Trends in Employee Selection: Resume Screening is a Thing of the Past

While resumes are clearly flawed, they are still a mainstay in most organizations, in fact, with advances in technology that allows candidates to electronically submit documents to a company’s recruiting inbox, most HR departments receive far more resumes today than ever before. This needs to change.

A closer examination of the use of resumes points to the many problems they present first; resume screening is a time and labor-intensive process for the hiring organization. Carefully evaluating a stack of resumes requires a significant amount of human attention – the type of attention that is difficult for most organizations to dedicate. As a result, the process may become one of selective attention (e.g. only reviewing resumes from candidates who have some type of an “inside track” to the position), or worse, a random task that only reviews candidates that happen to be “on the top of the pile.” Such an approach is clearly not optimal as it eliminates applicants for reasons unrelated to their qualifications. The resume process is also time consuming for candidates. Oftentimes, the very best candidates are the ones who are already employed, and as a result, may be turned off by the time it takes to update their resume or tailor it for the requirements of a specific job opening. This can have a significant impact on the quality of candidate pools.

Second, even if an organization is able to dedicate the time to review each resume, the evaluation process is a subjective art with very little science to back it up. Research demonstrates that evaluators have a difficult time applying a set of consistent standards across multiple candidates or they consistently apply standards that are irrelevant to future job success. Progressive organizations have attempted to combat these problems by developing explicit evaluation criteria and/or providing screeners with various types of rater error training. Nevertheless, because the information obtained from resumes is highly unstructured, even well trained, experienced screeners are required to apply substantial judgment when making their evaluations. Unfortunately, this leads to biases and prediction errors that reduce screening accuracy. Further, the problem is compounded when multiple screeners are used to evaluate resumes for the same position. Poor inter-rater reliability among raters leads to even more evaluation inconsistency.

Third, the resume process makes it difficult, if not impossible, to accurately and efficiently quantify applicant information in a way that allows for a rank ordering of candidates according to their likelihood of job success. Instead, information from resumes only allows for a qualitative evaluation that requires a significant “inferential leap” in order to combine the available data into an overall prediction of future success. For example, suppose you are evaluating two candidates for a position that requires a certain level of experience and education. Both candidates possess at least the minimum qualifications for the role; however, candidate A is viewed as having stronger work experience than candidate B. At the same time, candidate B is viewed as having an educational background that is more in line with the role. How are these candidates compared? Without a process that carefully weights each piece of information, screeners are left to themselves to make such judgments. This reduces an organization’s ability to make fine-grained distinctions within groups of candidates who might all possess the basic qualifications for a position. Additionally, because resumes are typically not scored, or measured quantitatively, it is difficult to track predictions and provide resume screeners with feedback on their evaluations. Without feedback it difficult for organizations to continually adjust and improve their hiring processes.

Finally, resume screening has been shown to have a significant adverse impact against minority candidates. More specifically, the University of Chicago's Marianne Bertrand and MIT's Sendhil Mullainathan responded to 1300 job ads with resumes that used either statistically common black names (Lakisha and Jamal) or white names (Emily and Greg). Black “applicants” had to send out 50% more resumes per interview callback compared to whites. In other words, a qualified applicant with a black sounding name has to send out 15 resumes per interview invitation versus 10 resumes per invite for candidates with white sounding names. Furthermore, companies that advertised they were “equal opportunity employers” were no more likely to provide an opportunity to the black candidate than were companies that did not emphasize equal opportunity. This finding led Mullainathan to suggest that even unconscious biases have to be considered if equal opportunity is a true goal. The simplest way to do this is to ensure that your pre-screening methodology cannot consider a person’s name when evaluating candidates.

So how can we evaluate candidates quickly, fairly and objectively without even seeing their name? Fortunately, advances in our knowledge of the screening process have made it possible to eliminate, or at least substantially minimize the problems with resumes outlined above. There are a number of best practices that organizations should employ when designing a candidate screening process.

First, and most critical, is that you should have a clear and objective definition of what the job in question entails. For most HR professionals, this comes as no surprise. However, the practice of applying this principle is not always straightforward. For example, while an organization might have job descriptions that outline the basic elements associated with each position, these descriptions may not break the job elements down into discrete, and measurable types of knowledges, skills, abilities and work style characteristics. Without this information, it becomes difficult to apply a common set of standards from which to evaluate candidates. This in turn, leads to subjectivity in how candidates are screened.

Once the elements of the job have been identified, it is important to develop a structured approach for soliciting the relevant information. Traditional resumes fall woefully short of accomplishing this goal. When someone is asked to submit a resume, you are essentially asking that person to provide a generic, exclusively positive overview of his or her work and educational history and hope that the information they choose to include provides insight into whether or not they possess the qualities deemed important for the job.

A much more effective process is to carefully focus the type of information that you request so you can be sure to solicit data that is truly relevant for your decision-making process. By having a structured questionnaire that not only collects work and educational history, but also data related to specific critical elements of the job, you are able to focus candidates’ attention so they provide relevant comprehensive (i.e., positive and negative) information.

There are a number of other benefits to a structured screening approach. In addition to ensuring that you are collecting relevant information from candidates, a structured screening approach gives you the ability to develop an objective, standardized methodology for evaluating candidates. Such an approach eliminates subjective biases and inconsistencies that are unavoidable when using traditional resume methodology. Also, it enables you to potentially generate a “score” for each applicant that can subsequently be used to rank order candidates according to their likelihood of job success. This has huge time saving implications for HR departments as it allows for automated candidate screening. It also helps to make fine-grained distinctions between candidates who on the surface all appear to have similar qualifications. And, over time, these scores can be tracked to continually improve the accuracy of the process.

Another, more subtle benefit to having a structured screening approach is that it tends to be a more efficient and engaging task for applicants. The process of developing and/or updating a resume can be an arduous task that provides no insight for candidates as to what the job actually entails or how well a candidate’s qualifications match the job requirements. With a structured questionnaire, applicants are able to make a much better determination of their odds of success due to the information that is being solicited. For example, if the questionnaire asks if a candidate is willing to climb ladders and walk across catwalks then it can be inferred that part of the job includes climbing ladders and crossing catwalks. Additionally, the questionnaire can be constructed so that applicants who do not possess the minimum qualifications do not proceed through the entire questionnaire. Thus, saving time for everyone. On the surface, this may appear to be a fairly trivial benefit for organizations. However, in reality, this can have a significant impact on the quality of candidates that end up applying. As mentioned earlier, the best candidates are often those who are already employed and may have little motivation to develop and/or update a resume without having at least some sense of their odds of being hired.

Over the years, SDS has worked closely with organizations to help them optimize their job screening processes. After examining the numerous downsides to resume screening, we have built an online job application tool that is faster, more efficient and far more accurate than typical applications and/or resumes. How do we know that it works? Our research shows that clients who have switched from the traditional resume/application to the SDS Online Application have experienced the following improvements: (1) have nearly doubled the number of applicants applying for each position, (2) seen a 40% improvement in screening accuracy (i.e. the applicants who get past the initial screen are more likely to perform well in the next step of the hiring process), and (3) experience substantially lower adverse impact (i.e. it helps to identify more qualified minorities). The table below outlines how our online application differs from the traditional screening process.

Stang Decision Systems is a full service Industrial and Organizational Psychology firm. Our focus on advanced decision-making and risk analysis techniques allow us to help your organization make better decisions, especially those related to employee selection and development of human resources. Because our systems are scientific and data-based, we can assure that your personnel decisions will be fair, accurate, and will save both time and money.

For additional information on how Stang Decision Systems can provide hiring assistance for your organization please contact us at 906 226.2829. Or visit us at our website www.stangdecisionsystems.com