Do you want great resumes or great talent?

Good resumes are error free.
Errors indicate poor attention to detail.
If a resume has errors, it goes in the trash.
Period.

Yep, I followed these rules for 25 years and I hired hundreds of fantastic people — and most of them look, think, and work pretty much like me.

In 2012 I received an award from the YWCA for being a CEO who is dedicated to diversity in our community. My stomach dropped when they told me I was being honored for my diversity practices because, frankly, I didn’t deserve it. I spoke a good game and was authentic in my desire for a diverse, inclusive workforce, but the makeup of my staff didn’t reflect my commitment. And the output of our work likely suffered because our perspectives were too linear, too similar, too predictable.

In the two weeks I had to prepare my acceptance speech for the YWCA award, I had many sleepless nights. I engaged in uncomfortable conversations about how to find underrepresented people to hire. I blamed my black husband for telling me to fix the problem without providing any solutions. Finally, I sat in my office rummaging through recent resumes, trying to figure out if there were any answers in those piles of paper. Lo and behold, there were!

Biases

I realized that I had biases that were stopping me from considering bundles of candidates. Here are the primary biases I discovered:

Typos are unprofessional.
Bad formatting means the candidate doesn’t care about how they represent themselves, so they won’t care about how they represent my company.
No college degree means they haven’t set a hard goal and stuck with it.
If they haven’t been at one job more than 2 years, there must be something wrong with them.
Foreign grammar on the resume means they will be difficult to communicate with.
If they’re not locally located, they probably won’t move here.

Why are biases bad for your business?

Recent, trusted studies show that millennials of all backgrounds (majority and minority) value diversity and look for employment with companies who have diverse and inclusive environments. This means that companies that do not figure out how to diversify their employee base and offer a company culture that embraces diversity in an inclusive manner will become unable to compete for top talent. Diversity and inclusion is a competitive requirement, not a benevolent act.

Not only are biases bad for your business, but many industry studies, including a must read by The B Team, prove that the business case for diversity and inclusion is irrefutable.

What does a “perfect” resume tell us?

A typo-free and well formatted resume tells us that the candidate was taught that resumes need to be proofread until perfect, and that the candidate likely got help from others to proofread and produce a clean resume. But many people have not been in the right places to be taught this skill or to even know that they need to learn this skill. And just because someone HAS been in the right place to learn this, that doesn’t set them apart from the crowd. If someone has great experience and potential, we can teach them to have someone proofread their work. That’s easy.

How to review resumes to find top talent, not top resumes

As I pored over the stack of resumes in 2012 looking for hidden answers to my lack of diversity dilemma, an enlightened approach to reviewing resumes emerged. Within weeks, we began to hire staff who added immense value to our team and didn’t look, think, and work like everyone else.

Here’s the enlightened approach:

Consider diverse perspective as a core skill for comparison between candidates, because it is. When you see something foreign, different, or unique in a resume, apply extra value to it.
Hide the names on the resumes during the first pass through.
Hide the dates on the resumes during the first pass through.
Hide the address and contact information on the resumes during the first pass through.
Read the extracurricular section first — if there are any associations or acronyms that you don’t know, look them up. You’re looking for things that are unique, not familiar. Value things that are unknown to you or things that you may be critical of because they deviate from your likes.
Read past bad grammar and imperfect delivery. Challenge yourself to find the diamond in the rough.

Have you tried any of these techniques or others and found diamonds that otherwise would have been thrown in the trash? Let me know in the comments!