❂ WHO AM I
❂ LET’S FACE IT, RESUMES ARE INTENDED FOR A SOLE PURPOSE: SALES & MARKETING
I have never seen a good resume intended for something else other than the obvious: Getting the foot in the door for the 1st Interview.
Don’t get me wrong.
There is nothing wrong with sales and marketing of oneself. Provided all resumes are written to the same global “Gold” standards. Which clearly isn’t the case.
Some resumes are well written and professional. Others are embellished. Yet there are others that are purely narrative but has not much “marketing” value.
Whatever the case, most interviewer I know can only vet through some 20 – 30 resumes before fatigue (and mindsets) sets in.
I have personally experienced these after reading some 158,500 plus resumes (and counting) over the last 20 years. That’s an average of 660 resumes a month, 20-30 on any given work day over 20 years. That’s a lot of resumes to go through in details.
So is there fatigue and mindsets setting in?
Absolutely.
❂ WHEN WE READ RESUMES AND MAKES A QUICK DECISION IS THE SAME AS JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER
We all know it is unwise to judge a book by its cover; judge a movie by its trailer and judge a person by their appearance.
Yet, we do it all the time, especially when we first set sights on a candidate’s resume.
It is our own personal bias, our own perspective and our own second guesses that trigger and further compound the problem of the “already biased resume”.
Hiring Decisions are plagued with Human Biases
Let me explain;
The first impression of a resume draws out our very own perception from our past experience, which is opinionated and 9 out of 10 times completely biased, whether we agree or not.
Let me illustrate with an example:
Assuming both candidates qualify for the job descriptions and job skills;
Likely 50% of you will choose to interview the candidate on the left, and the other 50% will choose to interview the candidate on the right, if you were forced to choose one or the other. Well, some might choose to interview both because they just can’t tell.
This is where there is already a difference in perception based strictly on resume and attached photographs. The variance is 50%, which is rather high considering that it is a 50/50 error rate.
That’s almost like saying; “I am alright that the pilot flying this plane I am on has a 50% rate of landing this aircraft safely”
Well, in my area of work, 50% error is totally unacceptable. For most companies, I imagine 50% error rate is not acceptable.
So we make sure there is almost zero error.
Without letting the cat out of the bag, one candidate has demonstrated the following attitude even BEFORE we conducted any interviews with her:
#1. Responsiveness
#2 Compliance
#3 Consistency
#4 Responsibility
#5 Attitude & Values
All these were measured, without looking at the resume or without referencing the resume, even if we inevitably peeked at the resume.
Not surprisingly, the other candidate, instead, simply ghosted the interview.
❂ FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN BIAS IS FIRST IMPRESSION
Our mind formulates a first impression when we read a resume or meets anyone for the first time. It is hardwired in our subconscious mind to formulate an impression based on our past experience and personal bias.
This same bias affects our judgment and results in our mind looking for Confirmation Bias, a phenomenon where we look for evidence to support what our mind speculate our decision about that person; i.e. we look for what we already decided in our mind.
It is this Confirmation Bias that blinds us to the real facts that were presented to us.
This Confirmation Bias is what has caused numerous decision errors in history leading to accidents and fatalities that USA NASA created a department to specialise in Human Factors analysis to avoid Confirmation Bias.
If you consider Confirmation Bias costing hundreds of millions and even billions** in some extremely large enterprises, then it is no longer a trivial problem to merely accept or ignore the errors.
**Source: businessinsider.com/amazon-attrition-costs-company-8-billion-a-year-2022-10
❂ HOW DO WE AVOID HUMAN BIAS
By delaying all forms of human decision making till the FINAL INTERVIEW BY THE HIRING MANAGER AND HR MANAGER.
The first few rounds of interviews is independent and unbiased assessment of values, attitudes, skills and validation of facts, starting with the most important: Values & Attitudes using Drawings as illustrated below (thats what we built into our black box):
❂ WHY ARE THESE 10 DRAWINGS UNBIASED
The above drawings came from the 10 basic symbols illustrated here:
The scientific basis for this methodology was derived from Rorschach Test from 1921
These 10 symbols have neither questions nor scale to grade.
They do not require the candidates to answer any questions nor determine what fits or do not fit them. What they agree strongly or disagree with.
There is nothing to interpret and it does not require native language understanding to complete, nor comprehension of any form.
The symbols are universal and is not dependent on cultures, gender, age or work experience.
It “visualises” directly with our sub-conscious mind.
And it simply cannot be gamed nor manipulated.
Period.
Let me demonstrate why.
One of the symbol here is ” / “, a slope upwards.
Across all cultures, gender, age or work experience, everything and everyone will think of the following as an upward line:
#1. Money
#2. Career / Job
#3. Lifestyle
#4. Relationships
#5. Business
Everyone, including the Richest or Poorest Man on earth, will want any of these to be GROWING UPWARDS. There is no exception for this Symbol.
Hence it is universal and unbiased to all cultures, gender, age, and work experience.
Our neural network engine called Drawmetrics™analyses the co-relations between each of these drawings to determine what is the most dominant and display the innate behaviour and values report of the individual.
❂ WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE REPORT
We validate the Drawmetrics Values Report by generating a list of customised interview questions, specific to the candidate ALONE.
No one has exactly the same sets of interview questions! So it is totally unique to the Individual.
See our Newsletter on Hiring to Represent Your Brand
❂ WHY INTERVIEW QUESTIONS VALIDATIONS GET US TO 100% ACCURACY
When candidates answer specific questions that are only specific to them, it gives them no room to “perform” well rehearsed and prepared answers.
10 out of 10 candidates will be surprised by how well the questions are tailored to them and will force them to explain from their past PERSONAL experience, not from their intellect or pre-conceived model answers.
This not only increases Candidate Experience with the interviews, it provides the much needed framework to build a story or picture about who the candidate really is. This goes way beyond the resumes and skills. This is about who they are.
Companies invest in founders for who they are, not only for what skills and knowledge/skills/experiences they have.
Similarly, by tailoring the interview questions to who they are, it allows the interviewers to know the candidates deeply and how they make decisions, think, feel and act, based upon real situations, not scenario based questions that gives theoretical answers.
For example: One of our Interview Prompts is: “Check Sensitivity”
Interview Prompts:
“Please tell us a time or an event where you needed to handle a negative feedback or criticism about you or your work. What happened?”
Once these validating Interview Questions are well covered, interviewers/hiring managers can get a very good sense of who they are really hiring and how they will work with others, especially in the following aspects:
- Honesty in answering questions that are not theoretical nor can be pre-prepared ahead of time. This is important to established what is real and what is in theory (this is another topic to be covered in greater details in a separate newsletter).
- Integrity in owning up to what are real strength and also real weaknesses. The typical question around weaknesses are, well lack of a better term, weak. They do not provide the real assessment based upon the answers of most candidates in answering this honestly.
- Completing the mental picture of the candidate’s values, attitude and how they go about making decisions and how that might conflict or create conflict within your teams & corporate culture.
If this is helpful, look out for our next Newsletter where we discuss the challenges of hiring and retaining people with values and cultural misfits and how to overcome or prevent them from happening.
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❂ REACH OUT TO US FOR PROOF OF CONCEPT
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/resumes-bring-out-human-bias-andrew-chai-/