The curious case of Skill-Matching | Hiring for Experience vs Hiring for Potential
Leonardo Da Vinci does not need much introduction, he was an acclaimed painter, architect, engineer, scientist, sculptor and of course, a genius. He was also credited for writing world’s first resume — more than 500 years back. In this resume, he writes to Ludovico Sforza, the Regent of Milan, explaining his array of skills and expertise and appeals to him for a suitable work opportunity in the city of Milan.
Experts have studied this document extensively and believe that it was a winning resume created by Da Vinci as he had extensively personalized it for Sforza. Not just that, Da Vinci had beautifully articulated how his skills can help Milan win wars (by engineering bridges or developing war equipment) or even beautify the city with his ability to design immaculate architecture, sculptors and paintings.
Below is the snapshot of the original Da Vinci resume:
However, a recently conducted social experiment by BBC claims that Da Vinci would have faced a tough time in today’s job market, and it would have been very difficult for him to get his CV get past the initial screening stage!
IMAGINE! Leonardo Da Vinci, a genius getting rejected by the modern day Human Resources department!
According to Glassdoor, Talent acquisition team of a medium-large organization get 250 job applications for a single job role. Conservatively, even if a company publishes 1000 job openings in an entire year, they will still receive more than 2,50,000 applications!
The hiring team has the herculean task of going through each of these candidate profiles and assess their ‘fitment’ to the role. With the limited resources and tight SLAs around “time to fill”, companies must rely on technology to screen the resumes and recommend the ‘best-suited’ ones.
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) with Keyword based skill-matching capabilities work almost like most dating apps these days. They scan the resumes of the candidates and try to match with the requirements of the job role.
The skill-matching problem will always have two aspects defining it — Demand and Supply. Organizations often issue Job Descriptions (JDs) defining the key skills ‘demanded’ for that particular job role. On the other hand, to meet the ‘supply’ side, aspirants looking for suitable job opportunities will often create a resume/candidate profile that describes their skills and competencies. More often than not, these two primary sources of data: Job Descriptions and Resumes are very poorly created, resulting in a Garbage-in; Garbage-Out scenario.
The job descriptions are static and have not been revised in the recent past. In most cases, the hiring manager themselves are not aware of “what it takes to do this job” and hence the JDs do not exhibit the real skills that are needed on ground to do a job successfully. On the other hand, it is estimated that more than 90% of the candidates tend to use their ‘standard resume’ to apply to a job role. This means that the candidate has not spent enough time to ‘customize’ their profiles according to the requirements of the job — and hence are likely to be screened out by the ATS because of binary key-word matching.
To put it simply — Organizations don’t always know what skill set to look for, and candidates don’t always know if they have properly included all the skills that define them.
And ironically, our hiring systems are screening out thousands of potential ‘geniuses’ on the basis of this inaccurate information!
This is what seems to be the problem Da Vinci would have faced had he been applying to jobs in this era. While the BBC experts who analyzed his resume believed that it was very well personalized however, it hardly highlighted any of the buzzwords these platforms usually look for. It was concluded that Da Vinci is a person with varied interests however does not have a ‘single area of expertise’. This hits closer to reality, as most of the Job Descriptions often describe the job very narrowly, giving the candidate very little scope to be good at more than one thing.
Another criticism of Da Vinci’s resume was that he did not elaborate or talk about his achievements. Research has proven that candidates, especially from under-represented and diverse pool are likely to underplay their achievements on their social profiles and resumes. This dramatically increases the odds of them getting rejected during the initial technology-screening stages.
Hiring for Work Experience vs Hiring for Potential
It is a well-known fact that people considering switching jobs often look for newer opportunities, and not working in the same job role in a new company. Yet, majority of the corporate investments are focused on enhancing the capability to hire for “relevant experience”. This assumes that people with prior work experience in the same field can hit the ground running and will be a good fit for the organization.
However, the changing talent landscape is challenging this notion heads-on. A Deloitte report states that Millennials (born between 1980 and 2000) will comprise of 75% of the Global workforce by 2025. This is a talent group that has been exposed to rapidly changing technology, diverse career paths and virtually infinite ways to acquire skills from the open source. This shapes the real-life experiences of these candidates and mould them into passionate and driven professionals.
Hiring for direct work experiences can also act as a bane for the organizations, because more often than not the recruitment systems will throw ‘homogeneous’ candidate profiles at them. This dilutes the diversity in any organization thereby stagnating innovation, growth and creativity in the firm.
HR technology vendors are coming up with cutting edge products that are leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning to understand millions of data points and help recruiters develop a deeper understanding of the candidates. These insights aid the recruiters to take data driven decisions right from sourcing to screening. These AI driven platforms are leveraging multiple global and local data sources (job boards, LinkedIn profiles, HRMS data etc) to study the potential of a candidate on the basis of passive and active experiences they have had in the past.
In this era of cut-throat war for Talent, it is easy to ignore the candidates who will go an extra mile to ‘seek new experiences’ and deliver results for the organizations. It is important for the talent acquisition teams to understand this changing skill landscape and expand their horizons to be inclusive of more of Da Vincis 😊
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -
Informative Sources :
- https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/recruiting-humor-and-fun/2015/the-worlds-first-resume-is-500-years-old
- https://www.holborn-consulting.com/post/da-vinci-s-cv-rejected-by-two-hr-specialists-a-bbc-social-experiment
- https://www.ere.net/why-you-cant-get-a-job-recruiting-explained-by-the-numbers/
- https://www.crowdstaffing.com/blog/recruiting-for-potential-not-work-experience
- https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/About-Deloitte/gx-dttl-2014-millennial-survey-report.pdf
