Throwing the baby out with the bathwater

[Moz]

“Paying too much attention to what’s on paper may cost you the perfect employee” according to Jeffrey Pfeffer in an article in today’s Australian Financial Review.

His article questions the value of the resume in the hiring process. Other than the fact that resumes aren’t terribly reliable as a record of a person’s work history, Pfeffer argues that the resume tells us very little about the individual, their personal drive and essential nature.

He also recounts his own experience using the interview to sell the job to a candidate who presented well and appeared outstanding on paper, but turned out to be a disappointment after he had been hired. Hand’s up who’s guilty of that mistake?

However, possibly the biggest mistake we make in our use of resumes in the recruitment process, is that we use them as a first pass filter, discounting people who don’t have what we believe to be “the necessary qualifications”. This is where we maybe “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”, or even worse we have an external recruitment firm do it for us, (so we’re blissfully unaware who has been rejected).

Pfeffer points out that there are many successful business people who don’t have a basic university degree, for example Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Steve Jobs (Apple).

Just as well they’re not looking for a job nowadays, they’d be lucky to even get a rejection letter from some organisations, let alone an interview!

According to the AFR, Jeffrey Pfeffer is a professor of organisation behaviour at Stanford Graduate School of Business.