Reviewing Resumes? Don’t Make This Common Mistake

Imagine you advertised an open position, and are now sitting down to review a stack of 100 resumes.

If the first ten resumes you read are terrible, you feel a sense of dread coming over you. Without realizing it, you lower the bar, so if the 11th resume is even close to being qualified, you breathe a sigh of relief and eagerly move them to the “Yes” pile.

But if the first ten resumes you read look well-qualified, you raise the bar. You become very selective about who makes it into the “Yes” pile. You invent new criteria to help you winnow the field.

In both cases, that 11th resume is not being judged strictly on its own merits, it’s evaluated primarily by what came before it.

In the first case, all those unqualified resumes are corrosive to your selectivity. You get desperate and lower your standards. This happens with astonishing frequency in hiring.

In the second case, an abundance of apparently good choices leads to hyper-selectivity. You get picky on criteria unrelated to job performance just to save time interviewing. You become desperate to “weed out” some people that would have been perfectly fine otherwise. You rule out people without stopping to consider that you only have a resume and your assumptions … but none of the facts. In my experience, the best candidate rarely has the best resume, so being hyper-selective in resume review always causes you to overlook potentially great people.

So how do you prevent yourself from arbitrarily raising or lowering your standards?

You have to notice what is not in front of you. That stack of 100 resumes may or may not be representative of the available pool of people for your job. And each resume may or may not be representative of the true talents of each person.

Ask yourself two questions:

• Before you select candidates from the stack of 100 bad resumes, ask yourself, “Am I confident that this candidate pool represents the best people I could attract to this job?” 
• Before you rule out good people from the stack of great resumes, ask yourself, “Have I fairly considered everyone potentially qualified for the job, or have I ruled out people based on factors that may be irrelevant and assumptions that might be inaccurate?”

You may find that in both cases, you forged ahead, trying to “save time” in the interview sequence, instead of taking the necessary time to hire the best possible person for the job.

Great on Every Level

Great organizations are great on every level. They pay meticulous attention to how they hire everyone, from the receptionist to the CEO.

If your company lavishes attention on senior level hires, and leaves lower level openings starved for attention, that’s a real warning flag. You are never going to achieve your potential if the conversation about lower level hires is that you can settle for less.  

Results happen on the front line, not in the rarified air of the boardroom where important strategic decisions are made. And all top performing executives know this. When you are interviewing top executives, they are also interviewing you, and assessing if their team has what it takes to deliver great performance … at every level.

How Does Your Recruiting Stack Up Against My Local Turkey Farm?

My Thanksgiving turkey this year will come from a farm ten miles away from my house. (I love local food, but I also like simplicity–I pre-ordered it online). When I first heard about the turkey farm, I did not drive there, I Googled it. Right below their website was a Yelp review.  (Yelp reviews turkey farms … who knew?) I saw the 5 star ratings and I placed my order in moments. Easy peasy.

So how does your recruiting process stack up against my local turkey farm?

When one of your employees refers someone, how easy is it for them to apply? As in, “Hey Fred, you should come work with me at ACME Anvil.” So Fred says, “Thanks Barney, I’ll check it out.” And Fred goes online and finds a really dull job description on the company website, and a lousy review posted on Glassdoor, and an Applicant Tracking System that will take at least an hour to complete. I bet my local turkey farm has a better online reputation and offers a better user experience than most employers.

The growing importance of online comments and increasing visibility of reputations is what I call the Amazonification of Recruiting. And that’s the topic of my post in The HR Examiner today. In my post I share the online reputations of two local staffing firms. (Yelp reviews staffing firms now … who knew?) One firm looks great.

But the other firm gets cooked.

Pause Before Plunging Into the Job Offer

The HR Director was irritated. “I told the candidate he could have a week to decide about our job offer,” she complained, “But the department really wants his answer sooner.” This candidate had first interviewed almost three months earlier, so after all that time, the Director felt like she was not in a position to deny the candidate some time to think it over.  Although I never recommend giving more than 2 days to decide on an offer, the real issue here is that the HR Director did not ask for what she really wanted (a fast decision) so she was left in limbo.

But not asking for what you want applies to both employers and candidates at every stage in the interview process. To make a nice first impression, people often indicate maximum flexibility at the beginning of the process:

• Candidates indicate they would consider a much lower salary than they really want.
• Employers indicate they have far more upward mobility, or workplace flexibility than they really want to offer.

Everyone plays nice at the outset. The courtship phase of recruiting is all good feelings about a mythical future with lots of bright possibility. But then as the hazy distant future comes into focus … things change. And when a job offer hits the table, reality comes right along with it, and everyone’s perspective instantly shifts. That sought-after candidate could take a week to schedule an interview, but once the job offer was on the table, well then, that employee was making his new boss wait a week for an answer … unconscionable.

I recommend you pause before you run from the warm sauna-like haze of the recruiting process and plunge into the ice cold water of job offer reality.

Once an offer is made:

• The hiring manager thinks, “This hiring process has taken far too long. Now I’m behind on my work. I need that employee to get here soon and hit the ground running!”
• The candidate/employee thinks, “Oh geez, this is real, now I have to decide. What have I gotten myself into? Is this job really any better than my current job? And, ugggghhh, now I have to give notice to my current job–and the thought of that makes me really uncomfortable.”

So before you make a job offer, before everything changes, while you are still in the warm sauna of the recruiting phase …. hit the pause button. Check in with your candidate. Have a conversation about your expectations, and theirs. “Hey Sally, we are seriously considering making you a job offer and wanted to check in with you on that. I know we initially discussed (whatever), are you still thinking along those lines?” And “Have you thought about what your current employer might do? Are you expecting a counter-offer? How do you plan to handle that?”

Just dip a toe in that water before you plunge in.

Removing Bias (and Desperation) from Your Hiring Decisions

In a doomed attempt to save time, many hiring managers unwittingly make themselves both more desperate and more biased in their hiring decisions. When you prematurely narrow the number of candidates you are willing to interview, you set up the perfect storm for bias and desperation.  Here’s why.

The Washington DC metropolitan area has a great job market. As I said in The Washington Business Journal,  job seekers have the upper hand again. Mid-career professionals often receive multiple job offers and can afford to be choosy. This means that candidates who do well in their first interview with you often withdraw from consideration before you’ve even had time to schedule their second interview.

So, if you have not started your first round interviews with a field of at least six highly qualified candidates, you will probably find yourself coming down to the wire with only one viable candidate. That makes your hiring decision both simple and dangerously flawed. When you only have one person, your choice is either a) hire, or b) don’t hire. Really, the choice is a) continue doing two jobs, or b) get help from someone. So naturally most hiring managers a) decide to hire now, and b) live to regret it later.

A recent study suggests why you make better decisions by improving your frame of reference. Harvard Professor Iris Bohnet explains it this way:

“Our hunch is that the mechanism works something along the following lines: if you look at one pair of shoes, it’s hard to evaluate the quality of those shoes. You will be much more likely to go with stereotypes or heuristics or rules of thumb about shoes. But if you have several pairs of shoes available, you’re much more likely to be able to compare different attributes of the shoes.”

The Harvard study showed promising results in removing gender bias from hiring and promotion decisions, but the frame of reference principle applies equally well to other aspects of hiring, such as evaluating the competencies and cultural fit of the candidate.

Don’t set yourself up to make a bad decision. Do what it takes to assemble a robust slate of qualified candidates, you won’t regret it.

Interviews are 80% Performance Art

Imagine you are hiring for a key position.

A good looking, well dressed candidate confidently walks in on time, smiles, looks you in the eye and warmly shakes your hand. You exchange pleasantries for a few moments and you can feel yourself beginning to relax.

You think “Oh good, they seem like a great candidate!” So you might be tempted to begin talking more. You know, to get them interested in the job.

Except, of course, you don’t know a thing about them yet.

Interviewing is full of traps like these.

• We’re drawn to good looking resumes that fit our mental picture of what the resume should look like (regardless of who actually wrote that resume, or whether people from other backgrounds might be more qualified).
• We’re seduced by appearances in the interview (regardless of the fact that interviewing ability does not predict anything about the candidate’s ability to do the job).
• We’re most comfortable with people who are “like us” even though teams are strengthened by diversity.

Traditional interviews are 80% theatrics (performance art) and 20% substance–your instincts will routinely fail you unless you methodically guard against your unconscious biases. Don’t wing it.

Skilled researchers pored through 85 years of scientific literature to identify which employee selection methods were the best predictors of job performance, and they distilled it down to a few things anyone can do.

Making a Job Offer? Don’t Make This Mistake

Client emails me and says “Hey, I want to offer the job to Kathy, but I only have her salary on her past two jobs, can you get her salary from the company before that? That would be helpful to arrive at a fair compensation package for both her and us.”

Sounds pretty reasonable, right?

Except it’s not the right way to set salary.

If my client wants to retain Kathy, her past salary is irrelevant – the only factor that matters is market rate. And in this search, all the other qualified candidates were within 5% of each other in total compensation–that’s market rate. (Here is more information about how to calculate it).

If you want to attract and retain good people, take your nose out of the salary surveys, ignore individual salary histories, don’t go into an excel-spreadsheet-trance with your budget, and pay at least fair market rate. Because what Kathy earned in 2005 will not help you retain her when your competitors come calling.

Managing Expectations in the Hiring Process

Have you ever interviewed an ideal candidate, gone through a lengthy interview process, excitedly put together a job offer, expected a quick acceptance … and then you were rejected?

Of course you felt disappointed, and perhaps even embarrassed. When it comes unexpectedly, the rejection stings even more. But why does disappointment feel so bad? Neuroscience can explain why … and neuroscience also yields a few clues why your job offer might have been rejected.

It’s all about expectations.

In a recent column in the New York Times, Alina Tugend interviews David Rock, author of “Your Brain at Work.” It’s a fascinating read, but this quote really stands out:

“When we don’t hit our expectations, our brain doesn’t just get slightly unhappy, it sends out a message of danger or threat.”

Woah. When your expectations are not met, you actually feel threatened.

OK, well enough about you, now let’s talk about why your ideal candidate might have rejected you. If you are like most employers, you did not do a very good job of managing their expectations during that lengthy interview process. You left them hanging several times by not clearly communicating what your interview sequence would be, or how long things would take, or how many times they would need to come back for additional interviews. In my experience with hundreds of small to mid-size organizations, the normal interview process almost always fails to meet candidate expectations.  So your normal hiring process constantly puts your ideal candidate’s brain into danger and threat mode. No wonder they rejected your job offer.

Three years ago, one of my first blog posts was about managing candidate expectations during the interview sequence. Candidates assume that how you manage the hiring process is how you manage the organization. If employing top performers is important to you, candidates assume you’ll demonstrate it during the interview process.

What High Performing Organizations Do Differently

Imagine a problem has just occurred that will cause your company to lose $15,000 per month in revenue, and might soon cause a string of similar problems. Which solution to the problem would you choose?

Solution A) This solution has no upfront costs, but it diverts your internal resources away from their current work, takes 4 months to implement (costing $60,000 in revenue) and is projected to lose an additional $24,000 during year one, with the likelihood of continuing losses of $36,000 per year thereafter. This solution has a 50% chance of failing completely and if it does fail, it might trigger a cascade of similar problems.

Solution B) This solution has an upfront cost of $15,000 (which was not in your budget). It requires no diversion of internal resources, and takes 2 months to implement (2 months faster than Solution A). By the end of year one, Solution B will recoup the $30,000 revenue lost during its two month implementation, and is likely to generate an additional $36,000 in annual revenue thereafter. Solution B has a performance guarantee, and significantly reduces your risk of this problem cascading into other areas.

If Solution B seems like the obvious choice, let’s review what happened the last time a vital person with hard-to-find skills resigned from your firm.  Did you consider using a search firm to fill the job?  If so, did the conversation sound like this? “I hoped our HR department might be able to find someone to fill this job. We thought if we could handle the search internally, we might save money on search fees. And if HR failed, we could always hire a search firm later.” Or, perhaps your internal deliberations sounded like this? “We did not budget for any search fees, so we had to do it on our own.” Both conversations probably sound familiar, and on the surface they might even sound reasonable. But when you look carefully, you realize that that both conversations make the same four assumptions. They assume:

1. There is no cost to leaving a position vacant. There is zero cost to the lost productivity of both the employee and the team.
2. There is no risk to leaving a position vacant. Under-staffing and over-working the current team will not result in any turnover risk. Zero.
3. Any hiring process that results in a hire is just as good as any other. A hiring decision will be just as good whether you have only one candidate to consider, or a full slate of 6 qualified people.
4. Any person hired in this job will deliver equivalent results. There is no difference in productivity or performance between an “A player” and a “C player.” Zero difference.

So if all four assumptions are laughably wrong, how did you ignore them in your decision making? Research shows exactly why it happens. Recruiting costs are very easy to calculate, but it is far harder to calculate the cost of not hiring, and harder still to calculate the cost of hiring badly. When faced with that kind of complexity, busy executives look at what they do understand (recruiting costs), and ignore what they don’t understand (the cost of hiring slowly and badly). The snap decision becomes: “We can’t afford to pay a search fee.”

High performing organizations are different. Because they have specific performance targets to meet for every position, the cost of not hiring (or hiring badly) is far more obvious. So they have an easier time balancing their recruiting costs against the return on investment of making a good hire quickly.

This is exactly what our Solution A and Solution B example did for you above. With good information, the trade-offs were easy to make. It was the gathering of the information that was complex. (Which is precisely why so many people will skip the next section of this post and just read the conclusion).

It That Good Interviewing Advice or Just a Cheap Parlor Trick?

When you read advice about interviewing, it usually falls in one of these categories:

1) Self-serving studies where the study sponsored by pre-employment testing company X, shockingly, recommends you use pre-employment testing. Whatever… your eyes start to bleed in a few seconds and you can click away without much harm done.

2) An interview with a successful CEO where the journalist asks them their secret to hiring. As if you could take the hiring process used at a PR firm in New York and apply it to hiring forklift operators in Tulsa Oklahoma. While this sort of thing is amusing, it will not help make you a better interviewer. What works in one culture is irrelevant to another.

3) Thoroughly researched works that deal with the real-world complexity of hiring, and methodically track the results over time. A good example is  George Anders book, “The Rare Find.” Research this good is indeed a rare find. Read it, learn from it, wrestle with it–it’s worth it.

4) My real problem is category four. The stuff that sounds like science, and may even be decent science–but is not grounded in any kind of hiring process. People who have not rigorously worked on their hiring process gravitate to this stuff, like a “magic bean”–a panacea for all that ails their hiring process. But when you put it in practice, you find it’s just a parlor trick.  Here are a couple examples that people sent me this month:

One article says not to lean to the left when negotiating your salary. Pish posh. Interviewing is not a game of Twister. You’ll tie yourself in knots trying to pay attention to this stuff.

Watch the video below and you will think that giving someone a hot or cold beverage will influence your opinion of them (Hint: if you are interviewing, go for the hot beverage):

This stuff is ridiculous. If you want better hiring results, ignore the parlor tricks and focus your interview process on the factors that really do predict job performance.