I’m not trying to slap myself on the back when I say I really try to take some time to read a resume and understand transferable skills, career progression and the candidate’s growth of responsibilities and achievement. Headhunters deal with humans. We need to understand as much about them as possible, what they’ve accomplished, what makes them tick . . . and what they ideally want.
I continually run into hiring managers who don’t really read the resume for career growth, achievement and consistent increasing responsibility. Rather, it seems they try to most closely match previous experience (read, keywords) with the existing job description. There’s sometimes no overall consideration of achievement, performance and previous opportunities for advancement. Great candidates get lost in this shuffle.
The whole situation is compounded for those poor Human Resource people caught in the middle. They have to deal with hiring managers from multiple departments. There is no way they can possibly understand the nuance of some increasingly technical or multi-faceted positions as well as that hiring manager. Rarely is enough time spent between the hiring manager (department head or person the new hire will report to) and HR, explaining the need and the kind of candidate who will excel. Rarely does the hiring manager provide a well thought out job description for HR to work with. Everything just happens too fast . . . everyone’s too busy.
It’s not like hiring is the only thing most HR professionals have to deal with. Most are the go-to person for questions about vacations, benefits, insurance, the lack of coffee in the break room or the annoying employee in the next office. The larger the office, the more work is on HR’s plate. Talk about a juggling act . . . there just aren’t enough hours in the day. It’s the most obvious explanation of why HR gets a bad rap for not being more responsive to inquiring candidates. These are not the harried folks I talked about in my “Screw You” posting a week or so ago.
As a result of all these competing interests, HR and hiring managers default to matching up resumes and job descriptions. The more keywords, titles, target companies or clients the candidate has on their resume, the more attention they get (or not). There just isn’t the possibility of spending 10 minutes reading a resume from back to front and understanding just what a candidate may have to offer. You’ve heard that people have an impression of your resume in 30 seconds? It’s true. I am not advocating that the “right” way to write a resume is to incorporate all of those elements, for the benefit of the harried reader.
The other unfortunate component is that most people aren’t great at writing resumes. They never think about having one updated and on hand. Most never see resumes in their daily routines and frankly have no idea what makes a good one, or how to write a powerful one. It’s one reason I was compelled to start a resume and portfolio consulting service. I kept running into great candidates who had resumes that were not representative of their abilities. I couldn’t present their existing resume to my client and expect that my client would have any real idea of my candidate’s potential for them. If I wanted that candidate to be taken seriously, I had to help them with their resume.
The whole job description and resume protocol hasn’t changed
in 100 years. There has to be a better
way! If you add the online (and
sometimes anonymous client) component to it, it’s an incredibly impersonal
process. You’d think we could do better,
for a hiring process that is dependent on personality, and personal impressions
to succeed.