Interview with CEO of Resumefit (Part 1)

March 20, 2007 · Filed Under Finding Your Job 

After my video resume post, I received an e-mail from Tom Schmidt at Resumefit about his product. I went to the website and was really intrigued by the product and where the possibilities could lead. I asked if I could interview him for this blog and I am breaking it into two posts (so I am not being compensated).

According to their website,”Résuméfit in conjunction with CentACS, Center for Applied Cognitive Studies, and Qualitech Solutions, Inc. provides a comprehensive software solution to candidates and companies of all sizes trying to improve their selection and retention process.” If I could sum it up, I think this is a serious step forward for resumes.

This is long but really interesting. I really encourage you to read it if you are at all interested in a cutting edge resume product. Here is part one of two:

YourHRGuy: Tell me a little bit about yourself, background, etc.

Tom Schmidt, ResumeFit: Since I started working several decades ago, I’ve had a natural inclination to observe people and determine what motivates them to do their best. I’ve always been intrigued why some people are highly successful in one environment, and less effective in a slightly altered one. I believe that we should try to help each person at work become more and more of who s/he already is. Same holds true when they are at home.

I am not a cognitive scientist and I am not intrinsically an HR person. I’d like to think that I’m a pragmatic visionary who can work with a wide range of subject matter, e.g., customer service, general management of early stage start-ups, accounting, program management, cognitive assessments, candidate selection processes, company administration.

In certain situations (life is lived out in context) I’m someone who takes risks. I’ve worked at several start-ups as well as at large enterprises such as Infotron Systems Corp., US Robotics, 3COM, and Sun Microsystems. I’m better suited for a start-up. I’ve experienced good job fit and bad job fit. I like good job fit. Bad job fit sucks the life out of me.

I’ve spent the past four years researching and studying the human capital management market as a result of seeing people come and go during my four years working in Silicon Valley. It was the conversation at the water cooler time and time again. “I wish we knew then what we know now about so and so.” It wasn’t that we didn’t know that they were a program manager or an accountant. It was their personality approach to the workplace that took us a few months to figure out.

I can be most authentic while leading a start-up where the goal is to assist candidates and employers enjoy the fruits of good job fit.

Also (a big also), Dr. Pierce Howard, our cognitive scientist, has appeared on stage on the Oprah Winfrey show. He’s written several books on the human brain. He’s a very smart guy as well as a very nice man.

HRGuy: I have been pretty hard on video resumes. Do you see any potential advantages to using them?

TS: Employer / recruiter review of resume content and its validity coefficient (trustworthiness) is influenced by its location in the candidate selection funnel. The funnel is wide at the top where all candidates enter and narrow at the bottom where the fewer short-listed candidates are identified. You would like all resume data to be perfectly trustworthy in all areas of the funnel, but that’s just not practical. An employer likely does not have sufficient resources to assiduously scrutinize everyone who submits their resume.

Video résumés are not practical at the top of the candidate selection funnel for several reasons. (1) They don’t integrate very well into present day hiring processes. (2) A pair of human eyes and ears are necessary to scrutinize each one, and that takes time. (3) Reviewer bias is immediately turned on. (4) There’s more risk than reward in submitting a short video clip as the safe bet is the finished product isn’t very good at representing the candidate.

There may be a place in the future for video interviews of candidates, which happens after the candidate successfully makes their way down the candidate selection funnel.

HRGuy: Tell me a bit about your company. How does it seek to improve job seekers resumes and increase trust in the document?

TS: This is a two part answer. The first part is about what additional information might be useful to include in the “next gen” résumé, and the second part is about résumé delivery. (Delivery is not to be confused with résumé distribution methods.) Please keep in mind that our goal is to improve candidate representation and subsequent candidate selection as résumés enter the top of the candidate selection funnel.

We reviewed what information employers are collecting at their career portals. We realize that there are many more small to medium size employers that collect very little or nothing more than the candidate’s résumé. Those employers that do collect additional information are likely to present “knock out” questions, which are highly transparent and favor résumé padders over those who answer truthfully. Candidates who are eventually short-listed may be invited to complete an online assessment of some type.

It’s worthwhile to note here that the résumé market is huge (worldwide). There is only one product available, the standard-traditional résumé, and it is well known that it creates havoc for both candidates and employers (and everyone in between). Furthermore, there is no branding in the résumé market. No one says they have a Pongo Software résumé, or a CareerBuilder résumé or a I Got The Job résumé. There’s also no competitive landscape. If a candidate knows that they can nail a job because they have everything the employer is looking for, how do they convey that to the prospective employer via their résumé or cover letter?

Most position descriptions contain language about the type of person the employer is looking for, e.g., “…candidate should be good at multi-tasking, ambitious, creative, etc.,” you know the drill. Saying that you are those things in a cover letter mean very little. Our comprehensive résumé system gives the candidate the opportunity to complete either the Workplace Big Five ProFile™ or the SchoolPlace Big Five ProFile™. Data from the completed assessment is then included in the “next gen” résumé as well as the auto-generated web portfolio.

To address how a candidate can covey their overall qualifications to the prospective employer, our comprehensive résumé system gives the candidate the option of including a Trait Fit Index and / or an Experience Fit Index. We compare the candidate’s assessment data with the position they select from the Dept. of Labor’s O*NET. If a candidate is a paralegal and applying for a paralegal job, they select that position title from O*NET. We then compare the candidate’s assessment data against the information in the O*NET tables and determine a score using the 0 – 10 scale. Anything above a 7 is a good indicator that the candidate has the traits to be successful for the position title selected. It takes about one minute for the candidate to calculate their Trait Fit Index.

The Experience Fit Index is about the candidate making the reciprocal relationships between the position description and their “next gen” résumé’s data. I’ve never had someone tell me why the employer must make all the reciprocal relationships between the position they’re trying to fill and each résumé they receive. Employers determine these reciprocal relationships in two ways:

(1) Stare and Compare – This results in a highly subjective decision to put the résumé into one of three piles: yes, no, or maybe.

(2) Résumé Parsing – Software applications using artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic that scan and parse résumé data into a database for subsequent keyword searching. Some résumé search applications use a blend of machine learning, case-based reasoning, explicit semantic analysis and other high-level mathematical models to search a résumé db for the right candidate(s).

The garbage in – garbage out principle applies to either method above and, in fact, any method as the résumé is:

1. Inherently untrustworthy
2. Lacking sufficient information to identify candidate quality
3. Not scientifically measurable

Although no one respects résumés, millions of them circulate daily and worldwide. They do a poor job representing candidates and employers find it difficult to quickly and accurately identify quality candidates among the hundreds / thousands of résumés they receive.

Only candidates who know they are qualified will complete a Position Description Analysis. When a candidate reads the position description, they mentally determine how well qualified they are relative to the requirements, responsibilities, education, traits, etc. The qualified candidates who know they can “nail it” don’t have a good way to convey that via their résumé submission. The candidate parses the job description into our comprehensive résumé system, and we give them the ability to make the reciprocal relationships between each element of the job and the data in their comprehensive résumé system. Although the candidate is determining on a five point scale if they exceed, meet, or lack the required experience, trait, education, etc., the candidate must correlate data from their career experiences, education, and / or assessment data to support their claim.

The big question is not what type of information to include in the “next gen” resume, but how do you deliver this information to the candidate so that they can use it just like the standard-traditional résumé they’re using today. Data integration is an important issue. Since 99.999% of résumés and CVs are in MS Word, and since all hiring processes handle MS Word perfectly, the “next gen” résumé is in MS Word. But that begs the immediate question that an employer will ask. “How do I know that the candidate hasn’t changed the scientifically based information in the document?”

The answer is the digital signature. I could write pages about how a digital signature works, but I don’t think it’s necessary here. I’ll add our organizational digital certificate issued by VeriSign to this document as well as doing several other things to it. Try to edit or alter the document. You can’t. You could copy and paste it into another Word document, but you’ll lose the digital signature as well as the other things we did to it, which means you’re back to square one. The digital signature on an MS Word document is a huge deal. Depending on what version of MS Word you’re using, you can see the Red Ribbon at the bottom of the application bar, which signifies that the document has a digital signature. Click on it and you can view Résuméfit’s digital certificate issued by VeriSign.

So now we have additional content that benefits candidates and employers, which can be delivered seamlessly into present day hiring processes via MS Word. Résumé parsers can parse it. Career portals can upload it. Search engines now have reliable data on the candidate’s soft skills and workplace competencies.

Our Dig-Sig IERS™ (digitally signed Integrated Evidentiary Résumé System™) is also parser compliant / friendly. I don’t want to sound insensitive, but how many résumé writers put their finished product through a résumé parser to view how it’s tagged? I’ve seen some “pretty” résumés get clobbered during parsing. We use the Sovren Group’s résumé parser, which also parses the resumes for the largest job board on the planet. We know the rules of résumé parsing. They’re different from making a résumé look pretty. The two formats of looking good from (1) eyeballing it, and (2) electronically scanning it can be successfully combined.

Check out HRM Today for the latest in the HR blogosphere.

Comments

2 Responses to “Interview with CEO of Resumefit (Part 1)”

  1. Frank Roche on March 21st, 2007 6:27 am

    Very interesting and well done interview. The whole subject of “next gen” resumes is one that needs discussion. I’m afraid too many people give the “one page resume” advice as if it’s gospel…not recognizing that’s so 1950s.

    Thanks for the good work on this.

    [Reply]

  2. YourHRGuy.com » Blog Archive » Interview with CEO of Resumefit (Part 2) on March 21st, 2007 10:31 pm

    [...] can see part one [...]

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