John Sumser, Principal Analyst, HRxAnalysts
Be prepared for a wave of products and services that attempt to score individuals and their resumes. Although the stuff might have been an outgrowth of the 20th century assessment business, it’s actually an expression of gamification, the measurement of influence and a desire to deliver better choices for hiring managers. The practice of assigning a relevance score to a resume is as old as resume search engines. This new trend involves making the scores public.
You can think of it as the emergence of transparency into the resume matching process. As spartan forms of performance management (like stack ranking) have swept through workplaces, rank has become an important part of some cultures. In my own work trying to measure industry influence, ranking is less important but emotionally very powerful.
For example, Bright.com offers the ability to measure the relative congruence between a resume and a job description. They’re pouring a good deal of energy and money into the project which behaves like a sort of search engine. Ranked results based on the degree of the match are the final output.
Monster’s SeeMore takes a more comprehensive view. It offers a way to match some parts of resumes across a variety of databases. The scoring algorithm and points are kept under the hood in this application.
Some readers will be familiar with Klout, PeerIndex and SocialEars. These tools try to measure aspects of influence in the online social media world. They each use data from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other sources to try to identify the relative social influence of an individual. Where PeerIndex and Klout take an absolute scoring approach to the question, SocialEars sees the problem is a question of a specific topic or conversation. (Some job hunters are starting to include their Klout scores on their resumes.)
RezScore offers job hunters the opportunity to have their resumes scored for free. Positioned as a lead generation machine for resume writers, the service has an ambitious scope. The score (a letter grade) can be accompanied with interesting bits of information about supply and demand. Most resume and influence scoring neglects this critical area. They don’t appear to offer a recruiting product as of now.
Some imagine a single resume score that is like a credit score. It’s a one size fits all proposition rooted in the idea that some schools and companies are better than others. These approaches are more likely to measure social class than actual desirability of a candidate. The idea has been around for a while in one form or another. Here’s a 2008 vision.
Great recruiters know how to look at a resume and suss out the details that are hiding behind the words on the page. They know tidbits of relevancy (like this class at Harvard Business School was a good one while that one wasn’t or the difference between a Lehigh engineering degree and one from Stanford). If there were going to be a usable scoring tool, it would be cognizant of these things. Until then, scoring is not likely to be much better than the current resume relevancy rankings.
We all know those limits.