Why we should ban resumes!

The idea of matching someone’s skills and experience on a resume to a job description consisting of an arbitrary list of skills and experiences seems rather archaic to me. Some people actually defend doing this faster as a major advance in modern HR practices.

(Note: due to the interest in this topic I've scheduled a live webcast on February 28th to discuss alternatives to resumes. One idea - a performance-based segment as part of a LinkedIn profile. Add your ideas below.)

In a recent post I suggested that a better first step was a candidate being referred to a recruiter or hiring manager by someone already in the company, a vendor, a customer, or someone who can personally vouch for the job-seeker based on the person's past performance. This is equivalent to using the company employee referral program to proactively seek out more top performers. Most companies recognize this as one of their best sources for new talent and the primary reason why referral programs are being expanded using tools like LinkedIn. Promoting people through internal mobility is also based on the tried and true concept that performance is more important than experience.

In my new book I suggest that the process used for internal promotions represents a good model for finding and hiring people from the outside. Adopting this approach involves eliminating traditional skills-infested job descriptions, replacing them with performance profiles, and reconfiguring the box-checking first step.

Due to the “radical” nature of this proposal I asked David Goldstein a senior attorney with Littler Mendelson, a highly respected U.S. labor law firm, for his legal perspective. His white paper is now available. Here’s his opening statement:

Because the Performance-based Hiring system does differ from traditional recruiting and hiring processes, questions arise as to whether employers can adopt Performance-based Hiring and still comply with the complex array of statutes, regulations, and common law principals that regulate the workplace. The answer is yes.

In particular:

A properly prepared performance profile can identify and document the essential functions of a job better than traditional position descriptions, facilitating the reasonable accommodation of disabilities and making it easier to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and similar laws.

In the book I also suggested that the standard “submit resume and box-check skills” approach should be replaced by an initial matching process that didn't inadvertently eliminate fully-qualifed people. One idea was to have candidates submit a one-page summary of two accomplishments most comparable to the real requirements of the job. Since the job postings I recommend minimize skills and emphasize opportunities and challenges (sample), this is pretty straight-forward. For example if you’re hiring a maintenance supervisor to minimize machine downtime and upgrade the team, ask all applicants to describe something they’ve done in each area as the first step. This will minimize the pool of unqualified people from applying and broaden the pool of the most qualified who might have a different mix of skills and experiences. David gave a legal thumbs-up to both the creative advertising idea and the alternate approach for applying.

Coincidently, in the past few days two different starts-up companies approached me to consider being on their advisory boards. Both had far different and unique ideas on how to broaden the pool of potential candidates by breaking the same nonsensical skills-matching process described here. The common idea: the best people aren’t interested in lateral transfers, the best people often have a different skill-set, and these same people aren’t interested in enduring the insensitive application process. Excluding the most talented people from consideration when hiring from the outside never made sense me. It's exciting to see some technical advances being proposed to now do this at scale.

If you follow my posts you know I’m on a quest to change the focus on finding and hiring people to one based on their actual performance – they’re ability to deliver comparable results. It’s what people have accomplished with their skills and experiences that matters, not their accumulation. This opens up the door to a whole new pool of more diverse, younger, older, military veterans, displaced workers and the physically challenged. We don’t have as big a skills gap as the national media contends, we have a bigger thinking gap.

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Lou Adler (@LouA) is the Amazon best-selling author of Hire With Your Head (Wiley, 2007) and the award-winning Nightingale-Conant audio program, Talent Rules! His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, is now available as an Amazon Kindle eBook.