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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)
(The author is Chief Learning Officer at Wipro. Views are personal)
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