righty. Once you have decided that it's now time to replace somebody that has left your org, or you're growing or one of the other many reasons, you could decide that you need a and have a need for a new position to be filled, you're going to go through and put your job description together and you decide what you're going to pay and get it out to the world. Then we wait for pieces of paper with date and times of where people attended work and where, who signed their paychecks from Monday to Friday, and a little bit of a history of where they went to school. All come in. Once we've got enough of them, maybe we review some of them.

Max: 1:29

These pieces of paper are obviously known as the resume. This thing that we've all decided is the cornerstone of our hiring experience and the start of our hiring process that, while we can understand why it used to be a requirement, a component of the easiest way to synthesize all of that information into a comparable format against other candidates, Well, I think if you want to start that way, we can talk about, just give some context about the progression of the way that these things are used in general.

Mike: 2:16

I think that if we look back on companies and their hiring processes as they age and as time goes on and as the times change and technology changes and this and that we can see, essentially there's been a constant, which has been the resume.

Mike: 2:33

Where there's been. We have this delivery method of our information. We've made some type of loose format for what it should look like and we've changed the delivery method of it as time has gone on. We've had initially you can go drop it off at a place that you may want to be employed or mail it, and then you can some time goes on and now you can email it directly to the person where you may want to be employed, and some more time goes on and now you can upload it to a platform where somebody who puts out a job role and you may want to be employed there, and we see this delivery method changing. But the core information and the core process itself has not really been changed and a lot of the time we look at making the delivery method more efficient, when really we should be looking at making the information itself more efficient and more encompassing.

Max: 3:30

That's a fair point. Starting from the point of like that, we've been optimizing the delivery method of the resume for so long through different platforms, to the point of where LinkedIn started as essentially a place to put your resume online to the world, because now there are so many inherent problems in the resume itself. The format reduces so many components of things that we want to be good at when we're hiring. The basis of they have so many unwarranted disqualifications because we are interpreting what they're writing on their resumes and sending to us. We are letting our biases make quick, snap decisions, because when you've got a stack of applicants to go through, you don't want to waste time on anything that could perceivably be a red flag or issue.

Mike: 4:36

On the stack of applicants thing, with the delivery methods changing and being more and more efficient that's another problem is with the resume not having changed with it. The ease of applying or delivering your resume to multiple places is, like the friction levels very low, which means that it can be very passive, which is fine. But with it being very passive it means that on the other side of things, you need to be able to handle a higher volume of these documents as well. So now you have a higher volume of probably people who are not really that invested in their application in the first place.

Max: 5:12

From there we end up with this convoluted starting point to your hiring process and, as well, we talk a lot about owning your hiring process and the speed of your hiring process. To really take both of those concepts to heart, we need to evaluate whether or not we're starting from the right place with the resume, or should we be moving to a new format that is more targeted and direct, that is tailored to what you're looking for in an applicant and also allows applicants to apply in a very straightforward manner and get to the point of having actionable insights after the initial application?

Mike: 6:01

Yeah, ultimately, given the landscape of hiring and of passive job applications and things like that, high applicant volume is going to be something that you will need to handle as a hiring manager, and that's the way that tech goes and how easy it is to distribute your information to a mass amount of people. That is something that will need to be handled, and making sure that you're able to see relevant information front and center will help you handle that. And that's what I think what Max is touching on is with those points of really being able to have these pointed application processes that aren't submitting a generalized document of who you are to whatever role you apply to and then expecting the people on the other side of that to extrapolate that data and apply it to the specific role. If, as employers, we can put out a more specific way to apply, then that'll sort itself out.

Max: 7:04

The ability to remain focused and keep applications simple is paramount to increasing the number of qualified and eligible applicants.

Max: 7:16

You will get to your flow at the same time not making it so open that you're unable to make any kind of decision on an applicant, that you're now just subject to even more bias and problems down the line.

Max: 7:31

So where we really try to focus people is on those core elements of what it is you're hiring for, what this person is going to be doing 80% of their day and what credentials and skills are required to do that job, and what things that they will learn on the job versus things that they will learn you would need them to bring to the job. Once we've identified all that, we can start to move past this piece of paper and towards a understanding of applicants In a in depth manner. From the get go allows us to have all those actionable insights that we still want to need, that we felt we were getting from the resume. What, most of the time, we were just making up and making assumptions on our own biases. That from that point forward and that doesn't even bring us to the point Of something for a later episode of the latest developments in AI and their effects on what a resume is and can be.

Mike: 8:36

Yeah, that brings up a whole can of worms there as well with with AI, because, as you know and as a lot of people know, when you introduce Candidate tools, such as the systems and things like that where you do collect resumes and you use some type of tool in order to help do your review process because you are the only such high volume people are introducing these tools to help speed up their process and really what's happening is you end up with Resumes that are largely generated by being reviewed by systems that are largely dependent on AI and you're really creating a net zero of things going on, like nothing's really happening on the human process anymore and it's hard to use these tools and determine. Both sides of it are leveraging to assist. Did you really gain any information in the exchange? I?

Max: 9:32

don't think so, and that's what we try to focus things. We always want to bring it back to what it is you're looking to hire for, not based on the title, not based on the department or anything else like what is it that this person will do once they get into your business. And those are all things that, once we have that understanding, we can move past the resume and a generic form of hiring and on every applicant that comes through to make your hiring process simpler and faster and more focused as you go.

Mike: 10:06

Yeah, and all these problems that stem from volume. They'll translate into some other things and like they don't. They stem from volume, but they don't stop there. I mean you know they cause some other things when you have that and you can't handle it and you end up with some slippage in your review process where you may not be able to properly evaluate or consistently evaluate candidates throughout your whole team, like if you have, say, three hiring managers that are going to tackle your stack of applicants that have come through. These three people may apply their review process differently than each other. So ultimately your candidates at the end of that funnel are going to be based on different parameters. They may do it at different speeds than each other. So you're going to have different stages of the flow where you know If that whole process slows down and if you introduce batching, when you only review after you receive 50 applicants and then you only schedule after 25 of those have been reviewed, and then you really just add these bottlenecks and slowdowns and thing like compiling Problems that all stem at not being able to handle the information appropriately.

Mike: 11:14

Which is the resume, right? Right, with your one overarching tagline phrase, whatever you want to call it is, at the end of the day, you're hiring a person, not a piece of paper. That's been the thing that you want to push all the time, and I think that I don't know. Just getting back to that, it really sums up everything, right.

Max: 11:35

That element that we want to refocus on the person and not sit there going. I want to read their resume because otherwise I can't know who they are, when in reality is there are so many better tools out there to let you make informed decisions through your hiring process.

Speaker 1: 11:54

Thank you for listening to the hiring experience. We hope you enjoyed this episode and learned something new about the art and science of hiring. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast player. This helps others discover the show. Share with a friend, colleague or anyone going through the hiring experience right now. Share your hiring experience with us at hiringexperiencepodcom.