Not every star candidate has a star resume. But that’s OK because you’re not hiring a resume. You’re hiring the person behind it. Or you should be. You wouldn’t make any other critical business decision without getting all the facts. And, really, there is no more important investment in your company’s future than people.
A resume is a starting point
How do you sum up a 15-year career in two pages? If you’re an accomplished professional, it’s impossible. Yet that’s what job applicants are told to provide – a resume that is inclusive but brief. It’s an oxymoron that makes it difficult for candidates to tell their full story and equally difficult for talent acquisition teams to clearly identify the best of the best among applicants.
Great people are not necessarily great resume writers, although careful attention to detail should be obvious. You must read every word and read between the lines. Broader experience that seems tangential at first glance may indicate valuable skills that are directly applicable or easily transferable. Resumes can indeed reveal immediate red flags, for example:
- Job jumpers with little tenure in any given place
- Short time in the industry overall
But don’t be overly wedded to keywords. If “optimization” is so important, why? What knowledge or skills are you really looking for? Even if you don’t see all your key criteria keywords, don’t assume a candidate has not done the specific work. Maybe there is something else that sparks your interest? The bottom line is that if a person has some excellent skills to do the job, it’s vital not to dismiss this candidate without further information.
There are simple ways to learn more about them beyond their resume.
- Check out their LinkedIn profile for more detail about their career and background.
- If there is some synergy to the job, TALK to them. A brief one-on-one conversation is the best way to extract great accomplishments from people – life accomplishments as well as job-related successes.
As a staffing or talent acquisition professional, your goal is to build a total picture of the candidate. Their resume is just one component of that.
And what about cultural fit?
All the skills and experience in the world won’t be an asset if the candidate doesn’t fit in with the rest of your team, especially those they will be working with most closely. Yet, nowhere on a resume can you learn anything about someone’s personality or approach to working with others. What’s their energy level like? Do they have leadership or mentorship potential? How have they fit into bigger projects as a teammate?
Here at Power-4, one of our favorite recent reads is a book called “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.” Author Malcolm Gladwell (remember “The Tipping Point”?) suggests that it takes just 90 seconds to get a feel for whether you’ll mesh well with someone, and that first impression is nearly always spot on. You can’t get those 90 seconds from a resume.
People do the work
Hiring, staffing, building out teams – however you define your role, it’s a people business. Important as a resume is, anyone in a hiring capacity should be thinking beyond that document to flesh out a clear picture of the candidate.
So, to repeat: if a resume feels close or something catches your eye, take the time to look more closely. Due diligence can uncover value points that may surprise you. (And to think you would have overlooked this fantastic candidate if you hadn’t looked more closely!)
Are you getting quality candidate insights from your recruiting partner? Top candidates are themselves focused on agencies as resources for finding the most desirable (and perhaps not published) positions. But a great agency won’t just pass along their names with a “resume looks good” notation. They will introduce the total person as well as their resume, with multiple reasons to interview this individual – key bullet points and a comprehensive summary of why this person is the kind of new hire you really want to meet.