Why Resumes Suck at Hiring Employees

From the Industrial Economy to Knowledge Economy
Resumes have been the de facto standard for hiring since the emergence of the industrial economy, being the primary way employers identify a candidate’s formal skills. 100 years ago, this hiring model worked well, when job descriptions could implicitly assume that the core elements of the position in question were static, fixed, and unchanging. Until now. 

The workplace isn’t what it used to be. To be successful in today’s business environment means being able to adapt and respond to rapidly changing circumstances—all within a moment’s notice. Organizations are becoming more siloed than ever before, and technological advances, globalization, and the virtualization of work have made the corporate landscape unrecognizable from 20 years ago. 

Even the workforce landscape is changing. Deep-seated beliefs that previously overemphasized a candidate’s specific technical skills are now giving way to a greater emphasis on a candidate’s human abilities. Resumes rarely capture the full scope of a person’s teamwork abilities, willingness to broaden their competency set, or even grit. With these shifts in attitudes towards work-life balance, motivation, and human connection all converging, the world of work is being irreversibly altered—and we must adopt a new workforce optimization model to drive agility and high performance. 

Executives need better ways of finding gaps in their workforce’s talent and measuring their team’s competencies—all while streamlining business processes. That’s where Claira comes in: an AI-powered machine that has the capability to discover and realize career growth opportunities from within your company. 

How Competencies Influence Work
With work projected to increase by 40-fold in the next decade, fostering positive team chemistry and collaboration is necessary to get work done. Although resumes will still play an important role in identifying relevant past experiences, they aren’t necessarily useful at gauging a candidate’s personal qualities, like their level of curiosity, learning agility, and critical analysis framework, which are essential in this evolving corporate landscape. 

Future jobs will rely on a candidate’s job-specific abilities, but soft-skills and contextualizing an employee’s previous work experiences will be the foundation for building dynamic, productive teams. However, an individual’s current competencies aren’t always easy to assess, and predicting those that will be needed in the future can be particularly challenging.

Where resumes fail to convey a person’s client-facing abilities, Claira’s competency engine helps leaders place talent effectively and efficiently by providing a translatable framework for understanding how one’s previous experiences might predict future performance, how one might contribute to team dynamic, and how they might increase their value proposition to the organization.

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Bottom Line Benefits
Harvard Business Review predicts that in 2023, organizations will need to become more comfortable assessing candidate’s competencies to fill critical roles—and leaders who leverage competency science and machine learning can realize up to a 107% increase in placing talent effectively, which can translate to improvements in productivity (+49%), retention (+98%), and a positive workforce experience (+79%). Organizational visibility drives growth—companies that understand their human capital from the inside and out are able to make better decisions to increase their resilience. 

One page can rarely tell the full story, and with a growing number of people having “resume gaps'' in their professional history as a result of the pandemic, an increase in non-traditional applicants means employers have to be flexible and empathetic towards this increasingly diverse range of professional and interpersonal experiences. 

When unemployment rates soared to well over 14.7% in April 2020, Claira was able to move and place talent effectively across industries, such as servers in the food industry to drivers in logistics using our dynamic ML engine. By precisely identifying the cross-functional abilities (ie. technical and behavioral) of candidates, Claira empowered leaders to reduce the risk of bad hires and better identify which employees had the capacity to adapt, learn, and grow with the business.

In addition to increasing agility, unlocking efficiency, and boosting engagement, Claira’s dynamic platform provides business leaders with predictive analytics to reduce attrition and increase candidate diversity, providing organizations with continuous improvement value and increasing an organization’s strategic flexibility.

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