In an attempt to teach a recruiter how to better vet resumes for job openings I came to discover firsthand two of the core faults of recruiting today: the false positive and the false negative job candidate. The former results in the hiring manager being inundated with off target resumes which is a waste of precious time. However, the latter and more pernicious result is the false negative which regularly results in quality candidates not making it through the first level of recruiter screening. How many world-class candidates have you not seen because the person doing the vetting did not know what to look for?

In an attempt to “teach” a recruiter about how to more ably find quality candidates for a mid-level accounting position I was hiring, I asked them to participate in an experiment. I requested that they pass along to me the first fifty resumes that came in from our job posting without any vetting. Just forward them straight to me. Then, armed with the same fifty resumes as my recruiter, I asked that the following week we get together and compare who we thought were the best candidates. In other words, who would she have vetted and passed on to me vs. who I thought the best candidates were out of that first group of fifty. Well, the next week came and she brought me her dozen vetted resumes. Not bad, really. I usually get more than 25% of the raw resumes from a recruiter as a first pass but I think she was being highly conservative given the added scrutiny of our little experiment. I brought four resumes. The shocker here was not that she selected three times more resumes than I did. The real surprise was that two of my four were not represented in her twelve resumes. It’s one thing to get too many resumes from a recruiter and waste a lot of time (and money) separating the chaff. However, it is far more worrisome that fully half of the candidates that I deemed had potential were not even in her solution set. What’s the deal?

You know far more about what you are looking for in a candidate than your recruiterWhy do we, as hiring managers, get flooded with resumes when working with a recruiter? Well, that is the false positive effect. If your recruiter is working off of keywords and gives you 30 resumes to review of which you find only two candidates that qualify for a phone call, that means you received 28 false positives – resumes the recruiter thought you might like when in fact you did not. How does this happen? Well, to put it simply, you know far more about what you are looking for in a candidate than your recruiter because as a hiring manager the chances are very good that you have a)been in the very position you are hiring sometime in the past, b)have worked with people in that position before, c)have managed that position before, d)have hired that position before, or e)all of the above. In other words, you have real-world business experience that brings you deep knowledge of most positions you hire as a manager, and most recruiters, having only recruiting experience, do not have that experience. This results in the recruiter having no resume vetting tool other than keyword matching. Because there are so many resumes out there that share so many keywords, it’s no wonder you get a lot of false positives – and a lot of extra work trudging through all of those off-target candidates.

False negatives are more pernicious than false positivesFalse negatives, however, are more pernicious. Due to your real-world business experience you typically do not judge a job only by its keywords. That sense of black and white may exist in very basic jobs, but most jobs and most candidates have a lot of gray areas, especially when it comes to management and leadership skills, or that “special something” that is impossible to put in a job description or keyword. But you know it when you see it, and it is your experience that makes you inherently better at spotting a candidate who may not have been selected on a pure keyword basis. An analogy would be software or service purchasing. If you only purchased software or services for your company based on who had the most “checkbox” items (that is, keywords), you would very likely be missing solutions that fit your need as well or better than the solution with a litany of checkbox features.

There is a way to avoid the vast majority of false positives and false negatives: work with a recruiter who has deep, real-world experience. Think about this: if your hiring manager had all of the time, tools and candidate networks that your recruiter had, and they were the one doing all of the vetting and pre-interviewing, they would probably find the best candidate most of the time (and in the shortest amount of time). Of course your hiring manager is probably busy with work and thus cannot play that role, so finding someone who can do that would be valuable. There are shockingly few recruiters out there with extensive real-world business experience, but they are out there and they will get you a better result. Look for recruiters who have worked their way from the bottom (functional individual contributor) to the top (executive leadership) and who held many senior roles at a variety of companies. What makes a recruiter attractive is much like what makes any other critical position at your company attractive: a track record of technical knowledge, management skills and leadership ability – proven many times over.

In summary, working with most recruiters today entails a lot of extra work for the hiring manager via false positive candidates, and often will result in missing qualified candidates via false negatives. Working with recruiters that have real-world business experience (as opposed to only recruiting experience) will net you far less work and far more promising candidates. That is a win-win.

…This is a high-level discussion of a typical hiring challenge. There are many other factors effecting talent management depending on where the company is in its industry, product life cycle, financing life cycle and many other factors. Let someone who has been there be your partner in finding the best fit for your position and your company. ProfessionalSourcing offers full-cycle recruiting services for all of your engineering, accounting and finance personnel needs. Learn more here.

Summary:

Recruiting false positives: too many untargeted candidates, waste of time
Recruiting false negatives: missing candidates who should be in your solution set
Conclusion: use recruiters with extensive real-world business experience and reduce both cases dramatically

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The Great Candidates You're Not Seeing (and Why)

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