In 2006 I wrote a blog about the imminent demise of the resume, arguing that they were on longer relevant in the new digital world. Fast forward 14 years and resumes, or CVs if you live in the UK, are still the most common anchor point for the recruiting process. The problem with resumes is not just one about digital relevance; now it’s about the effectiveness and integrity of recruiting itself. So what are the alternatives and how can the industry move forward.
My guest this week is Sterling Grey from The Chemistry Group, an organization that has been pioneering new approaches for employers to assess and hire talent.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The dangerous implications of recruiting via resumes
• Conscious and unconscious bias
• What are the alternatives and are they working in practice
• Increasing data points to improve selection
• The cost of a mis-hire
• Humans and technology
• Will recruiting be done differently in the future
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Atrax. Atrax is the total career site system which converts site visitors into high quality job applicants. A fully SaaS system, Atrax is powered by the latest AI to deliver an outstanding and relevant talent experience, personalized employer branding and a strong conversion of candidates into the ATS. To find out more, go to www.attra that’s www. Attrax.co.uk and attracts is spelled a double T R A X.
Matt Alder [00:01:01]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 267 of the Recruiting Future podcast. In 2006 I wrote a blog about the imminent demise of the resume, arguing that they were no longer relevant in our new digital world. Fast forward 14 years and resumes, or CVs if you live in the UK, are still the most common anchor point for the recruitment. The problem with resumes is not just one about digital relevance, now it’s about the effectiveness and integrity of recruiting itself. So what are the alternatives and how can the industry move forward? My guest this week is Sterling Grey from the Chemistry Group, an organization that has been pioneering new approaches for employers to assess and hire talent. Hi Sterling, and welcome to the podcast. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Sterling Grey [00:02:02]:
Sure. My name is Sterling Grey. I work for the Chemistry Group. I am a client partner and that means that I am on the front lines of helping us expand our work into some of the largest businesses in the world, helping them with recruiting and internal development.
Matt Alder [00:02:21]:
Fantastic stuff. Before we sort of get into the main body of our conversation, tell us a bit about your story. How did you get to do what you do now?
Sterling Grey [00:02:31]:
I grew up in New York City, in Manhattan. Manhattan in the 80s and 90s. I went to public schools, I went to public university. I came out, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I started in, in real estate sales, moved into pharmaceutical sales, then I kind of went back to grad school, retooled, kind of fell in love with consulting and business strategy and then ended up in this space where, where we try and help organizations kind of better marry individuals to work. I mean, that’s, that’s the crux of what we do and that has, you know, unearthed all these really interesting difficulties and problems, you know, of how we most effectively and efficiently do this.
Matt Alder [00:03:23]:
It’s a really interesting point and something that I’VE been reflecting on recently is, you know, why we, why are we still using cvs? So we have all this technology, we have all this sophisticated thinking around recruiting. We’re at a period of time where companies need to think very deeply about the type of skills that they have in their, in their, in their business. Yet we still use, you know, what seems like a very, very old fashioned, old fashioned thing to anchor the recruitment process round. What are your, what are your views on that?
Sterling Grey [00:04:00]:
I violently agree with everything that you just said. I think if anyone stops for a second and thinks about the utility that is the resume, you’ll pretty quickly come to the realization that it’s absurd. Deep down we all know it. The ask of a resume has been sum up the entirety of your professional career, every important thing you’ve ever done at work, onto one page and your livelihood depends on it. It’s, it’s insane. We know it’s not the best way to, to join, you know, people and employment, yet it’s the thing we rely on the most. And, and I would go as far as saying, you know, it’s not only kind of arcane and a blunt instrument. I think it’s, it’s, it has some really dangerous implications for, for society.
Matt Alder [00:04:58]:
Tell us more about these implications.
Sterling Grey [00:05:00]:
Sure. So you have to unpack kind of what the resume is a little bit. I mean, look, there’s evidence that shows and suggests that it opens the door for an incredible flood of bias conscious or unconscious to enter the recruitment process. There’s studies done that show a recruiter spends at most seven seconds reviewing a resume and they focus. You know, they spend 80% of that time focused on six really kind of superficial things. So in a sense, it’s like the original Tinder for Employment where these recruiters are just swiping left on most people making these massive assumptions based on their name, whether they recognize the name of their current employer, their previous employer, where they went to school, because that’s a proxy for how intelligent you are. Right. And they’re making a decision on someone’s, someone’s livelihood and that’s a really important thing that, that I think deserves and requires a bit more attention, intention, and yet we treat it really haphazardly. The scary thing is that the people who get, who get discriminated against are often the people who most need the employment. So we start to widen the chasm between those with any sort of privilege you can imagine and those without it. The thing I think a lot about is the idea of discrimination. Right. Because in Recruitment, discrimination is absolutely necessary and it gets a bit of a dirt. It has become a bit of a dirty word. But discrimination in its literal sense is just the ability to distinguish one thing from another. And that’s, that’s important. We have to do that. It’s when we, when we allow bias to come rushing in that it gets really, really dangerous. It’s kind of like a kitchen knife, right. It’s absolutely mandatory, you need it. But it gets really dangerous when, when you. When hate when other things kind of enter in. And it can be used as a really, a really dangerous thing. And that’s kind of how I look at resumes. And I think there are a lot of other alternatives that we could be using that would be a lot more. What would just be better and a bit more fair.
Matt Alder [00:07:57]:
What I’d add to that is very often companies don’t even really understand the skills they need in their business, let alone trying to interpret those from a Word document document or a PDF that is missing data and doesn’t represent the ability of that person. You mentioned alternatives and lots of people have come on the show and sort of talked about CVS not being fit for purpose and bias in the recruitment process. But there seems to be a lack of alternatives in practice. What do you think the alternatives to this are and do you see them already working in practice? In some cases, yeah.
Sterling Grey [00:08:38]:
So let me, let me back up a little bit because I want to peel a couple things apart that you said. So you started with companies ability to really glean whether someone is good at something from a resume. And I think you’re right to point that out. That doesn’t work either. Right. Because the resume is this curated collection according to that person, of all the rock star things they’ve done. So it’s, you know, I’ll say it’s probably a bit inflated at the extreme. There’s probably things on there that are just false. So that makes it really tricky for an organization to figure out as well. What I want to separate are skills from everything else about a person, which is really important. And I think one of the trappings that businesses fall into is, is not considering those things collectively. Right. An incredible developer at Facebook or Amazon may not be an incredible developer for Google. They might have the same requisite skills, they can code in the same language, but one will work in one context and they won’t work in another context. And the thing that contributes to that is all the other stuff about a human being aside from the skills that they can perform. And that’s where the problem lies. Nobody’s measuring that stuff. And that’s precisely what we try to uncover at the chemistry group. So the tools that we use are a number of assessments that get people to reveal their personality preferences, the things that motivate or energize them at work, their go to behaviors and their cognitive ability. These are all things we can largely do through online surveys. But what it adds to the resume, which is just a list of experience, is hundreds of other data points on who this person is and whether they’re going to fit into the context that you’re going to place them. Right. Does this job require someone who is highly organized and very, very structured? It may, it may not. You know, if you’re thinking about developers being able to work in agile, which is, you know, the new thing requires a certain type of person and if you misalign that, everything’s going to feel hard. It’s going to feel hard for them, it’s going to feel hard for their manager, it’s going to drag on the team. There’s a host of a cascade of negative effects that happens when you make a MIS hire. And it’s really costly to a business. I mean, billions of dollars gets wasted every year on, on MIS hires. The cost of a MIS hire, we estimated chemistry to be between four and something like 14 times that person’s salary. So yes, there are more nuanced ways of analyzing whether someone will be the right person for the job. And I say that with intent. The right person for the job, not the right set of skills, but because that’s only one part of the story and that’s what we’re doing at chemistry, that’s what we’re focused on. But there are a number of different examples of how people are starting to, or how organizations are starting to think about this. There are blind auditions, there are blind offers, there are other skill based or material based assessments where whatever that person is going to have to be performing, they actually do a sample of that and that is used to qualify the quality of someone’s work rather than where they went to school, which might be irrelevant. Where they worked last, which also might be irrelevant. Laszlo Bach at Google, he’s got this really powerful statement that your experience is one of the least reliable predictors of future performance. And I found that to be true in my own journey, in my own path. I’m sure a number of others have found that to be true as well. Yet we’re stuck in this rut of cognitive dissonance that this is all We’ve got, so let’s just continue to use it. And I think that’s a shame.
Matt Alder [00:13:37]:
And what kind of outcomes and value have companies been seeing being who are adopting this type of approach in their, in their hiring?
Sterling Grey [00:13:48]:
I mean, I can tell you about the work I’m most familiar with in the last three years working at Chemistry. The value comes in, I mean there’s, there’s, there’s economic, but there’s also cultural value. The economic stuff is all, you know, all the stuff that you can measure. When you start improving the quality of the hires that you are bringing in, you see a host, we have documented a host of positive externalities, right? So the time to actually hire those people goes down. Attrition plummets at all levels from the executive level down to your call center worker. That saves the organization tens of millions, millions of dollars. You know, when we engage with salespeople getting the right, the right salesperson, are they a hunter, are they a farmer? We see top line revenue increase by double digits. I mean, we’ve worked with a number of telecom companies who were in a just, they were hemorrhaging revenue because they were getting the, the, the profile of the salesperson completely wrong. You know, they wanted the smartest people from the best schools. And what we found was, you know, by doing that, first of all, you’re fishing from a very, very small pond and that the competition for those people super high. So you end up paying a premium for them. But they were going, they also had an attrition that was, you know, over 100%, which means they were replacing their entire sales force each year. Because these people were coming into the job, they were bored to death and it wasn’t stimulating for them. What we did was widen the, you know, open, open the pond, widen the pool of candidates, stop hiring from out of this, you know, just this group of, of top schools. And we found that, you know, their intellect, their horsepower didn’t matter. And actually the people who didn’t score as high on those cognitive ability tests were actually better suited for the role and they erased their attrition and they brought the company back into the black in a matter of 18 months. So it happens. It requires a bit of a mindset shift that’s not easy and there’s a bit of work to be done because we kind of have to, we have to break the limbs and reset them of this process. This kind of calcified way of doing business that seems to last far too long. It’s outstate its welcome.
Matt Alder [00:16:49]:
What’s the role of technology in this. You mentioned assessments, you mentioned online assessments. There are a lot of technology providers out there who claim they have some kind of magic bullet that can solve this problem. What’s the mix between humans and technology? And how do you ensure that bias doesn’t come in in other ways?
Sterling Grey [00:17:15]:
That’s a great question. I don’t know that I have a perfect answer for that. I think technology should, should aid us, underscore, aid in making better decisions. Right. I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to erase discrimination or bias completely. It’s just, it’s, it’s one of the fundamental instincts of humans. And if we’re, if we’re creating the technology, I doubt we’re going to be able to create a perfect technology. Right. That’s a probably a conversation for another podcast, but I think that we can get better. And so, yeah, I truly believe that technological tools can help us get more accurate. And by more accurate, I mean less discriminatory and zeroing in on the things that actually predict performance rather than the assumptions that, that we have of what predicts performance. The scariest words, the most frightening kind of phrase I hear too often when I engage with really smart senior business leaders, when we start talking about hiring, they’ll say something to the effect of, oh, well, I’ll know it when I see it. And if you stop and think about that statement, it’s terrifying because it just opens the door for whatever you think is right. And we’re all fallible. Right. So are there technological tools we can use to remove the opportunity for some of that bias to come in? Absolutely. I was speaking to the head of talent acquisition for one of our main clients, Experian, and this is in the UK region. And this guy’s really forward thinking in how to better use technology in the recruitment process. And you hear all about, and you’ve probably engaged with like these, these chat bots, right? If you go onto a website, kind of pops up in the corner of your screen and it’s like, hey, can I help you with anything? Well, organizations are starting to incorporate that into, into their recruitment process, right? So let’s say you’re out looking for a job or you’re on LinkedIn or something, and it starts to recognize kind of what you’re looking for. It might be able to, to bring you some options and say, hey, you know, where do you live and where would you consider living? And you’re like, oh, well, I live in New York City. Looks like you’re Looking for a product manager role? Yeah, I am. Would you consider, would you consider looking in New Jersey? I would. Excellent. Here’s a list of product manager roles in a 20 mile radius from where you live. Why don’t you have a look at these and see if any of them interest you. Take 10 minutes and I’ll come back to you. And then it does. And so you’re having this conversation with a, with an AI and it is taking you deeper and deeper into the recruitment process. It starts asking you about key things in your background, your experience. Let’s go back to what we were talking about earlier. It could start to ask you about your personal preferences, your ways of working, and before you know it, it’s done the job of three different recruiters in a matter of minutes. That would have taken hours to schedule a phone screening. Do the phone screening have that really awkward conversation that we’ve all had over the phone with someone we’re trying to get to employ us? It’s really strange. And there are ways of kind of doing that in a more natural setting that’s probably going to get more honest answers, that’s going to uncover a lot more and it’s working in the background for an organization. They haven’t had to pay anyone to do that. They’ve paid for the software obviously, but there’s so many cost savings that can, that can come out of that. And then when that person does come to, to an interview, whether it’s on the phone or in person, the volume of, of background and data that you have on them already, you’re, you’re already worlds ahead of making a more educated, informed decision on whether they’re the right person for the job or not. You know, going back to the, the resume screening bit like, is there a degree are, are people qualified to be, to be spending seven seconds on a resume? Are they that good? They’ve been trained that well to do this, that we just, we give them this responsibility. No, the answer is of course not. There’s no degree for this. And yet we’re, it baffles me that we’re, we don’t do any diligence in kind of qualifying our gatekeepers and they potentially keep a lot of good people out with high potential and that. Yeah. So using, using a software could be a much, much more nuanced way of getting a lot more data and making a much more accurate decision.
Matt Alder [00:23:01]:
So final question. It’s obviously, you know, nigh on impossible to predict what the future is going to be like from where, from where we from where we currently are, but perhaps sort of putting together some of the ideas that you’ve already talked about. What do think that coming out of the crisis that we’re in now that employers will be approaching the way that they do recruiting any differently?
Sterling Grey [00:23:27]:
I, I mean, I think a number of things are changing and I hope they stick. I do think that we’ve been forced into this context where employers, managers now under. They see a much more human side of their employees. Right. And they have to make concessions for the fact that people have other obligations. They have children, they have pets, they have elders that require their attention and help. And we tend to ignore those things about people. So I hope this is prying open the door on the realization that the whole person is much more complex. And we should be considering that when we think about bringing that person before going into a relationship with that person. Right. Because that’s what work is. It’s the, it’s the most dominant relationship that we’ll have in our life. We’ll spend the most time doing it. So that should be our, Our whole person should be more considered. Then there’s, there’s the working at home bit. I think that because what was already starting to emerge as a trend where people and employers were thinking about roles that they can have, people work from home and still do successfully, I think that this is just fast forwarding that. So I think that organizations are going to take a step back and they’re going to realize that, well, the bottom didn’t fall out and we had everybody forced to work at home. Why are we paying for this expensive real estate and these luxury offices when we probably need a half or less than that actual square footage and we can keep people at home. What that means for recruitment is that we’re going to have to learn to rely more on our video conferencing technologies, potentially some of these bots or other AI technologies that’ll help increase the number of data points that you have on somebody. And I think the consumer or the person looking for a job is going to have to adapt their behavior. And maybe that would be a good thing. Maybe it will become a lot more ubiquitous to start to give more personal information, share more personal information with your employer. I don’t mean like, you know, open your Facebook and your, and your Instagram up to them, but start to explain more about who you are, what your working preferences are in a way that isn’t, that’s more genuine than, you know, an interview where someone is largely pressured to tell, you know, tell that person, they’re sitting in front of what they think they want to hear. And maybe if we figure it out in collecting that data for people en masse, we can create this network of jobs and people profiles that is being matched in the background. Imagine LinkedIn could notify you and say, based on what I know about you, here’s a job I think you’re a really good fit for, for. And it had nothing to do with your skill set and it had everything to do with, with you as a person. I mean, you know, let’s not ignore the skills. Some of them are mandatory. But I think that kind of, that, that network would be much more efficient for employers. It would be much more efficient for, for individuals in matching them to work, that they’re going to be engaged and driven to perform at a high level rather than I need a job because I have to pay the bills. So I’ll take this job and I’ll contort myself to do it, even though it doesn’t come naturally to me and it’s not sustainable. But I’ve got to do it because it’s the only thing that’s on my plate.
Matt Alder [00:27:38]:
Sterling, thank you very much for talking to me.
Sterling Grey [00:27:41]:
It was my pleasure. I’m really appreciative that you invited me.
Matt Alder [00:27:45]:
My thanks to Sterling Grey. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. You can also listen and subscribe to the show on Spotify. You can find all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
