“If you can DO the job, you should GET the job”
Employers’ continuing embrace of resume credentials as their primary screening tool perpetuates the problem that prevents skilled people from getting jobs, and employers from filling open positions. The problem has to be pretty bad to earn a presidential rebuke.
Yet a rebuke is exactly what the credentials orientation got earlier this year from President Obama in a speech announcing his TechHire Initiative, which aims to convince corporate America that a traditional four-year degree in computer science shouldn’t be a prerequisite to hiring individuals with IT expertise. Obama said that it doesn’t matter where you learned code, it just matters how good you are at writing it.
The President mentioned coding specifically, but the “can do, should get” principle is equally true for any knowledge-worker role. Salespeople, marketers, managers, finance or legal pros — all fall victim to resume-credentials bias.
“If you can do the job, you should get the job.”
A resume can’t show that you can do the job. It shows what you claim to have done in previous positions, but doesn’t prove what you can do in this next one. Resumes also can’t reveal self-taught skills, or any of the “soft skills” that employers now recognize as critical to success on the job, such as resilience, curiosity, self-reliance, or collaboration.
Despite these well-documented limitations, employers continue to rely on resume credentials that trigger inferences and biases that cause qualified candidates to be rejected, and less qualified candidates to be considered.
There are conscious biases, such as the presence or absence of a particular type of degree (as the President observed), from a particular tier of school. Or years of experience. Or having worked for high-profile employers. These positive biases cause companies to infer, often incorrectly, that someone with certain credentials can do the job, or that someone without them can’t.
Resume credentials don’t correlate to on-the-job success.
Resume credentials don’t correlate to on-the-job success. That means, as a screening tool, credentials are irrelevant at best, and counterproductive at worst, producing “false negatives” that exclude candidates who can do the job, but who won’t even get a chance to interview because their resumes don’t check off the expected boxes.
Laszlo Bock, Google’s SVP of People Ops, is unambiguously against resumes.
“A major part of why…finding a job is so hard — is because resumes are awful at conveying who you really are and companies stink at screening resumes. Too many companies rely on clumsy software products that sort and filter resumes based on keywords. And too many recruiters do the same thing, looking for fancy schools or company names instead of at what you actually did. Resumes are a very poor information source.”
Bock’s comments about screening go on to say that “Work sample tests are actually the best predictor of performance.”
Why do employers cling to resumes?
So, if the resume, the tool that’s been the universal screening mechanism for decades, is so unreliable that it’s a major part of the problem, and work sample tests are a reliable alternative, why do employers still cling to resumes instead of work-sample tests?
It’s partly just longstanding habit, but it’s also because there’s been no simple, inexpensive, and reliable way for candidates to provide work samples, and concretely demonstrate their capability to do the job.
Even when companies use some form of work sample, the sequencing is backward. For example, when they conduct a coding session on a whiteboard, or a role-play with sales candidates, etc., these exercises typically occur during the face-to-face interview, which is too late in the process. By then, the damage has been done; biased resume-screening has already compromised the candidate pool by including too many unqualified candidates, and excluding too many who are capable, at least some of whom may be potential stars.
A much better way to screen and hire
What if employers made the work sample their first step, and began with a concrete, objective demonstration of job capability? No interpretation needed, or risked. (They’d also have a pretty reliable demonstration of a candidate’s genuine interest in having this job. After all, who’d take the time to complete a work sample if they weren’t really interested?)
And what if that work sample was also anonymous? That would eliminate screening bias entirely. Nobody would know a candidate’s gender, race, age, employer, education — not even their name. Nobody’s biases would mess up the process.
In the formative days of Varsidee, when we showed employers our software that lets them publish Tryouts (our term for a work-sample test), they said they loved the Tryout concept, but wondered if candidates would be willing to spend the time to do the work required to complete the Tryout. Fair question.
We surveyed a number of candidates by phone. They all gave the identical response: “If I’m really interested in the job, I’d be willing to do the work to complete the Tryout.”
Candidates liked the fact that they could escape the rigged credentials game, and be evaluated purely on what they could do rather than which companies they’d worked for, or where they went to school (or didn’t).
The way to level the employment playing field and make it work for both employers and candidates is to eliminate bias-triggering resumes as the screening tool, and replace them with an equal opportunity for anyone to show what they can do.
Today, startup companies are innovating ways for candidates to supply work samples that do just that.
If you agree that resume credentials are arbitrary and unfair, and that everyone should get an equal opportunity to pursue a job, add your voice to the growing fairness movement.
Mike O’Horo is a Co-founder of Varsidee, software that lets employers assess talented professionals by creating work sample projects called Tryouts. He is leading a movement to change the way companies identify and assess talent, so they can build more effective teams.
