The resumé is inaccurate and inefficient – but you can replace it easily

It’s a fact: People lie on resumés, whether the format is a LinkedIn profile, or an old-fashioned document.

Checkster reports that 78% people who applied for a job in 2020 lied about their skills or experience.

Another poll by LendEDU found that 34% of LinkedIn users lie, to some extent, on their profiles. Of that number, 55% said they padded out their ‘Skills’ section. To win roles, it seems, many of us are not above a little trickery.

In 2023, when talent acquisition specialists and hiring managers have hours (and sometimes less) to assess candidates, interview them, and woo them, the risk of resumé skill-creep is magnified.

For a rushed and overworked hiring manager, who is fed up with losing talent and looking bad because of it, the process of vetting becomes less about careful analysis and more about keyword-matching.

All of this culminates in a series of statistics that should not be surprising: According to a 2022 Aptitude Research report of more than 300 HR leaders at major companies, 50% of companies have lost quality talent due to the way they interview and hire.

At the same time, 50% of companies do not measure the ROI of their interview process. One third are not confident in their interviewing game as a whole.

The process is broken.

The resumé is at the heart of a greater efficiency problem

That same Aptitude Research report examined the average company recruitment funnel, laying out the points at which candidates typically drop out. It found that, on average:

• 22% of candidates drop out at the application stage
• 24% drop out at the screening stage
• 25% at the interview stage

So you might be losing anywhere from 20 to 40% of your talent pool while you spend time vetting resumés and sifting through cover letters.

Aside from the fact that this is a massive time-waster and a prime source of frustration of hiring managers, enforcing the use of resumés is not an effective way to ensure quality of hire.

That’s for two reasons:

1. 78% of people lie on their resumés, as we mentioned above.
2. Even if they don’t, average humans cannot look at resumés and determine exactly how good a candidate will be at the job for which they’re applying. According to research by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter, past experience accounts for just 3% of on-the-job performance. Put simply, what has happened cannot predict what will happen.

Therefore, our over-reliance on resumés creates problems when we go to interview candidates. It’s a classic problem: Overworked hiring managers formulate questions on-the-fly after making cursory glances at candidate submissions.

It’s little wonder that 25% of candidates bail at this point – often, they’re just reconfirming information they’ve already told you about who they are and what they’ve done.

There is an alternative: Structured interviews. Schmidt and Hunter found that structured interviews are the best predictor (26%) of on-the-job success.

The biggest companies are starting to focus more on this.

According to the Wall Street Journal, employers like Google, Delta and IBM are combatting the tight labor market by easing strict needs for college degrees, focussing instead on interview and assessment processes that accurately measure soft skills and behavioral traits.

Getting started with structured interviews

In its simplest form, the structured interview is based around a predefined set of questions.

These questions are typically behavioural and situational in nature: It’s about giving candidates the opportunity to explore how they think, solve problems, formulate plans, and deal with success and failure.

Therefore, questions like ‘Tell me how you’d respond if [specific situation] occurred’ don’t belong in a structured interview.

Instead, you might ask, ‘Tell me about when something went wrong with work, and you had to fix it. How did you go about it?’

Importantly, the questions you ask must be the same for all candidates. A critical component of the structured interview is fair and balanced comparison of candidates.

If you ask each candidate something different – as so often happens in a fast-paced hourly hiring setup – you can never accurately compare one candidate against another.

In that uncertainty, bias creeps in. It becomes a case of ‘I like this guy, he leans forward when he speaks.’

We’ve developed a handy tool to help you get started with structured interviews today: Our HEXACO job interview rubric. It comes with step-by-step instructions to help you figure out what skills and traits you need based on your open roles and company values.

From there, we’ve supplied you with more than 20 science-backed questions and a scorecard. It’s something simple enough for a busy hiring manager to use.

Remove the resumé entirely, and succeed

There is a possible world in which the resumé serves hiring managers as a kind of back-up validation document, used purely to verify the veracity of a candidate’s skills and experience.

In this world, the first stage of your recruitment funnel is the actual candidate interview.

That’s what our Ai Smart Interviewer can do. It’s a conversational Ai that takes candidates through a chat-based interview, using questions tailored to your open roles.

Candidates give their responses – with plenty of time to think – and Smart Interviewer analyses their word choices and sentence structures using its machine learning brainpower. 

A candidate may be able to lie about their years of experience, or their knowledge of CSS, but our Smart Interviewer can accurately determine their cognitive ability, language proficiency, and personality traits.

Then it can make recommendations to you on the best candidates, according to the criteria you’ve set – and, at this point, you haven’t even looked at a single resumé.

But, as with traditional processes, you have the final say in who you hire.

In 2023, the name of the game is efficiency. Success will be measured in time saved NOT having to screen, review resumes and cover letters, compile candidate feedback, communicate with candidates, or improve hiring manager interview techniques.

When you’re saving that much time and money, your recruitment (or HR) function has more bandwidth to focus on long-term talent acquisition and people initiatives.

Don’t struggle in 2023 – speak to our team today about how we can solve your hiring challenges.