What’s wrong with the CV?
The CV or Resume has been around for hundreds of years, well at least according to Wikipedia, so are they still appropriate in the modern world?
Many employers and most recruitment agencies still ask candidates to send in a CV with a covering letter to apply for a job or register with them. Typically a recruiter will then screen the CVs against certain criteria and dismiss those that don’t meet the benchmark.
Yet to my mind this process is completely flawed for a number of important reasons; A CV may be missing information, laid out badly or not well written, and CV’s come in all shapes and sizes, styles and formats and if poorly presented can instantly lead a recruiter to reject that candidate. Most recruiters are under time pressure so only skim CVs making it easy to overlook a potentially strong candidate. CV’s focus on what you’ve done in the past, and as we all know ‘past performance is no guarantee of future returns”. And let’s be honest who’s going to write a personal statement that doesn’t exaggerate the positive and gloss over the negative?
Now some may argue that if a candidate isn’t prepared to spend time, or even money, on creating a professional looking CV they don’t deserve the job, but that’s just rubbish. Surely, the most important part of a recruiter’s job should be finding and recruiting the best person for their employer or client. Just because someone sends in a CV that doesn’t grab a recruiter’s attention, does this make them automatically no good for the role, I think not.
Can we replace our reliance on the CV?
With the rise of LinkedIn more of us now have a digital profile, however in many ways this creates just as many problems as a CV. A LinkedIn profile is created by the candidate, so the quality and level of detail varies widely and the focus is still on where you’ve worked, your education and what you’ve done in the past. For recruiters it’s still extremely difficult to get an accurate sense of a candidate from just their LinkedIn profile.
The best way to really find out what a candidate is like and whether or not they’re going to be a good fit for your role is to meet them face to face and interview them. But of course this is both time consuming and totally impractical if you receive hundreds or even thousands of applications. Furthermore, attending an interview can be difficult for a candidate that’s working and off putting for passive candidates.
Is there a better way?
Recruiters need to be bold and rethink the way they recruit because, as the high level of new hires that fail testifies, the current approach simply doesn’t work as well as it should. Obviously, there’s no one size fits all solution, however I believe for a great many roles it’s perfectly possible to utilise new technology to deliver better recruitment outcomes and improve candidate experiences.
Let’s take a typical office based role, for example a new Accounts Assistant and we’re going to advertise the position on our own careers website and post an advert on a couple of job boards. Assuming a well written job advert and the job is located in a major population centre, we might reasonably expect to receive anything up to a few hundred applications. Unfortunately, of these a great many will be from candidates without the required standard of education or previous experience so let’s restrict applications by asking potential candidates a couple of simple questions before we even let them apply.
We’ve now reduced our number of applications by as much as 50%. Next we get them to complete an online interview, using Tazio of course, and we ask them a couple of general questions and five or six questions relevant to the role. We’ll loose a few more at this stage because those candidates not really interested in the role won’t do the interview and most of those that don’t have the required qualifications or experience, will soon realise they’re going to be found out and go no further. Finally, once they’ve completed the interview they can upload a copy of their CV and include links to their LinkedIn profile or other online sites.
Now instead of a couple of hundred CVs which we need to filter, we have maybe 50 completed video interviews to review. If we watch all 50 interviews in full it may take us a good few hours, but in reality we’ll watch each candidate’s first answer and decide whether or not they are good fit for the role, much the same as we would in a face to face interview, only here we don’t have to sit there for another 20 minutes out of politeness. Having reviewed all the video interviews we can create our shortlist of candidates for a face to face interviews. Importantly, because we’ve already had the chance to hear them respond to our general questions, when we meet face to face we can focus on more in depth questioning and probe further into any issues raised in the online interview.
From the candidate’s perspective, they have found a job they like the look of, they have applied and had the first interview within maybe 30 minutes. They have received an automated email outlining exactly what will happen next. Should they be lucky enough to be invited for an interview, they can be assured the recruiter is genuinely considering them for the role, reducing the number of no shows and giving candidates a far better feeling towards our brand.
While this approach isn’t going to work for every job, for many roles I believe this offers a far more effective way of screening and assessing candidates than simply skimming through CVs.
If you’d like the chance to demonstrate to your boss you’re think ahead, then give me a call and let’s discuss how we can help you improve the quality of your next hire, as well as saving a great deal of time and money in the process.
Finally, if you agree this may just be a better way of recruiting, why not be the first to share this link and tell all your friends and colleagues.