Recruiters and HR representatives are one of the most clueless people in any organization. When it comes to hiring processes they don't appear to know the most fundamental aspect of reviewing applications: knowing how to read a CV. This is a big issue as perfectly good candidates get rejected. And, the ones that do come through the filters are normally not a good match for the role. The primary reasons for this are highlighted below:
- Recruiters sift through CVs without understanding the context, they only read through job titles or whatever was the last job title of the candidate.
- Many don't even have the time to read through hundreds of CVs so they only scan their way picking out keywords or even how many times they are mentioned.
- From the hundreds of CVs they have they might review the first five to ten CVs on the pile, put another five to ten on hold, and reject the rest without even reading through them.
- Sometimes they already have their preferred candidate pool who they go to first rather than bothering to sift through the entire pile of new candidates.
- Sometimes they might reject the candidate because they don't answer their call on first instance so they assume that the candidate is only passively looking.
- They may even favor candidates that are already in a role and looking for a change, compared to the ones that are actively looking and not in a current role.
- On other occasions they just can't make sense of the CV so they reject it.
- On other occasions if the CV does not contain certain keywords they reject it, ignoring the fact that the same keyword could have been used in alternative synonym forms.
- Sometimes they will reject the candidate simply because they are racist and make the assumption that they want a typical white person for the job as a safe bet or the fact they stereotypically assume that a non-white won't have the skills to do the job. In fact, in many cases they might even label it as a cultural fit issue.
- In many cases, it also boils down to the fact they don't have the necessary understanding and skills of the domain that is being recruited for to be able to review the applications.
- Sometimes, it is the case that the role was only advertised to meet compliance but that direct applicants are automatically rejected in favor of agency supplied candidates.
- On other occasions, it could be the fact that they might have had a bad experience in past with the candidate and decided to blacklist them for future roles.
- Or, it could simply be that the role never really existed and was merely a marketing gimmick to showcase that the organization has alot of work on the go.
- Sometimes they might like the look of the CV but just not like the candidate personality, the way they come across in-person or on the phone.
- In some organizations, a CV is not even looked at and a separate scoring grid matrix may be used just as in public sector jobs and if this has been filled out by a recruiter then there is likely to be some discrepancies.
- Sometimes the recruiter may ask the candidate to custom tailor the CV for the job, which usually means they either don't think it is a match based on missing keywords or don't have a clue of what they are even looking for in their application screening process.
The way to get around this hurdle is for organizations to use smarter more intelligent tools that can provide better context-specific matching of candidates, measure of their associated risk selections, and to resolve for biases in such screening processes. And, fundamentally to remove the human-in-the-loop biases as much as possible. However, this process should not stop here but also be extended to review of interview processes as on many cases the interviewer can also bring their own sense of biases. There also needs to be a way of picking out fake job ads especially ones that don't quite make sense where the job titles don't match the job description or they simply don't exist. There is an endless process of improvements that could be achieved through AI in the human resources and recruitment sectors. However, in many cases this starts out with identifying the right places were AI can make the greatest impact. Perhaps, sending HR and recruiters on a 101 course in how to read a CV could be the first point of training. It is understandable that a recruiter may not have the technical background to know about all the domain skills in every specific type of job that they recruit for an organization. However, there are various tips in reading that can be used to make the job effective such as: 5W1H question/answering, SQ3R, using a tool that uses probabilistic NLP models and knowledge graph to bring context and aspects of match/filter functions to light.
