Ep. 7: Screening Candidate Resumes Quickly and Effectively

In this episode we discuss all the tips and tricks for effectively screening a candidate’s resume, so you can breeze through them, able to highlight the main points and effectively select only top performers.

Transcription

Fletcher:

One, two, three. All right, folks, welcome to episode seven. Stephanie and Fletcher from The Hire Talent here. Today we’re going to talk about how to screen resumes in the hiring process, mastering this task when shuffling through hundreds of resumes and learning how to do that quickly, but also effectively without overlooking fantastic talent and not wasting your time screening or spending time with talent that probably should be overlooked. It is extremely valuable and ultimately getting the end result, which is an A player, right?

Stephanie:

Right. Yeah. What do you look for in a resume? You haven’t met the person. All you have is a piece of paper. You’re going to go over what to spot in a few minutes or less.

Fletcher:

Yeah. Well, I’m generally looking for a handful of things that will give me some cues. I want to spend more time with that person. You know me. I like to interview a lot of candidates, so if I choose a lot of subpar candidates to spend my time with, it’s wasteful, and it will extend the time that it takes for me to get a new hire. Ultimately what I want to look for, number one thing, I want to look for evidence of achievement in growth within roles. That’s a very universal type of thing that you can evaluate in find in any resume. Sometimes I’m looking for people who have very relevant experience for the role that I’m hiring. If hiring a tax accountant, they need to have experience preparing and doing tax work in a similar environment or have had education. In other times, it may not necessarily be relevant. It needs to be what I then call relatable.

Stephanie:

What’s the difference between something that’s relatable for your tax accountant if they don’t have that exact experience?

Fletcher:

That’s an example of someone where I need to have relevant experience. In other situations, I just need relatable experience. In a lot of cases, I think of salespeople. Sometimes I can take salespeople from one set of experiences and translate those experiences into relatable experiences that will help them be successful selling in a different environment, maybe somewhat similar environments. Inside sales, I maybe am cold calling over the phone and I’m prospecting to sell timeshares. How about that? You’re making a lot of dials and you’re having a lot of conversations and it’s a hard closing situation. You’ve got to get that customer from not interested to signing up for the free vacation where we can give him the next pitch.

Fletcher:

Let’s take that candidate and let’s put them into another kind of environment where maybe I’m selling marketing solutions. I need to get that person from not interested to sign up for a demo and actually showing up for the webinar or the demo phone call. Same kinds of skill sets. You’re just selling a different product to a different customer base.

Stephanie:

That’s the relatable versus the exact type of experience.

Fletcher:

Yeah. If I’m hiring a senior tax accountant, then they better have some tax preparation experience in whatever environment that I’m looking for. Maybe relatable would be I have a CPA who’s focused on doing individual tax returns and they’ve got a lot of experience there but very little in doing tax returns for entities. At that point, maybe I could say I’ll take that experience and then begin to translate it into a different kind of experience or we could build on that previous experience.

Stephanie:

You’re looking for that evidence of achievement. If you have a tax accountant, you’re looking for somebody who started off as maybe an accountant or a bookkeeper 10 years ago and then they’ve evolved and grown or been promoted into a higher level.

Fletcher:

Yeah, it could be that way. Every situation is going to be a little bit different. The tax world is tricky. Those people go from college to senior tax accountant within three years. I would also want to relate the level of achievement back to the industry or the environment or the world that the candidate lives in to become, let’s say, a controller or a CFO for a large private entity. That’s a much longer career path. That person starts in some low level, entry level, staff accountant position, maybe accounts payable, accounts receivable, then they move into a staff accountant position. They move into a senior staff. They might move into an accounting manager, then they might go to controller to director of finance to CFO. Early in this person’s career, I want to see them move through some of those early stages of their career relatively quickly in a reasonable amount of time. That would show me growth, goes from accounts payable to junior staff accountant to staff accountant to senior staff account. I might look at that person for an accounting manager position now. Right?

Stephanie:

Yeah, right. It just really depends on the environment there and you have to look at all the parts and what’s I guess typical for that industry or-

Fletcher:

What’s significant in terms of achievement? As a salesperson, pretty early in their career, year one, two, three, I would expect high levels of earnings. I would expect people to move up the ranks and compare well against their peers pretty quickly. If you’ve got somebody who’s out of college and they’re in their third year of sales and they’re not in the top 25 percentile of their peers in the environment that they’re working in, whatever it is that they’re selling, selling satellite TV services or selling a SaaS product, selling health benefits, whatever it is, pretty quickly, if they’re not within the top tier right away, then it’s not likely that they’re ever going to be a top performer in that environment.

Stephanie:

Right. Makes sense.

Fletcher:

Also, for salespeople, it’s about sustained success and exceeding past year’s goals. This year’s goal was a million, then next year, did they do 1.25 or did they do 800,000?

Stephanie:

Then, what that looks like translated on to a resume is either an indication of a position title change, so you started off as an outside salesperson in to a senior sales associate or a manager, right?

Fletcher:

Accounts payable, junior staff accountant, staff accountant, I like those ones better. Salespeople, again, it’s a little bit different. Evidence of achievement or promotion are two different things. In sales jobs, we’re looking for achievement for more maybe technical or administrative roles. We’re looking for promotion as much as we are for achievement. Achievement is just much harder to measure in those kinds of positions. As an accountant, people don’t really measure your work very much. Yes, you to get audited. Somebody is double checking your work. There’s mistakes. There’s errors. You’re dealing with more complex work, but that’s really difficult to measure. How do I determine whether you’re performing better than your peers? Well, recognition through promotion is one way.

Stephanie:

Again, just evidence of either that promotion and change of title on a resume. You see it moving up a rank.

Fletcher:

Which is a reflection of achievement, right?

Stephanie:

Right, or either achievement to how they write in the bullet points what they did at each job or if they’ve-

Fletcher:

Yeah. It’s not just what they did. That’s the differentiating point. Most people write a resume and says, “Outside salesperson for ABC Lumber.” I was responsible for calling on contractors to secure orders, large commercial orders of our lumber products. Great. That’s what your job was. That’s what you did, but nothing in there tells me about how well you did it.

Stephanie:

You want to see the actual metrics and what they achieved on that resume.

Fletcher:

Yes. Number one salesperson for Ganahl Lumber six years running out of 150 sales reps. Not only is the achievement significant, but it gives me some context. I was the number one salesperson for ABC Lumber. How many salespeople did you have? We had one. We do need to put things into context always, but we might do that in the interview as opposed to worry about on the resume. If my resume tells me these things, if they have had these significant achievements, that’s all I’m looking for, brief description of what they did just so I have some context, and then I want to understand how well they did it. If I see a resume that had some indicators that this person did it better than everybody else or in the top of their class or field, like top 25 percentile maybe, especially if it’s a large group of people that you’re comparing them against, that’s fairly significant. That’s a sign that that person was an achiever. If they’re leaving out those achievement numbers, longevity is a sign of achievement. Very rarely do people keep people around who aren’t doing at least something right.

Stephanie:

Sure. Performing in some capacity.

Fletcher:

Yeah. Usually they’re performing quite well on the better end of things if they’re being kept around for long periods of time. Obviously, title change. That’s where we go back to more technical kind of roles. Sales and leadership role is pretty easy to measure. There’s a lot of metrics associated with what they’re doing. Other roles can be tougher. Evidence of achievement, promotion, number one thing I’m looking for. Number two, I’m looking for relevant or relatable work experience. The third thing I’m often looking for immediately right off the bat is do I believe, and this is going to be something that you have to practice, but do I believe that my opportunity is a step up opportunity for somebody in this situation?

Stephanie:

Why does that matter as much as if I just need somebody who knows the job, what they’re doing? Maybe they want to come work for me because my company is better.

Fletcher:

Well, it depends on how long I want them to stick around. I guess if I only need temporary help and it doesn’t really matter if they stick around very long, it’s not very difficult for me to train them and get them up to speed and teach them about my company and my products and my services. If my sales cycle is super, super short like a few days, then it probably doesn’t matter, but that’s not usually the case for most people. If it’s not a step up opportunity and the candidate accepts my offer and the job, the likelihood of them not working out, leaving and moving on to another opportunity that is a step up for them sooner than I would like goes up quite a bit. In order to have somebody who is more likely to be successful, put the time, effort into being successful and more likely to stay with the opportunity, my company and grow within the company, I need to start them by giving them a step up opportunity to begin with.

Stephanie:

Describe step up opportunity in I guess general terms and then maybe some specific examples.

Fletcher:

Well, earlier, we talked a little bit about having that senior staff accountant move into an accounting manager role. I’ve seen a track record of success. They moved from accounts payable to junior staff accountant to staff accountant to senior staff account, say, maybe two, three, four moves over the course of a reasonable period of time, maybe four or five, six years or something like that, so a step up every couple of years and now they’re at this senior staff level. Their next move is accounting manager. Am I going to offer this person another senior staff accountant position?

Stephanie:

That’s probably a bad idea.

Fletcher:

It’s a bad idea. First of all, why would they bother? It’s just a lateral move for them. There’s nothing. There’s no incentive for them to make the move from one company to another for a lateral position.

Stephanie:

The step up is ultimately incentivized. It gives them more opportunity for growth, learning, pay.

Fletcher:

Which is a big part of engagement. If somebody makes a lateral move and they’re just like, well, I’m doing this because I have to do it, the chances of their level of enthusiasm being high and their drive being high is not as good. If I put somebody in a step up opportunity, they’re more likely to be driven, motivated, engaged, excited and wanting to achieve.

Stephanie:

That makes sense.

Fletcher:

When I look at those resumes, I think to myself, does this person have a track record of success? Is it leading up to the opportunity that I have available to them? Will this opportunity be a step up opportunity for them in terms of the work or type of work that they’re going to be doing? Is it likely to allow them to use their previous experiences and skills and challenge those and stretch those out? Also, fact of the matter, is compensation going to be a step up for them? Again, nobody wants to take a step back in their standard of living. We all want to move that forward. We all want to enhance that for our families and for ourselves. I got to think to myself, are these other opportunities, these roles that they’ve been having, are they paying more than I’m paying? If the answer is yes, then that automatically makes that candidate less attractive to me.

Stephanie:

What do you think about a step up opportunity maybe in terms of a better company culture or other factors that aren’t specifically related to the job itself or pay?

Fletcher:

That’s only about 20 to 30% of the candidate’s decision-making process, I think.

Stephanie:

It doesn’t lead-

Fletcher:

It’s not the lead, yeah. We all think that. Well, it’s important. It is critical. It’s one of the three major factors. Ability to stretch the person’s skillsets, challenge themselves at work is about a third of the equation. This all comes from Lou Adler. Another part is company culture, work-life balance, work environment. All of those things, a big factor. The third one is compensation. You need a step up in all those areas or you need one of those areas to be an overwhelming step up. It’s pretty difficult to make environment, work-life balance, company culture to be so overwhelming that it overtakes-

Stephanie:

It’s so much more important than the others.

Fletcher:

Yeah, that it overtakes those things. You better have something that’s spectacular. Work-life balance, the environment, the culture has got to be so amazing that somebody is willing to take a step back in their standard of living. Think about that.

Stephanie:

After a while, I imagine that’s maybe the initial draw, but after a while, when you think about it practically, it doesn’t fit.

Fletcher:

Yeah, it doesn’t last forever. Those are three opportunities, things you got to think about. The other big one immediately, and we haven’t talked about this, save the best for last, I think, and I’ve seen this all the time. We see people’s resumes that are moving around quite a bit, which might give the appearance of promotion or increased responsibility or-

Stephanie:

Moving around companies or-

Fletcher:

Yeah, companies, yeah. It might give the appearance of a variety of experience or a lot of experience.

Stephanie:

Well-rounded, yeah.

Fletcher:

Maybe. It might seem that way. Also, it might show that the person has varied experience within an industry. People always want people inside their industries they don’t have to train, which we can talk about that more another day. The bottom line is interviewing and determining who’s going to be successful in the next role is all based on the amount of evidence that we can collect in the hiring process. If somebody has had more than three jobs in the last 10 years, that means that they don’t stay in jobs for more than three and a third of a year. That means that person has a track record of consistently not staying in jobs more than three years. That means I have zero evidence that this person is likely to stay in my job for more than three years.

Stephanie:

In fact, you have all the evidence to the contrary. They’re most likely to leave.

Fletcher:

Yes, exactly. The more obvious ones are the one and two-year people. The two and three-year people are really tricky, the ones that put I was employed at ABC Company from 2011 to 2013.

Stephanie:

December to January.

Fletcher:

Yeah, it’s sneaky. It feels like two years, but it could really be one year or one and a half years. Watch out for resumes who don’t put the month and year dates of employment. The ones that do, make sure to pay attention and do the math. Was this two years or one year? As a rule of thumb, if I’m looking for long-term people, I try to stay away from people who don’t stay in jobs for more than five years, honestly.

Stephanie:

I think when you’re reviewing a resume, that’s probably one of the easiest things to spot too. When we would review ours, I would always look for that first because it’s a number. It’s so much easier than all this text on a page. Your eyes just go there. If you see a really short period, you already have in your mind, maybe it’s going to be a red flag.

Fletcher:

We’ve assessed so many of these people and almost … As consistently as the resume is bad, so are their assessment results.

Stephanie:

The candidate fits this criteria.

Fletcher:

The people who don’t stick around with jobs, we’ve interviewed thousands of those people. We’ve tested and assessed thousands of those people. A very small percentage of them are an exception to the rule, and the rule being these people are not high-quality producing candidates. They often have attitude and integrity problems. They’re highly unlikely to stick with the job for a very long time.

Stephanie:

That’s the biggest thing with candidates who job hop, because we can really conclude one of two things. It’s either attitude problem or performance problem or both.

Fletcher:

Yeah, or both.

Stephanie:

That’s probably the biggest.

Fletcher:

If you want to make it objective, just say to yourself, well, there’s no evidence that this person sticks around for more than a couple of years at any given job, and so we don’t even have to ask ourselves, is it an attitude problem? Is it a performance problem? Is it somebody else’s problem? Just the bottom line is they consistently move jobs, and so I know that if I hire them, they’re more than likely, in fact almost 100% likely to make it no longer than their longest level of employment on their resume. That’s two years, and the best chance I have is keeping this person for two years.

Stephanie:

If that’s not what you’re looking for then that’s not your candidate.

Fletcher:

Probably not. Yeah. Super objective that way. We don’t even have to get into the nitty-gritty. That’s why I changed how I think about these things. If you just do those four or five things, if you look at a resume from those perspective and then train yourself to do that, we have a great resume checklist on our website, preemploymentassessments.com, under the resource section. Download that. I would encourage you then to review a lot of resumes. You can get really, really good at shortlisting these, the ones that … At least check these boxes. People who have evidence of achievement and promotion, people whose experience is relatable or relevant, people who we’re creating step up opportunities for and who have consistency or stability in their work history, automatically, like nine times more likely to be a better candidate than the next one. Those are the ones I want to spend the most time interviewing, checking references and just getting to know. If I could have 10 of those candidates for every job that I was looking to fill, I’d be a very happy person.

Stephanie:

I just thought of something. We have clients sometime that bring up, their candidate pool is maybe a lot smaller than we’re used to. They have seven or eight candidates to pick from, and maybe all the resumes have-

Fletcher:

Don’t meet any of those requirements or all of those requirements.

Stephanie:

Yeah, or there’s a few of them missing or a great candidate is a job hopper.

Fletcher:

They’re not a great candidate if they’re job hoppers.

Stephanie:

Otherwise a great looking candidate.

Fletcher:

Don’t deceive yourself. Don’t fall in love with it. Yeah, you just have to get more candidates.

Stephanie:

Keep looking.

Fletcher:

Yeah, go back to episode, what, is it three and four and two of our podcast. Give us a call. We’ll point you in the right direction. More often than not, we say to ourselves, oh, well, here are all the candidates we have. We’re going to choose from the best ones. Well, I don’t know if that’s the best choice. Pick your poison. Poison is poison. Either way, I don’t want it.

Stephanie:

You’re shooting yourself in the foot either way.

Fletcher:

Yeah, exactly. You’re like, well, if it’s only a flesh wound, it’s not as bad. I don’t know. It’s still bad.

Stephanie:

That’s true. We get stuck in this. We do. We have the same thing with assessments. Pick the best of the worst.

Fletcher:

Yeah. Don’t put yourself in that situation. I could never get over that. At least find somebody who’s solid. On the other hand, sometimes we have too high of expectations, but people are people. We’re not perfect. We’re all imperfect. We’re all imperfectly perfect. Make sure you do have reasonable expectations at least at that level. Go into things with your eyes open, but don’t make some of the basic common mistakes.

Fletcher:

All right, so hat’s it for how to screen resume. Please come visit us at preemploymentassessments.com or thehighertalent.com. Our number is (714) 582-2730. Always happy to have a chat. That’s it for today and-

Stephanie:

See you next time.