An idea for the original CV. Student got a dream job at Moët Hennessy
Some time ago, media have spread the information about a SGH student who applied to Moët Hennessy Polska by putting his CV into empty Moët champagne bottle. Karol (that’s his name) also added to his application: a motivation letter and Moët Hennessy brand book, in which he described how he understands the brand.This original way of application was created to help him draw the attention of recruiters to his CV.
What drew my attention actually is not the original way of delivering a resume, but the competences and traits that Karol demonstrated through unconventional submission of his candidacy. The important information is that Karol applied to the marketing department (keep reading, I will explain everything in a moment).
Knowing the definition of marketing, we see that Karol’s idea was not accidental. Karol created a marketing strategy. A bottle of Moët Hennessy champagne was the carrier of the message that was supposed to reach its target (recruiters of the Moët Hennessy brand), CV, cover letter and brand book were a message: I understand your brand and I want to work for you.
His strategy was successful. He creatively reached the target, gave the message and as a result: received an internship. Appearance of the Moët Hennessy brand in the media was the icing on the cake.
Congratulations Karol on a great idea and even better performance.
My question is: should each recruitment process look like this? Should we compete in a more and more creative way of applying for the dream job? Fact: recruiters spend about 6 seconds reviewing our CV and deciding whether we fit the position…or in the worst scenario (sic!) should we pay recruiters for rewriting our CV? After all, we devote almost the entire adult life to getting the experience that creates this piece of paper …
What if you have all skills and competences required by a given position, but you are not as creative as Karol, and the position you would like to apply for doesn’t require creativity to do the job well? Does this mean that you don’t have a chance to get your dream job?
It’s all about broken hiring system.
The hiring process in most companies is still based on resume selection. Internal HR department/ Headhunters open the position and invite applicants to send their CV/cover letter or both to select people who receive invitation to the next step.
How this selection looks like? It’s mostly CV screening (6 sec remember?). And here comes my reflection: how can we judge whether someone has the necessary competences based on piece of paper?
Look at your CV and consider what competence you would expect from each of the positions listed in it. Try to objectively assess whether you really own them.
Let’s also look at my CV.
Did I come out with a set of guaranteed competences when I graduated from the University of Warsaw? No, no one guarantees them .
Did I get a set of guaranteed competences by obtaining a diploma from English Legal Methods at Cambridge University? No, because nobody guarantees them.
Have I acquired guaranteed competences while working in the Permanent Representation of Poland to the United Nations in New York?
I have heard many times: wow you must be really brave, if you decided to move to New York (no one knows how many times I wanted to pack and come back home), wow you worked in diplomacy, you probably know a lot of foreign languages (I know English, German (a little ) and Polish — is it a lot of foreign languages? I would argue…). Oh I have heard so much about wonderful receptions that diplomats go through — you must be the life and soul of the party (I’m an introvert, I hate going to parties with people I do not know). It seems that my CV presents me in a completely different light.
Did I gain guaranteed competences in this position? No, because no one guaranteed me anything. It also turns out that I naturally do not have them!
Am I hopeless? No … my competences, qualities and cognitive skills will fit better another position (on this subject I will write an article in the future).
Disclaimer: Hey, I’m not saying that if you graduated from Harvard or work in SpaceX your skills are not significant. I am just saying that there is a risk of false positive in recruitment. First of all, I mean that the CV absolutely does not indicate your real skills. These are nothing but words on a piece of paper. What is worth adding: not everyone has the chance to study in Ivy League colleges or work in top companies (for geographical or financial reasons).
The stage of selecting a CV may be therefore biased. At this level there is the biggest risk of rejecting candidate without credentials but with potential competences.
Employers prefer the risk of false positive in their recruitment than the false negative — you can’t blame them because they try to reduce the risk of bad employment, which is very expensive and very visible in the team.
There are way more examples where the recruitment process may be biased, but today I would like to focus on solving problems, not describing them.
If the resume screening doesn’t guarantee enough information, or it rather blurrs the full picture of the candidate, how should we be recruited?
Disclaimer: it’s not that all recruitment processes around the world are BAD. The interviewer MAY not be trained enough, they may have a bad day, they may not want to allow someone to join the team or his/her “gut feeling” may be wrong. Did you hear about „Thin slices”? 1980s. It unfortunately encapsulates how most interviews work. There have been volumes written about how “the first five minutes” of an interview are what really matters, describing how interviewers make initial assessments and spend the rest of the interview working to confirm them. If they like you, they look for reasons to like you more. If they don’t like your handshake or the awkward introduction, then the interview is essentially over because they spend the rest of the meeting looking for reasons to reject you. These small moments of observation that are then used to make bigger decisions are called “thin slices.” (Bock, Laszlo. Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead (p. 87). Hodder & Stoughton.)
It may also happen that the recruitment tasks don’t check the appropriate competences, the interview is not structured, so it is impossible to compare the candidates applying for a given position, or maybe there is no objective scoring of the candidates.
Unstructured job interviews were pretty bad at predicting how someone would perform once hired. Unstructured interviews can explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance, reference checks it’s only 7 percent of performance and number of years of work experience is 3 percent!! 3 percent!! Why the heck companies still look for candidates with specific work experience? The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent).
This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it.
We should consider, however, that the typical recruitment meeting takes 1 hour, and the task during normal work day usually lasts longer than 1 hour, sometimes a week and sometimes many months. This means that usually during the recruitment process we check the skills of working under time pressure, which is not necessarily related to our daily duties at work and this is a different skill. Another thing is that if we would like to propose a work sample to candidates that reflect their natural working environment, such as a work week, then none company can afford to involve all interested candidates for the position. Inviting only some candidates require pre-selection…
So we know that it’s difficult to use work sample assessment in the recruitment process, fortunately we have second-best predictor of performance which is relatively easy to use: test of general cognitive ability (26%).
These tests have defined right and wrong answers, they are well-standardized, contain items reliably scored, and can be administered to large groups of people at one item. Examples of item formats include multiple choice, sentence competition, short answer or true-false. Cognitive ability test assess eg. reasoning, perception, memory, verbal and mathematical ability and problem solving. Such tests pose questions designed to estimate applicants’ potential to use mental processes to solve work-related problems or to acquire new job knowledge — this combination will make most people successful in most jobs.
At the same level of credibility are structured interviews. A structured job interview is a standardized way of interviewing job candidates. The employer creates interview questions focused on the skills and abilities the company is seeking. Each interviewee is asked the exact same questions, in the exact same order. The employer also creates a standardized scale for evaluating candidates. Every interviewee is ranked on the same scale.
There are two kinds of structured interviews: behavioral (questions about prior achievements) and situational (job-related hypothetical situations „what would you do if…”). These situational questions better predict future performance at work according to meta-analysis research mentioned above.
So taking into account all of these information we still can claim that none of these techniques are perfect.
Science told us that there is a better way than applying only one of these techniques.
Research shows that combination of assessment techniques are better than any single technique and this is what CodersFirst is doing.
The goal of our hiring process is to give an opportunity to anyone, from anywhere, to be assessed on their ability. Software Engineers can verify their tech skills. No credentials needed — the recruitment process is totally bias free.
This means we need to predict how candidates will perform once they join the client’s team in the most effective way possible.
To achieve that goal we combine different assessment techniques applying placing the assessment in the natural work environment to help candidates stay comfortable during the recruitment process. We chose that way because it’s the most predictive and the most comfortable for candidates (in stressful situation people actually may act totally opposite to their natural behaviour so keeping them in stressful situation with tasks which do not reflect their natural work environment can be meaningless for the hiring process).
We’re creating a unique matching system which based on science, permanently acquiring deep and rich data from specially designed, scalable recruitment process and companies’ data. The whole package of data is permanently matching and analyzing by our platform.
CodersFirst has started with the IT industry.
We expect that our assumptions will develop and transform over time as we gather more data on what companies are looking for.
We think it is worth trying because the potential reward is huge! The world where people will get their dream job based on their competences seems to be beautiful.
We’d welcome your thoughts or feedback on the project.
Stay tuned!
