HR SPECIAL...A Resume is a Poor Starting Point for Hiring Decisions

A Resume is a Poor Starting Point for Hiring Decisions

How are most hiring decisions made?

 It starts and I daresay, also ends with the resume.

A resume lists the tangible elements of educational qualifications and the details of the experiences gathered with employers.

The assumption is that someone who is qualified to do the job and has done the job in the past is the right person to do the job for us too. This assumption has two basic flaws: Two people with identical qualifications will produce identical results. The second is that when we are hiring someone from another firm, especially one who has had a track record of success, the ‘star’ will succeed in producing top-notch results in every organisation. Both these assumptions can be questioned.

Research conducted on stock analysts with investment banks showed that most of stars fail in their new organisations despite their successful track record with the previous employer. The procedure, personalities, relationships and subcultures usually prove to be far more complex to master for these stars and this leads to abject failure in most cases.

The stars don’t stay very long in the new firm either, the study shows. “Around 36% of the stock analysts left the investment banks that hired them within 36 months and another 29% quit in the next 24 months.” That is because a person’s performance is also affected by the support system that a person has in the organisation. That takes time to replicate in a new environment.

The fit with the role and the culture together determine performance.

Performance depends on skill and will. If a person does not enjoy what he / she is qualified to do, it will produce mediocre performance. Enough and more research shows that a person, who puts in dogged hours of deliberate practice, will outperform a qualified person who is not motivated. 

Motivation is a factor of personality. Many job titles have not changed, while the requirements of the role have changed over the years. The role of a manager is a perfect example of this. Coaching and mentoring a team of young professionals is increasingly an important part of a manager’s role. Mentorship programmes do not take off in many organisations after being launched with great fanfare. Not everyone who has experience that others could benefit from is motivated to mentor others. This is where personality factors override qualification. Success in a role depends on the extent to which the personality matches the requirements of the role. The second factor that affects performance is the culture of the organisation. People are driven by different motivations.

Money, recognition, power, the opportunity to help others are all motives that appeal to people in varying degrees.

The people policies of any organisation give us a sneak preview of the culture that prevails. The rewards and approach towards recognising employee efforts and achievements creates the culture in which an employee performs. If they meet the deeper needs of a person’s values and motives, an employee will feel engaged and happy.

A fit of the individual and the culture accounts for employee engagement. The right hire means a person who is successful in delivering what the role demands and is happy doing it in the organisation’s culture. A resume is a poor starting point because success and happiness both lie in a match of the personality with the role and the organisation culture. The resume provides information that has limited impact on success and happiness. In his book The Rare Find, the author George Anders talks about finding the “jagged resume” to discover those gems whose resume is unlikely to get them employed in a conventional hiring process.

The person who displayed determination to pursue a goal despite many setbacks with a less than sterling resume may be a better bet in a role that needs someone with a high degree of resilience. It requires courage to go against the established approach of hiring the people with qualifications from top institutions and who have worked with the most coveted employers. We hire people for competence and fire them for problems of personality.

Think of the last time you were disappointed with a person who came in with great fanfare but did not deliver. May be it is time to take the risk of trying out this approach of assessing personality for hiring – not just matching resumes. Think about it.
(The author is Chief Learning Officer at Wipro. Views are personal)