Someone is Watching You
How many people lie or exaggerate on their resume? Turns out, a lot – a survey of 2,200 professionals showed 70 percent had discovered a person who had fibbed on their resume.
Stretching the truth or embellishing credentials and capabilities isn’t surprising or new – but it can be varied in how it plays out. How many companies have hired a programmer, developer, coder or software engineer who aced the interview but ultimately couldn’t deliver? In other cases, there may be misalignment between the hiring process and what a new employee finds on the job.
In a competitive job market, everyone is in the business of selling. Recruiters and hiring managers sell candidates on the company and job opportunities; and candidates sell their skills and strengths in the best light possible to ensure they don’t get knocked out of the running.
But for recruiters and hiring managers, resume and profile fluff can result in a waste of time, money and resources that could be better spent on qualified candidates. As candidates increasingly leave behind their digital footprint online, social profiles and other online activity can augment information on the resume and LinkedIn profile to provide a more complete view of a candidate’s true value.
Being able to separate truth from fiction can save employers from wasting time screening and interviewing unqualified candidates or making a costly hiring mistake. Everyone may still be selling, but that old Latin phrase – caveat emptor, or “let the buyer beware” – is in full effect more than ever.
Getting Greater Insight
Candidates leave a ton of information behind in their digital exhaust, from status updates to posting on review sites, question and answer communities and industry-specific social platforms. But the availability of all this information isn’t, in itself, of great use. Where the advantage lies is in intelligently filtering the information – making sense of it and detecting patterns.
Taking advantage of big data and predictive analytics can deliver a better sense of a candidate’s skill set beyond claims on the resume or LinkedIn profiles. Looking at social activity and measuring other variables, employers can use aggregate data to get a better depiction of a candidate’s capabilities to increase hiring accuracy and avoid the pitfalls that happen when employees embellish the facts. Other information -- such as how their employer’s stock is performing, the last time they received a promotion or the length of their commute -- can indicate if the timing is right to approach passive candidates with a new opportunity.
You Can Handle the Truth
Having a clear way to accurately measure a candidate’s ability can help employers move beyond surface-level keyword analytics to construct meaningful queries to find the talent they need--queries which are often more accurate representations of the job requirements than the all-inclusive postings you sometimes see on job boards. Better analytics mean, among other things, better accuracy in identifying qualified candidates who may not list every piece of code they’ve written or software platform they’ve worked on.
When strategic leaders and HR executives speak about talent acquisition the focus often falls on luring the right candidates in a competitive marketplace. And that’s important. But it’s only one part of the puzzle in superseding the competition for qualified talent.
Another is finding the most accurate, meaningful and consistent way to deep-dive past candidates’ (perhaps over-aggrandizing) resumes and gain greater insight into core skills and strengths. Analytics backed by powerful software platforms present amazing potential in this area, and may spell good news for those organizations ready to take a more sophisticated approach in how they recruit and ultimately hire the best talent available.
