Optimizing Your Candidate List with Michael Yinger

Michael Yinger, CEO of Resume Sieve, joins Fletcher Wimbush to discuss the best ways to hire the right person for the right job through the resume sorting process.
Optimizing-The-Hiring-Process

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Fletcher: I'd like to welcome everybody to The Hire Talent podcast, optimizing the hiring process for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. Today, I've got Michael Yinger. He's a career talent acquisition guy. They've built a great talent acquisition tool, and he's really passionate about what he's done. He's done this his whole career, and he's really been in the RPO, the recruitment process outplacing or outsourcing type of realm. I thought that was interesting. I haven't had anybody on in this, and it's not really my realm, but there are organizations, especially now here with post-COVID, that are having to scale up huge numbers of people fast, and that creates a whole other problem than just trying to select one or two great people. So today, volume hiring, getting it done right and fast the first time is really going to be the focal point of our topic here. Thank you, Michael, for joining us. Please tell us a little bit more about your background. I gave brief info, but tell us more about how you ended up in the software side. I know you had a nice career in recruiting for that.

Michael: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for the intro, Fletcher. I actually backed into the talent acquisition space from doing a little bit of consulting. I started doing consulting for one of the early RPO firms. At the time, we were called. Some people might still remember that name. I worked my way through the organization doing implementation and then doing technology management, and then finally doing delivery and sales and product management, my last firm...

Michael:

I had a COVID event, like a lot of people did, so I was out looking for opportunities. Some folks that I knew from previous came to me and said, "Look, we've got this tool. We'd like you to come help us take it forward." That tool we call The Sieve, and that's the engagement that I'm working on now, ResumeSieve. But the idea was helping recruiters evaluate and rank resumes, and doing it quickly, so it ties in with the high volume in terms of that. There's some really good use cases there, and I know that's not particularly our topic, but that's what our focus is. I've been doing that for about 14 months at this point.

Fletcher:

Nice, awesome. Well, that sounds really exciting. Yeah, definitely everywhere we can automate or streamline, especially when we're in volume situations, is definitely important, but I think I'll be really interested, and I think the audience will be interested, to learn more about those best practices. What are the theories and philosophy if you're thinking about how you're going to do that effectively? What are you looking for? If you had to evaluate 10,000 resumes quickly, how do you do that effectively? This comes up from time to time in the SMB space. You get companies that are about to go into hyper-growth mode, or maybe they're going to add 10 or 15 people. For them it's hyper-growth. They're going to need to A, collect a lot of resumes. Maybe if we have time we should talk about that, because that's always a

Michael:

Yeah, right.

Fletcher:

Where are you even getting 

Michael:

Right now especially.

Fletcher:

... the few thousand candidates to begin with, just getting them in the door, let alone trying to evaluate them? But best practices around doing that effective volume so it's not a burden. How did you guys do it in the RPO space? How do you systemize it?

Michael:

Yeah. Well, you're right. It is a real challenge. Typically in the RPO space, you're dealing with larger clients. You're dealing with people with a pretty good set of technology, some sort of applicant tracking system that can help you with the process. Now, the applicant tracking systems aren't perfect either, because they tend to stay away from ranking. They're really good at collecting and organizing and processing. It still falls to the recruiter to do the ranking.

Michael:

In the early days of applicant tracking systems, you'd have 100 resumes. You couldn't evaluate all 100, so you'd just do the first 50, and then you'd make your slate from the first 50, unless you didn't find anybody, and then you'd go to the next. Oh, no, no, that's not good enough; we'll do every other one.

Fletcher:

Yeah, yeah.

Michael:

You look for tools, quite frankly. There are two ways to do it.

Fletcher:

That make it easier.

Michael:

That make it easier. In terms of what are you looking for, you're looking for consistency. You're looking for eliminating the bias that goes into the resume evaluation process. I'll just share a little short story with you. I was talking to a TA director who posted one job. She was trying to hire a recruiter. She got 700 resumes in 36 hours, and I said, "Well, what did you do?"

Michael:

She said, "Well, I printed them all. Three of us spent four weeks, and we came up with our slate. We hired one person." That's just-

Fletcher:

They printed every single resume? That's...

 

Michael:

They printed them all out because they ... You hear stories like that, and you think, well, there are easier ways to do that.

Fletcher:

Yeah. There's easier ways to skin that cat. I fell into the recruiting space myself. We're a talent assessment company, and we spent a lot of time coaching our clients on just best hiring practices in general, because again, back to this thing, if you don't have a pool of people to assess, interview, or vet period, however you want to assess them, whether you're using a sieve to match resumes, or using assessments, or just interviewing somebody, they're all forms of assessment, but if there's nobody in the pool, you can't do it.

Fletcher:

I go out, and one of my clients says we want you to do it for us, so we did. We started, spun out a little routine search, and we just found my first couple of searches back in the day. I got emailed a ton of resumes. I was actually pretty good at collecting resumes. I had several hundred, and they were all emailed. They were all sitting in my inbox, and I'd go through them. I'd scratch a bunch of them no, definitely not, but then I ended up with 70 resumes. I would print them out. I put them into piles on my desk, A, B and C. I took the As, and I would start calling all the As. I did that for two months, and I was like, okay, this is crazy. There's got to be a better way, a better use of my time.

Fletcher:

Then I discovered the applicant tracking system, and literally my life changed. I can process 100 resumes in 15 minutes.

Michael:

Yeah, right.

Fletcher:

Now, I couldn't do that day one. It took a little practice.

Michael:

Sure, sure.

Fletcher:

But that takes me to, well, how do you do that? You mentioned something earlier. You mentioned bias. You mentioned a system, a way to evaluate consistency, so if you have say 100 or 200 or 700 resumes, and you're going to humanly evaluate them, how do you create a consistent way to evaluate those resumes?

Michael:

If you're going to do it manually, we stipulate that you're going to do it without the benefit of-

Fletcher:

Let's use a tool. You've got to have an applicant tracking system.

Michael:

Okay.

Fletcher:

If anybody's not using an applicant tracking system out there, I'm sorry, guys, just go hide under a rock somewhere. They're so inexpensive, just go get any one, any applicant tracking system, hopefully a good one, but go get one. You're still going to look at that many resumes manually, yeah.

Michael:

Right. Yeah. So if you're using an ATS, generally the first way that you weed out is you do prescreening questions. It's interesting. People say we can't find anybody these days. I posted a job at 10:30 last night for a sales person. As of 9:30 this morning, I had already had 15 applicants. There's still people out there looking for jobs, so this idea that you can't find them ... Yeah, there are people out there in .

Fletcher:

Theoretically, in 30 days you'll have 450 applicants.

Michael:

That's right. So what did I do? I put in prescreening questions. There are certain things that I'm just ... I'm not going to hire a salesperson who's got less than five years sales experience. If they're answering the question honestly, then they're eliminated. That's the first thing, right? You can do some prescreening.

Michael:

What some companies are doing is that they're doing assessments. As soon as somebody applies, they put them through an assessment. They're using the assessment to further cull the list, so now you're down to just the ones that you want to evaluate. You do have to have a system, because even in the ATS, some of the more sophisticated ones maybe you can do some Boolean searching. You could say, I want these three or four skills, and it will bring up just the resumes in your stack that have those three or four skills. You run the risk of, it's limited, and what do you do with it? But that's just using the tools to their greatest advantage. There are any number, particularly now some of the CRMs are adding some AI capability that will actually evaluate the person's social presence, and make some judgements around what are they going to do, what might they do? But at the end of the day, if you're using those systems, it's still going to come down to the recruiter going through a stack, and evaluating that stack.

Michael:

Now in the ATS, you're probably looking at their application. The advantage there is that all the applications look the same, because that's what it is, it's an application.

Fletcher:

Yeah, yeah,.

Michael:

Exactly right. You can scan it and say, do they have Java? Do they have agile? Have they been employed for three years? Whatever your criteria is, it doesn't have to be tech, but whatever your criteria, you can generally pick that up relatively quickly off the application.

Michael:

But if you're doing it manually, if you're using one of the smaller ATS, some of which are ... The systems with smaller companies, I won't name names, because I'm not trying to shame anybody, they just have the applicants here. Here they are. The only difference is you get to see them on a screen instead of printing it out of email. You still have to go through all the resumes to decide who you're going to do, and if you want to be compliant, you want to follow the rules because you're worried about OCCP or something like that. You've got to keep track of how you're going through them. What we used to tell our recruiters, if you go through the first one in the stack, however big the stack is, you have to go through the whole stack.

Fletcher:

Yeah, yeah. You've got to give everybody a fair shake, right?

Michael:

If you do a search, and that search turns up 500 people who have whatever your search criteria is, redo the search, because you can't go through 500.

Fletcher:

Yeah, You bring up a good point, and I think this is where I see a lot of people make pretty, fatal errors. They don't set the parameter of the search up front correctly.

Michael:

Right, right.

Fletcher:

What I'm talking about is not your Boolean search. I'm talking about your job description.

Michael:

Yes.

Fletcher:

The ones that make me cringe the most are when people go ... I meet a lot of entrepreneurial circles, and they'll put a post on Facebook and be like, "Hey, does anybody have a job description for a salesperson?" You're going to use somebody else's job description for your job? Are you freaking out of your mind? I get why people do that, but it takes time, it takes effort. If you don't set the stage, if you don't sit there and do a job analysis, which doesn't have to be a complicated, scientific thing, it's a process. You've got to actually understand what it is that you expect this person to do, and what they need, what tools, skills, experiences, background they need in order to be more likely to be successful at doing that. You've got to do the time. You've got to put the time in to do that, right?

Michael:

Exactly. You were talking about, well, how do you go about the evaluation? If you're going to be organized around it, then before you start evaluating the resumes, you should know what you're looking for. This will probably ring true to you from recruiting. One of the most difficult things that I have found recruiters have to deal with is they have their criteria, whatever it is. They go through, and they come up with their list of their top candidates. They go to the hiring manager, and the hiring manager says, "Well, what if we asked for this?" Then you have to go back and do the whole thing over again. Okay.

Fletcher:

Yeah, and that happens because the hiring manager didn't spend the time up front to analyze the job, and determine what they really wanted to begin with.

Michael:

Right. Or they've created something, which also happens, that just can't be filled, so the recruiter comes with the best possible combination of things. Maybe it was, well, you've got to have three years of this and four years of that, and the recruiter says, "Look, I can't find anybody with three of this and four of this."

Michael:

The hiring manager says, "Okay, well, then you can take that one down to two," and whatever, but it still means going back and doing the whole thing over again. If you're using those kinds of tools, it is a manual process. It's a manual process.

Fletcher:

Yeah. Yeah. How do you streamline this process then, so that you end up with a list of people that really do meet those expectations of a hiring manager?

Michael:

Yeah. Well, part of it is time. The more time you've spent working with the hiring manager, the more you're going to understand when they say, well, this or that. You're going to understand what that means. You're going to have a sense of how that hiring manager works. Otherwise, you're going to go through some iterations with the hiring manager.

Michael:

The challenge is you have to create a consistent process, and then you have to follow it. If that process says, first I do this, and then I do this, that's okay. Even before all that, one of the things that you touched on early on was ensure you're getting the right people. That means not only understanding the job description, but understanding what does a successful person look like? It's much like we do in advertising. What's the persona? What is it that will make somebody successful in this job based on people who have done it? What does this person look like?

Michael:

There are systems that you can take a resume, or you can take a job description, and reverse engineer it into a search tool, where you're out looking ... Now, in that case, you are out looking for passive candidates, which is a whole different game, passive versus the actual applicants.

Fletcher:

You're saying use a tool that will take, let's say you have 10 successful people in a customer service role, you take their resumes and put them together, and then use AI to look for something similar to that.

Michael:

Right. It creates a search pattern, and goes out and looks for it. Then of course the challenge with those systems is then you have to tell it, did you do a good job? Did you pick people that really worked, so it knows to use the same process again. I'm a firm proponent of the whole concept of AI and machine learning, and what we often forget is that the system isn't really thinking on its own; it has to have some feedback to understand whether or not it was doing the right thing, or getting you the results that you wanted to get.

Fletcher:

Yeah, and the original input too. This is the whole argument around AI and recruiting, the whole bias piece. You get that garbage in, garbage out.

Michael:

That's exactly it.

Fletcher:

This goes back to the fundamentals. We're talking a little old school. We're talking a little new school here. Garbage in, garbage out happened in old school too, when the companies, or hiring managers, aren't bothering to do a job analysis to understand, what do our successful people look like? What do they do on the job that makes them successful? Which are the drivers of success in terms of activities, in terms of skillsets to come up with a proper job description and analysis, or persona, candidate profile, right? If they do a poor job at it, it's garbage in. Then the recruiters, when they're doing it manually ... The AI is not going to do any better if you feed it the same garbage.

Michael:

Exactly. I had a guy working for me running one of the accounts, and he was old school. He knew everything that there was to know about the technology, and his approach was you spend the time up front, you work with the hiring manager to understand what an ideal candidate looks like. You use that to refine your searching, and then you don't bring 100 candidates back; you bring back the four that absolutely match what that hiring manager is looking for. Okay, if that doesn't work, then you refine your searching, but that's a different kind of sourcing. That's a different kind of process than just throwing it out there on Indeed or LinkedIn, and letting the applicants flow.

Fletcher:

Yeah, yeah. ResumeSieve, in theory, does something like that, right?

Michael:

Yeah. Well, what we do is we say we don't care how many resumes you have. We're going to let you create a standard job description, which you can do either by importing one or manually creating one, and then you can evaluate 1,000 resumes, 500 resumes, 250 resumes, whatever you want to do. You want to change the criteria, you change the criteria, and in a matter of seconds, you reevaluate all those resumes on that new criteria. It brings all those candidates back, so you're still following the spirit of the law; now, they're just rank ordered. You look at the top 10, or you look at the top 15 instead of having to figure out ...

Michael:

That was the problem with some of those early methods; I'll take every other one, or I'll take the first 50. Well, maybe this one.

Fletcher:

There's a chance, right?

Michael:

This woman I was telling you about, when she did her 700 and it took her four weeks, I said, "Well, what's wrong with that process?" Not going to the obvious answer, really, and she said, "Yeah, I probably wanted number 701," because she shut her applications off there for 36 hours. Maybe somebody who was working that was busy and didn't get to the job posting, but now it's already down, so you're missing out on good applicants because you can't control the volume. Yeah. Even in days like we have now, which will fade over time, where we're fighting over applicants, you still have to be able to give yourself the ability to look at everybody, because you just don't know. Is it the first person to apply, or is it the last one?

Fletcher:

A better candidate? Yeah, and it always drives me crazy when people run a, oh, here are my top four, and I'm going to hire one of them. That's great if one of them actually is the person for the job, but when people settle ... I'm in the assessment business, so a lot of times people do this to us. They'll say, "Well, I ran an ad and I collected 100 people. Here's the three best ones. We had you assess them, and guess what, we don't recommend any of them."

Fletcher:

Then they're like, "Well, which of the three is the best?"

Fletcher:

"Well, none of them. They're all not right."

Michael:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where do you run the assessment? What's the assessment looking for? As you know, there's a whole psychology to that.

Fletcher:

Hiring by finalists is a poor strategy, in my opinion. It goes to that, maybe 701 was the right person? Hopefully, if you've got 700 people, you should be able to not hire by finalists, but find actually the true right fit.

Michael:

Yeah. If you're able to go through all 700, that's the challenge. This person had this incredible process that they invested in. Okay, knock yourself out if you've got that kind of resource and that kind of time to spend, just to find the candidates you're going to interview. Wow. It's a little scary.

Fletcher:

Yeah, super scary. I'm really curious, I don't know, it's just been popping. I'm always thinking about, here is ... Just to change gears and a different side of this, I'm still curious on the RPO side. How do big organizations' volume hiring evaluate the cost of hiring? I'm not talking about the cost of a recruiter, or the cost of buying people uniforms, or the cost of training them; I'm talking about the cost of whether or not that person gets the job done.

Michael:

You're talking post-hire evaluation, right?

Fletcher:

Successful hiring. How do they evaluate whether this hire was a success or not in terms of dollars?

Michael:

Yep, yep. Typically, the post-hire evaluation is where things get a little tricky, because that means that you have to have a performance management process that you have to believe in, that is fairly evaluated. We had one client that used assessments on everybody, because literally, they hired 65,000 people a year. Everybody who applied was assessed, so that was the first filter, the assessment. It was green and clear. Green, clear, yellow, red. Green and clear got through, yellow and red didn't. The hiring manager could override, because that red candidate, that was Bob's brother. Let's bring Bob's brother in.

Fletcher:

Sure, yeah. You're not being consistent.

Michael:

They had measured the performance of the candidates based on their assessment score, and they had, over time, a numeric valuation, to say a red candidate in an inside sales role, just as an example, is worth $1 million less a year in results versus a green candidate, and it's because they had the data. They had the data. They could look at the performance review. They could look at the productivity of the people. They had the sample size, all that.

Fletcher:

That's the number, right? That's the number. You're literally talking about $1 million hiring mistake to hire a red candidate versus a green one.

Michael:

Yep, that's exactly right, and they knew it.

Fletcher:

A $1 million hiring mistake.

Michael:

That's it, and they knew it. Of course, when you're dealing with numbers like that, and you're willing to collect the data, you can come to those kinds of things. You've got three or four IOs on your staff, including the CHRO. They'll figure that stuff out, but the key to understanding those outcomes is the ability to measure the results.

Fletcher:

But even in an SMB space, however you're finding people, you can measure the productivity, the value of a new hire, even just logically. I hire a new salesperson. I give them a $5 million a year quota. In 90 days, they sell $250,000 in revenue, and then they get fired because they're short, or they quit because they don't like working here or whatever. They don't work out for whatever reason, and then it takes another six months to refill that. You're somewhere around $2 million in lost revenue, created in that situation. Pick the customer service person. What's the lifetime value of a customer for you? $100,000?

Michael:

Yeah, right. What's the contract value? Yeah.

Fletcher:

$15,000, $10,000, pick a number. It's going to be a lot, whatever it is. If that customer service person doesn't work out, they piss off the customer, the customer fires you, you just lost $10,000, $50,000, $100,000 on that. Now, I think production worker, you can figure out what it's worth, even if you haven't done that exact number.

Michael:

You can.

Fletcher:

Now figuring out whether the correlation, if you follow this process, will produce this, that definitely takes some data or a good partner.

Michael:

Well, data and time, right? It takes time to generate the data. You've got to be willing to put in the time, because over time, and it's not a huge amount. I would think, for an hourly job over the course of a year, you probably could figure out what the value of that job is, what the cost is for replacement. All those kinds of things go into the hire, and you should also be looking at, can I create a persona around the people who are successful, so I'm going and looking for them.

Michael:

I'll go back to my hospitality example. Somebody who's successful working at the front desk in a hotel may never have worked in a hotel before. They may have been a server in a restaurant, or a bartender, or something like that. You learn through experience. The thing about an RPO, not to pitch RPOs in particular, an RPO that has got enough experience is going to be able to come to the table and say, "In previous situations, since we don't have a baseline for you yet, we've hired for other clients these kinds of roles and these kinds of situations, and this is what we have found to be successful for this kind of role for you. We're going to modify what we're looking for for you, because you've been looking for this, and you're telling me it's not working because you've got 50% turnover. Let's look for this, and let's see if we can drive your turnover down, and at the same time impact your productivity." It's an iterative process because you've got to give somebody a chance to succeed.

Fletcher:

I imagine that's a tough sell sometimes. People are just like, "No, I only want other front desk people from other hotels." You start beating your head up against the wall, but you have a 50% turnover, and that's causing you to get poor reviews on TripAdvisor. Your revenue is going down, and that hotel is going to be out of business if you don't fix it.

Michael:

Someone has to be willing to listen to a new idea. That's essentially what you're saying. The hardest customer in in the world for an RPO is somebody who says, "I want to hire you because you're an expert in recruiting, and I want you to do it my way."

Fletcher:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Michael:

Well, why are you hiring me if your way if working for you?

Fletcher:

Yeah. If you've got it figured out, then why don't you just keep doing what you're doing?

Michael:

Keep doing what you're doing, because you know that if you're paying me, I'm making a profit on it, so in theory ... It's a funny conversation, and it does happen. People will go out of their way.

Fletcher:

Yeah, and I've seen that too. Your ideal candidate is not the one you think it is, and you can prove it to yourself just by looking at the resumes of the people on your team that are successful. You go, "You're looking for this over here, but when you look at your existing people, they don't look like that."

Michael:

That's exactly right.

Fletcher:

I would challenge anybody listening to this to go do that exercise. Pull the 10 resumes or the 10 best people on your team, and look at those. Compare that to what your target is when you're evaluating resumes, and I bet you seven to nine out of 10 of those situations, people will go, "Oh, my best people don't look like what I'm looking for right now."

Michael:

Yeah.

Fletcher:

They'd have that epiphany if they took 10 minutes to do that exercise. It wouldn't take them very long.

Michael:

Yeah, exactly. It is phenomenal what you find when you dig into the data, but it takes a commitment to look at the data. Companies that are churning are probably just more focused on, well, how can I slow down the churn without really thinking about what's causing the churn?

Fletcher:

But it could be a million dollar hiring mistake with just one hire.

Michael:

Exactly, one hire.

Fletcher:

Just one low level inside salesperson could cost you $1 million in lost opportunity, let alone all the other roles that are probably, if they're not costing you millions, are costing you tens to hundreds of thousands.

Michael:

Exactly right, not to mention the replacement cost. You've got the replacement cost.

Fletcher:

Well, lost productivity. I stopped talking about the cost of hiring. I don't care how much it costs to run an ad on Indeed. Look, it's going to cost you $1,000 to properly market a job, period. You're going to run $500 on Indeed, another $400 on ZipRecruiter, and a couple bucks over here, a couple bucks over there in order to build a pool of adequate people for most jobs, so $500 or $1,000.

Fletcher:

Look, that is pennies compared to the lost opportunity, either having the job not filled, turning away work, or you're doing a poor job at the work, or you're burning out your existing people, and they're quitting because they're working too much or working too hard, or getting beat down. Those are more costs right there, but the cost of hiring, the time the recruiter spends, the time for the tools, the time, the money you spend on advertising are pennies. I don't even like it when people start talking about this stuff, because it's nothing. It's a drop in the bucket compared to those other things, and the biggest cost is lost opportunity. Every day that job's not filled, you're not making money. You're not delivering product or service. Even worse, every time you get the wrong person in there and they come short on their goals, you're leaving hundreds of thousands, if not millions on the table.

Michael:

Yeah. Well, it all ties back to a cost center mentality, where you're just looking at the expense and you're not really thinking about the upside. We had one client that went into just a frenzy of hiring because their business was exploding. Problem was, they had a fixed budget around talent acquisition. We got to the end of their budget and they said, "Well, you've got to stop hiring."

Michael:

We said, "Well, okay."

Michael:

They said, "But we don't have everybody we need."

Michael:

We said, "Well, what do you want me to do about that? You need more money. Isn't there an opportunity cost not selling these jobs? Go back to the people who need these jobs filled, and tell them, 'I need more budget if you want to fill those jobs, so you can make more revenue in whatever it is that you're doing.'" It's a funny conversation, particularly larger companies where there's a disconnect between these things.

Fletcher:

Well, small companies are doing it all the time, too. They don't want to spend $500 in advertising on Indeed. It's too expensive.

Michael:

Compared to what? Compared to the job being vacant for an extra two weeks, because we didn't find the right person?

Fletcher:

Or even worse, I've got 10 candidates. I picked the best of the 10, and none of them were any good. Now I've got six months of toiling around and screwing around with the wrong hire, and not getting the job done, and then starting all over again. Now 12 months down the road, you still haven't filled the job properly. That's often what happens. It's often a one year mistake for companies.

Michael:

Oh, sure, sure. It takes a while to realize that it's taking you time. Then you start focusing on getting it done, and then you go through iterations. You wonder about a job that's been vacant for six months. Well, do you really need it?

Fletcher:

Yeah. You obviously don't care enough. Sure, you might want it. Maybe you want to fill it, but you're not putting enough importance on the value that that job could create for the organization when companies do that. So yes, you either don't need it, or you're forgetting how valuable that job is to adding more revenue and more value to your company. That's why companies stay stagnant. They don't grow. They're penny pinching. They're worried about this little thing here and there, and then next thing you know, it's the same vicious cycle over and over again.

Michael:

It becomes a vicious cycle. You're always playing catch up. You'll never catch up, so you never really hit your full potential. It's a forest for the trees thing. I'm more concerned about my quarterly budget than I am my annual results. Yeah, okay.

Fletcher:

Fine, yeah.

Michael:

Well, what can you do? You can lead them to water, but that's about it.

Fletcher:

Yeah. You ain't going to make a bunch of money in real estate or the stock market unless you put some money into it, just like your business. Maybe there's another way to think about it? All right, Michael, this has been a really fun chat.

Michael:

It's been great.

Fletcher:

Would love you to leave us with two things that you could do in your organization, that you could do tomorrow to improve your hiring results.

Michael:

Sure. The first thing is spend the time up front to plan how you're going to do it. All too often people throw the thing out there, they start getting people in, and they're scrambling to get through. They're caught up in their production. It's basic process thinking. If you plan it in advance, what are you looking for? What are you going to do? How are you going to handle it? You'll be much better off, particularly-

Michael:

Yeah. Just to do all that in advance. That way you're not playing catch up.

Michael:

The second thing, and you and I have talked about it, really understand what's the profile of the successful candidate? It's not what the job description says. The job description says what is it they're going to do, maybe some of the skills they need to have, but it's not necessarily what describes the successful candidate.

Fletcher:

Who's going to be good at that.

Michael:

Exactly right. So understand what that is, because it may be that there are some odd quirks that are the best thing that you could find. It's a reverse way. The crazy example you always think of is you've got to have a bachelor's degree. Okay. Well, then Microsoft never would have hired Bill Gates. Are you really thinking that through? Are your most successful people really the people with bachelor's degrees? Maybe they are. Maybe that is the necessary criteria, but validate it, absolutely.

Fletcher:

I love that one. Both of those are great pieces of advice, but that second one, I think, no one's ever come here and talked about that. It's so overlooked, so that's great.

Fletcher:

Michael, tell us where we can find more information about ResumeSieve, you guys.

Michael:

Yeah, a couple things. Certainly there's our website, which is resumesieve.com. We're on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, all under ResumeSieve, or The Sieve, either one. We're also doing some crowdfunding, so if you want to be part of the revolution, if you want to get into being a contributor to the growth, we're on wefunder.com as ResumeSieve, so all ways to get a hold of us. I'm michael@resumesieve.com, and Michael Yinger in all the various social media, not hard to find me. I'm not hiding anywhere.

Fletcher:

We'll put everything on the landing page for this, all the socials and everything.

Michael:

Okay, great.

Fletcher:

We'll collect all that from you here, and everybody can get a hold of Michael if you're interested in learning more about ResumeSieve, and matching your resumes to your job descriptions, streamlining that process for you or anything else that we talked about today. Thank you very much, and appreciate your time.

Michael:

Great. Thanks, Fletcher. I appreciate it.

 

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Want to Know More About Today's Guest?

pre employment testing software, pre employment testing, pre employment tests, pre employment assessment tests, pre employment test, pre employment test,

Michael Yinger

CEO of Resume Sieve

Michael Yinger has been in the talent acquisition space for almost 20 years, most recently as the Global Lead of Growth, Strategy and Product Management for PeopleScout. His previous experience in the space includes Aon RPO as Global Delivery Leader, Randstad Sourceright as VP of Implementation and Technology, and as an independent consultant specializing in process and implementation for multiple clients. A well tenured business executive, Mr. Yinger brings expertise in technology, business design, and strategy to The Sieve, as well as a passion to enhance the experience of all the participants in the recruitment process. He and his family live in Charlotte, NC, where they take time to enjoy the outdoors and regional entertainment, taking advantage of the mild climate.

What People Say about Us!

"It helps us make solid hiring decisions. We have a minimum benchmark score for applicants. We can also consider areas of importance such as attention to detail, and whether the applicant is more suited to a customer facing role or a technical role."

 

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Rick O.

Satisfied Customer for over 2 Years

"My experience has been outstanding. In every aspect, I am provided with good service. If I have a question, it is answered promptly and thoroughly. I feel as though I have a ready consultant on my shoulder ready to assist and discuss with me any difficult choices that result from the results of the testing. They have this area nailed, and I am very satisfied and content with the system."

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Samuel B.

Satisfied Customer for over 2 Years