June 24 - 30, 2002
Because I work in a recruiting & staffing firm, I see numerous resumes during the course of my day. Note that I said, see – not read. The core function of our business is hiring – so we receive (literally) hundreds of resumes per week, every week of the year.
Roughly 80% of these resumes arrive unsolicited. This means that the job seeker did not respond to any specific advertising, nor was he identified through our own recruiting practices. The unsolicited resumes are generally accompanied by a cover letter that begins with, To Whom it May Concern and ends with the sentence “… if you should find that my background matches your company’s needs, I would appreciate the opportunity to interview with you”.
No one reading this article should find any of this new. In fact, I’ll wager that most of us have written similar letters at one time during our career. It has become a standard practice to keep one’s resume in circulation, even if you’re not actively looking for a new job.
Interestingly, the stream of resumes flowing into our office never slowed during the tightest periods in the labor market (between 1997 and 2001). There may have been an extreme shortage of candidates – but we never experienced a shortage of resumes. This begs the question: What is the value of a resume?
The answer should be of great importance to employers today. With all of the emphasis placed on recruiting over the past few years, employers have implemented processes that practically guarantee a steady flow of resumes into their offices. Combined with the use of the Internet, even the smallest employers have access to thousands of resumes at relatively no cost. |
Surely, this is a great advantage for employers since maintaining a qualified workforce is still a critical element in growing a business. But does having access to resumes translate into having access to a qualified workforce? For many employers, advances made in recruiting methods have not yielded many improvements in the hiring method.
Many hiring decisions are still based upon the limited knowledge of an applicant’s background obtained from reading the resume.
If we can be confident that candidates always tell the truth and provide information that is both objective and thorough, then this is not a problem. I myself have a very optimistic outlook on human nature – I believe that everyone I meet is truthful (until they prove otherwise). But I don’t read resumes.
Before trying to place a value on resumes, it may be helpful to define them. Here’s a list of the information that can be found in a resume.
- Education
- Previous employment
O.K., that’s not much of a list. Perhaps it would be better to list the information that’s NOT found in a resume:
- A resume does not tell us how the candidate performed in previous jobs.
- It doesn’t tell us how the candidate worked with previous co-workers, managers and customers.
- It doesn’t tell us anything about the candidate’s personality.
- It doesn’t demonstrate the candidate’s hard skills or real knowledge.
- It doesn’t tell us if the candidate is an illegal drug user, criminal, or a chronic liar.
- And a resume will never predict future performance on a job.
Logically, we should use the information included in the resume to quantify its value. So let’s return to the first list for a moment and evaluate the education and employment content. A survey conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management in 1998 reported the percentage of its respondents who find that applicants lie about: academic degrees (30%), length of employment (53%), former employers (45%), and former titles (44%).
|
There have been several other surveys in the past few years that show similar findings related to resume fraud. Many falsehoods are simply the result of stretching the truth, rather than outright attempts to deceive. For example, listing a BA or BS when the candidate was actually missing three or more credits required for the degree. Another common misrepresentation is adding 1 month to the length of a job so that there’s no break in employment. Regardless of the candidate’s motives, it places all other information in doubt. Do you really want to hire someone who initiated her first contact with a lie?
In our firm, we use a six-step process to screen and evaluate every candidate that we consider for hire. Reading the resume is not one of the six steps. When faced with the responsibility of selecting employees for our clients, we adopt the old management adage, Trust – but verify. Resumes are good tools for initiating communication with an applicant, but employers should always use additional methods to evaluate a candidate’s background.
Now, for your prize! I’m about to give you, free of charge and without further obligation, a secret screening tool used by professional recruiters that helps gauge the value of a resume. Here it is: Call the candidate’s alma mater and ask the registrar’s office to verify that she’s actually earned her degree. Whether it’s an associate, bachelor’s, or graduate degree – the school will always provide confirmation (at no cost) of the type of degree and date of graduation. I have yet to meet a traditional employer that performs this check on a regular basis, even though it’s easy and cheap.
There will always be a level of risk attached to hiring new employees. Employers can never eliminate that risk – but they can mitigate it by adopting even the most basic process for verifying education and employment history. Just don’t read the resume.
By Kevin F. Flemming
Director of Sales & Marketing
INTEGRITY Personnel, Inc. |
