Why Curricula vitae must be destroyed
You’re a growing, digitally-led, company who can’t afford expensive recruiter options; how do you find the right employee for that next critical hire?
Hiring poorly at mid-manager level with a salary of £42,000 can cost your business more than £132,000 if you get wrong. Yet a lot of people are getting it wrong — 85% of UK hiring managers admit to having picked the wrong candidate for their company at some point in time. No one can rightly believe that over four fifths of these veteran in-house recruiters are destined to hire incompetent employees. No, the fault is not in our stars, but within the information (or lack of it) hiring managers have access to before making that critical employment decision.
Current State: Application Overload
Six months ago, I was grinding away at a SaaS start-up-come-marketing-solutions-provider. As with many late-stage start ups / SMEs, our small marketing strategy and execution team were overworked, overstretched and in desperate need of additional person-power. We were granted resource to recruit an intern, which we were tasked with finding and hiring ourselves.
One distraction on our part, one oversight, and the possible perfect applicant was skipped over — no second chances.
What unfolded I’m is familiar to everyone: a wave of CVs washed over our team of four. Applicant after applicant submitted their resumes; densely packed, information-light and tedious to sort through. The vast majority of applicants had never worked in marketing and were completely unsuitable for the role. Confronted with so many of these documents, our process narrowed down to lighting-swift appraisal; a skim-read and if something was out of place, the CV went on the ‘NO’ pile. One distraction on our part, one oversight, and the possible perfect applicant was skipped over—no second chances.
Needless to say this is an awful way of choosing the right candidate for a role, and still incredibly time-consuming. Our intern lasted a while, but wasn’t retained.
A Better (Data-Driven) Way Forward
So what if there was a better way forward? What if, instead of laboriously reviewing each CV ourselves, we had had access to a system that took the legwork out of the initial review stage, weeding out the unsuitable applicants while shortlisting the best ones in a form of digital triage that ensured we only focused our reviewing efforts on the candidates who were the right job?
That’s the idea of BASEPL8. In a world where sorting through data is the forte of tech companies, we’re applying this same focus to the benefit of these very companies’ recruitment process, and many others besides.
We have created a unique approach to to capture and quantify all the metrics you could possibly need to create effective, efficient shortlists of suitable applicants.
What we think is even better is that our approach builds over the ruins of the old system of resume review, expanding the hiring manager’s knowledge to include an understanding of an applicant’s fit with the company across many areas, including: personality, working cultural preferences, behavioral competencies and values. Who benefits? Both the company and the successful hire.
The old Latin phrase ex nihilo nihil fit or “nothing comes from nothing” is as true now as it was back in Roman times. If the the situation remains the same, companies will continue to make bad hires. We’re still in the early days at BASEPL8, but our mission is to show how, if humans talk with numbers as well as words, we can bring a great new richness and understanding to the world of business recruitment and beyond. If you’d like to be a part of this movement, please email james@basepl8.com.
Let’s ditch the Résumé.
James | BASEPL8 Co-founder
