Can We Fix the Hiring Process, Already?

This week, we're talking about the horrible, no fun process of applying for jobs. A little later, we're going to talk to Karen Snyder. Karen's a linguist who's trying to fix that situation. But first, let's just talk about everything that's wrong with the hiring process. Yeah, applying for jobs is horrible. It's effectively, I think a system we can

describe as broken. Yeah, especially now with a lot of the online in job application sites, it does feel like you're sending your resume into a black hole that immediately will be incinerated. Absolutely, And this is also true I think probably on the employer side as well. I mean, you know, when you talk to employers and you read about it, they seem to have a lot of difficulty

finding the right people. So something's really gone amok here if you have applicants not really feeling like they're finding the right jobs and employers feeling like they're not finding the right applicants. Yeah, and everything, all the whole process

in between is unpleasant for everybody. So, like on the applicant side, even if somebody does read your cover letter or your resume, like one small thing can disqualify you, and it might be something that you had no idea was even something that was wrong with the hiring process. Let's let's talk about some of those potential disqualifies. So, actually, one of the most popular posts um Bloomberg since I've

been working here, I didn't write it. A former colleague, Natalie kidter Off, wrote it about the best and worst fonts for your resume? So could it could throw the whole thing? Yeah? What fun am I supposed to be using hell Vetico as a popular choice? Very hip? What am I not supposed to be used? I mean, obviously comics hands but even times New Roman. Oh, your your resumes in comics, it's always been in comics. Well, it's working for you. Yeah, I'm gonna bring a cookie vibe

to your office. You're the comics hands of Business Week report. Here there we go. But yeah, even times New Roman. I think some people in the article liked it, that it was fined, and some people thought it was offensive, and how are you supposed to know? It's ridiculous. And then there's the length of your I mean, there's the cover letter itself. Should you even have a cover letter? Right? So,

you and I have talked about this. We both are kind of anti I feel like the more you have in the cover letter, the less you have to say for yourself. In some way, it's like your resume pretty much should do the job. I feel like the cover letter these days, in many cases, it's just the email that you've attached your resume to, and the email might just say nothing more than here's my resume. Yeah that's been my move. But we also work in a more

informal field. That's true. It's not like a law firm, which I think is has a very specific rules for the kind of cover letters. Well, I guess in a way then that makes things a little easier because those rules can be known, they can be passed along and

you can sort of just function within them. It's it's in fact, when everything is supposed to be kind of loosey goosey and it's up to you and nobody wants to say what they should or shouldn't do, that you kind of are left going, yeah, but please actually just

tell me. Yeah. I think that's called like the tyranny of structurelessness or something like that, because it's sort of a fraud, right, because there are things that you probably should or shouldn't be doing, but nobody wants to come across as being so dogmatic as to say that you should or shouldn't write and and try hard or I don't know where do you come down on resume length? This is always an issue that I talked about with people. I have a one pager me too, I've had I've

been in the workforce six years or so. It seems like a one page amount of time. Also, people are just glancing at your resume, so if you have the second page where your most important work experiences, they're not even going to see it. I have been in the workforce for twenty years and I also have a one page resume because I like, you feel like there's no reason anybody ever needs. I'm not like a physician, Like I'm not like having like published articles exactly. Um, yeah

I should. We should just put links to every single article we've written out. It's very important that it is. Yes, no, And I've actually started taking jobs off my resume. Things that are so long ago. Is well, there are definitely some experiences that I didn't really enjoy and we're maybe brief for that very reason, and so it doesn't really matter, and they were so long ago so that it really it's like something that's twelve years ago that was for

six months, pretty inconsequential. And since I am trying to keep my resume to one page, take it off. Yeah, that one gets eighty six. I know everybody makes fun of LinkedIn for being useless, but actually, in this case, it kind of can be somewhere you can put other stuff. Obviously they're going to google you. The hiring manager is going to look at your LinkedIn page. Yes, you can

expect that to be the case. Yeah, So really all of this stuff is just it's kind of formalities that waste so much time, and I think once you talked to a person, the process doesn't seem as broken to me, it's kind of like, oh, we all know Jus and done some interviews, and you kind of know when an interview went well, and you know that you're like at

least being considered for our position. So yeah, we've both been working for some time now, and I think that it's fair to say that if we were heaven for friend to get a new job somewhere, it would it wouldn't be through a particularly formal process. It would be through a social network. It would be through our friends and through our colleagues and through our former colleagues and so forth, and so you wouldn't even necessarily have this process.

But if you are trying to break into an industry or even just get started, you are going to encounter these formalities. Yeah. I remember when I was applying for my first job, which was a fellowship at the Atlantic magazine. I had to apply again to and there was an online system even at that time, and it felt like sending something into a void, and when somebody responded to me, I really felt like magic or like a miracle, or like how did I get chosen? This is crazy, like

winning the Hamilton's lottery. I don't I don't think anybody actually wins. Nobody actually goes yes. Um. And I found my cover letter that I had sent and it's just so embarrassing and still did. They had given us a prompt, which I think at that time journalism was very much in this phase of like, technology is coming, what are we going to do? Yeah, And the prompt was something

like that. And in the first sentence, I have it right here in the computer, I used the word renders, which probably shouldn't use in a cover letter unless you're applying to a thought rendering facility renders obsolete. Perhaps it's just like I am writing a cover letter. Can we just get a couple of sentences here? I just want to get a sense of what we're talking about, even

as technology I can't do. Okay, even as technology renders the print and print journalism obsolete, good reporting, researching, and writing is more important than ever. Perhaps the medium of paper as a way to convey information is fading in importance, but Americans still deserve informative media. Rebecca Greenfield, you are hired. Yeah, why did that get me? I don't know. They probably got a lot of garbage from other twenty two year old You managed to string together some sentences they were

grammatically correct. Yeah, So somehow people get hired. And from our perspective, it feels like employers have have a good like they have all the power because they do. But I talked to a few hiring managers about the process and they have a few frustrations of their own. Take a listen. I think there's a lot of bad tips out there, Like people will tell you you have to stand out, so you have to visit the office in person.

But I've actually never seen this work up favorably. So what you usually see is, dear hiring manager, I have done X Y and Z for X Y and Z company. This will be applicable to you because something that sounds like it came from a fortune cookie. Please call me back if you're early inconvenience so I can expound upon this. Looking forward to it handed it. I've had people send me gifts and it never works. It's actually pretty cooky and it's not a gimmick that should get you noticed.

It's your talents. Like I've seen people attached pictures that you know, how like when you sometimes see people on on Facebook or LinkedIn and they've got it appears that they've got their arm around a buddy, and you can kind of tell that the photo has been cropped, you know, not only are they attaching a photo and maybe that's not you know, that's not appropriate. Now you kind of see this photo where you're like, oh, is that a

photo from the last Friday night. I literally had a candidate practically lie about getting in a car accident, and the candidate kind of said, hey, I'm not gonna be able to make the interview got in a car accident, like oh gosh, I hope you're okay. Um, And then they actually sent me a photo, which I thought was kind of odd, like why would you send me a photo, I'm not your insurance company right to prove that you

were in a car accident. I kind of shared it with a couple of my colleagues and they were much savvyer about, oh, let's go see if that's a stock photo. And I actually found like the stock photo up on the internet. So the person literally like lied about that, and just like, why didn't you just tell me didn't want to come to the interview. It seems like from an employer's standpoint, from a recruiting standpoint, it's a dreadful task and that you would rather be doing almost anything

else than deal with them, right, although I don't. To me, it's like, maybe it's kind of fun to like look at people's rescues, but I guess that gets old. It might get old. I've always maintained that, you know, when I deal. I've tried to tell myself this in in my own job seeking situations, and I've also told this to friends, which is that you know, you're waiting to hear back from somebody, and the days are sort of ticking by, and you're going out of your mind. Yeah,

you're going, what's going on? What's going They must be considering twenty other people, that's right, Yeah, And the truth is probably that they have just like procrastinated that task till weeks from now because there's more pressing. There's always something more pressing, you know, that needs to get addressed

that hour or that day or that week. And like hiring somebody in many cases is like it would be nice to get them in sooner rather than later, but we kind of have worked it out without them yet, so and so you're on the other end with nothing more important to think about than whether or not you're going to get this job, they are not nearly as interested in filling it as you are. Yeah. God, that's

so annoying. But the realities so Yeah. Even when employers are trying really hard to hire, like tech companies who need to staff up really fast, they still have problems hiring because there are not enough qualified people, or maybe they're trying to hire a more diverse staff hopefully and that is difficult. So in some ways we can sympathize with the employer a little bit, but it does go to this larger notion that the entire system does seem

to be broken. And this would probably be a really good time to bring in our guest, Kieren Snyder, who's working to help companies do a better job of hiring people alinguist by training. Kieren runs Texto, a company that uses machine learning to create better job listings and recruitment

letters for companies. Up happens when the power and potential of every employee and leader in your workforce is released, and corn Ferry can get you there by aligning your people to your strategy, attracting, developing, engaging, and rewarding them to reach new heights. With corn Ferry, you get a partner who truly understands people, leadership, and the new landscape of work, a partner who knows how to take your business up. Learn more at corn Ferry dot com slash

up hire. Hi, nice to be here, Thanks for joining us. UM. I'll start off with just wort of a basic question here, UM, given your vantage point, how would you describe right now the state of hiring here in the US. Great question. I mean, we may be in a little bit of a transition point right now, but the last couple of years have been tougher for employers than employees in terms of hiring, especially in sectors like technology and finance, where

there are a lot of great jobs available. You know, the economy the last couple of years has done pretty well and fewer qualified candidates to fill the role, so that the most qualified candidates on the market are highly in demand right now. I definitely think that's surprising from our perspective, the higher the employees perspective, because it just seems so impossible to find and look for jobs these days. UM. As part of the problem like some sort of mismatch

and what employers are putting out there. Yeah, that's a really good, good question. I can understand from the potential employee your job seeker perspective that it can be tough to wade through the content to find the right thing.

I mean, there are over three billion job posts on the internet, uh, just for North America at any given time, and so I do think kind of one of the challenges for the job seeker is to wade through all of that and find the posts that actually speak the most clearly to them for which they're sort of uniquely qualified. That sounds like some work for the job seeker to like wade through three billion different posts. Yeah, it's a

good question. I think job seekers take a couple of different approaches, uh, you know, and I think there's the employer side of this as well. Obviously, job seekers increasingly their number one and two tools for jobs seeking our Google and kind of secondarily maybe indeed as a you know, a board where they can kind of find one stop shopping for listings or they may you know, identify ten companies they want to work for and go directly to

the source. But I think it's a equally a big challenge for the employer in that model, because when you're part of such a large ecosystem. You have to figure out how to stand out so you can be found, which is you know, so I think there's some mutual challenge on matching. Karen, you've been working with a lot of companies um and helping them sort of craft better messages. What are some of the key things that you're telling your clients to be doing that will attract more or

better applicants. I mean, for us, given that you know, we really make software rather than providing expert consulting. The number one thing that we tell companies is that your own intuitions may be broken. Right that sort of your go to job posts that you've used for the last three years, where by the way, you're not happy with who applies when you put it out there in the world,

but you're still using it. Uh Or your intuition about what's going to work in the market or not isn't as powerful as real use of data from the whole hiring community. So your own intuitions and biases may take you two outcomes that you don't want to have, whereas if you can use real outcomes and real quantitative approaches, you know, look at what has actually worked in the past,

you're likely to bet get a better outcome. So it's the number one thing we have to tell companies, uh, is that you've got to let go some of what you thought were best practices. Do you have any examples of those bad intuitions? Are best practices that companies are using that we all see it in job listings all

the time that just really don't work. Yeah. One of one of the things that always ends up surprising people, uh, is that great, great example, the proportion of content that they put into bullets matters, right, the bullet points all over job posts. It turns out there's a sweet spot for candidate engagement. If you want the maximum candidate engagement on your job post, you want your listening to be about a third bulleted content. It's probably a visual silhouette thing.

And then, really interestingly, when you go above fifty you see a reduction in the proportion of women who apply, so women don't like bullet points. Yeah, And if you go below t bulleted content, you see a reduction in the proportion of men who apply, which is also not good. So this is one of those things you can only know when you're measuring outcomes at large scale. There's actually a spot that works, you know, inclusively to get the

most engagement from candidates, and people are always surprised. There's an example of the kind of thing like I never really thought about that before. I just I just wrote it the way I've always written it. Are there any other sort of examples that you can cite that? I mean, that was great what you were just talking about, UM, But other sort of like always nevers or dues and don't um that you've come to learn from all of

the data that you've been sifting through. Yeah, I mean, I guess one of the most I can give a couple examples, but one of the most important things is that there are few, always is and never uh, simply because language changes. So the patterns that worked a couple of months ago may not work today, and the patterns that work today may not work in a couple of months. So as as language change, it's just like with any marketing content, right, because the job post is essentially your

way of marketing your company and your job. What works changes based on what's happening in the market. I'd say one of the most common mistakes that people make is use of over formal language or sort of corporate cliches, you know, language like synergy or KPI S or r O I terrible jargon that nobody. Yeah, exactly, the pretty

jargoning stuff. Uh. I don't know what it is that people get behind a keyboard when they're writing a job post, but they don't write like they talk, and actually posts performed better when it feels like they're written a little less formally. And you know, one thing that we've we've found very interesting in our data. So every candidate, every demographic group, this is true, they don't like this corporate jargon,

but it has an even more adverse effect on underrepresented groups. Uh, particularly people of color and women uh don't respond well to you know, they're much less likely to apply the more jargon you have in your post. So yeah, pretty interesting. That's really interesting because we did an episode on jargon, and um we talked about how jargon is in speak,

you know, it's it's something that excludes other groups. So that kind of does make sense that underrepresentative people who probably already feel marginalized, you know, they see that language and they're like, oh, this isn't for me, that's that's

that community exactly. Yeah. I think it's because you know, it grew up in a pretty homogeneous corporate culture historically that wasn't particularly inclusive or representative, so the language has become something of a cultural signifier, at least at some unconscious level. Karen, can you extrampolate from the data and the work you've done with employers and sort of apply this to the employee side of the equation? Are their words or practices that are either misguided or underused or

truly beneficial? You know, it's a really good question, and I'm i as potential employees, everybody, of course wants to put their best foot forward, uh, and they want to have their best chance ants of being interviewed, you know, to get get kind of through the door and cover

letters and resumes. On the other hand, there's a part of me that always says, uh, yes, there are some best practices you can apply, but if you have to, if you feel like you have to fundamentally change the way you're communicating to get looked at by a company, you're probably not going to enjoy working for that company once you get there. So I'm always a little cautious

about telling job seekers to change themselves. Um. That said, of course, you know, companies increasingly use things like resume resume and keyword scanning software to even decide who to interview. Um, we know that shorter resumes do better, you know, with software. We know that resumes that include lots of active verbs to describe tasks and accomplishments that you've had in the past do better than resumes with sort of expository pros uh.

And its makes me a little bit nervous because you know, I've done some work in the past looking at within technology resumes of men and women, and men's resumes tend to conform to the patterns that resume scanning software privileges and women's do not, And so I never like to, uh make a set of recommendations for that end up being demographically selective in some way. But we can see

what what scanning software tends to privilege. Wait, that's so crazy that companies now are using more technology to separate the human interaction in the application process. I feel like, you know, it's one thing to just apply to a faceless, nameless job site, but now those applications aren't even being

read by people the first time around. Fewer humans and human resources generally speaking, to get to the human part, which I think is really scary for job seekers because I think the human part is kind of the the easiest part. Well, and I feel like you're and you were saying before, obviously people don't want to change who they are. And yet the way this whole thing is

being structured is almost like a game. Like if you just have to get through a stage or in this case, um, a piece of software to do you even just get to the point of getting a face to face interview with somebody, and so you have to play that game, even if the game, you know, is flawed or biased or or what have you. Yeah, I mean, I think this is just a new game. I don't know that

it's more game than there's ever been in the past. Right, I mean, even before technology was so pervasive, the majority of hiring was word of mouth hiring, right, And so already there's in network effects when you see that, right, if I'm hiring from within my network, I'm hiring people that I already know. So there's an advantage if you know me and I'm the one hiring. Um. And so I feel like you're right, Uh, there's definitely new dimensions

that come with the inclusion of technology. Um, I think they may just reshape the challenge rather than creating a different, different challenge, if that makes sense. So that's kind of that's push and pull of being yourself and being human. But also you seem to trust a lot in the data. Um. You know, like you said, companies shouldn't use their intuitions.

The data might show that other things work. So but are there times that when you looked through the data and you recommended a company change a word or the way they struct their job post and it had an unintended effect? Definitely? Textdo has seen that companies may have,

you know, i'll call them very specific patterns to the company. Right, So it turns out maybe what works to hire an engineer if you're at a travel technology company, Yeah, all of the same patterns that work for technology companies in general apply, But if you're at a travel technology company, also, the way you talk about travel is going to be highly predictive of the quality of higher these days in

the market. If you talk about travel like it's old school with travel agents and bookings, less effective at getting great people in the market than if you're talking about you know, an airbnb compete or um, you know, crowdsource

travel planning or something like that. And so definitely Texto does find that, you know, sort of algorithmically, the patterns that work may be highly tuned to your company's employment brand or culture um and so you you know, the guidance that that people at that company would want to

follow might be a little bit different. So you run a company, you hire people, what have been some of the issues that you've discovered in your own process of staffing up Texto us Just like everybody else, one of the big challenges is balancing between people are going to bring different points of view and people who are going to make a harmonious team because they don't always align well. Karen, I want to thank you for joining us. Um. This

has been a terrific conversation. We've learned a lot and hopefully well we're both very happy here at Bloomberg. We would never dream of leaving the company. I don't never going to apply for a job ever again. Should that horrible day come, though, we will take these lessons with us. Thanks for joining us. Absolutely having a names, everybody's told their entire lives to be themselves in every kind of situation,

and that's also true for applying for a job. But there's this creeping artificiality that starts to come in on both sides of the equation. Companies seem to be incapable of expressing themselves in a natural way, and probably a lot of applicants do the same, and so people are not even speaking the right language to each other and and not even representing themselves honestly. Yeah, and she mentioned

language is constantly changing. She's telling companies that they have to be more authentic and talk naturally, but then sometimes when they do that, that alienates people too. So it's a hard game to play. And it is a game exactly. I mean, that's the thing, right, there's something about this that it's a process to get you to the job, but it has almost absolutely nothing to do with the way that you will be doing your job. It doesn't

reflect it at all. No, not at all, unless you have to take some sort of test or you're going to work at like a recruiting agency. And even though Karen's discovering some of the problems that employers have, it does seem like technology isn't going to completely solve the problem. No, obviously, we're never going to fully automate the hiring process, and

nor should we. I mean, this is going to be an aspect of human relations and it's going to just require better informed, smarter humans to really make it better. Perhaps aided by technology, but not driven by it, which is probably good because we work with humans that work for now. And now it's time for my favorite segment, half bake Takes. Half fake takes. Half bake takes are when we have mildly informed opinions about things and air them out right here, right now. So what's your take. Well,

this is obviously my favorite part of the show. My half baked take for this week is a little bit of table side etiquette. I would just like to put out there a friendly reminder. If you're dining with a group of people and you're the last person to order with the waiter there, um, please have read everything on the menu by the time it's your turn. Don't sort of stare off into space and then finally you're the last one and go, I don't know, salmon looks good.

If you're the last one to order, you have the advantage of everyone else having ordered, so you know, like if you just wanted a bite of the mac and cheese. You don't have to order it, which is a huge calculation in my brain. It is a tremendously advantageous position to have. Don't waste it, Yeah, don't spoil it. Don't don't just, you know, squander it for nothing. Be decisive, be smart, be strategic, and come out of the dinner

a tremendous winner and hero. Yeah, yeah, are great take. Hey, thanks, So my take is related to working in an open office, which we have here and a lot of people work in now. And I think if you are walking around the open office, you cannot read over someone's shoulder onto their computer screen without their permission. I know you're thinking, what monster does this? Well, a certain producer of a certain show has done this to me multiple times and

she thinks it's okay. And I am just putting that take on this here show rhymes with you know, I have actually done this on very rare occasions. But I will say it's only with colleagues with whom I have worked alongside them for many many years in fact, and our friendly if not friends with Even then I might say like, hey, I'm sorry, I couldn't help, but noticing, Yeah, Liz and I are very close and she does have permission to do that, and I'm obviously just kidding with her,

but it's just not cool. It's also true for phone calls. Oh yeah, if you hear somebody on the phone and you say, ah, you know, I had that too, but I got an ointment and it all cleared right up. It's just the issues we all have working in an open office space. It's hard. You have to maintain the illusion that you don't know things about Let's pretend at least we have privacy. Okay, that's it for this week's half big Takes, half Baked Takes. This has been another fascinating,

amazing episode of Game Plan. I'm Sam Grobart. Follow me on Twitter at Sam Grobart and you can find me at RZ Greenfield and our guest Kieren Snyder is also on Twitter at Kieren Snyder. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again soon. Bye. Get the most from your people and send your business soaring with corn Ferry. From executive search to talent strategy, leadership development, rewards and succession planning. Corn Ferry knows up is more than a direction, it's

your future. Learn more at corn ferry dot com. Slash up what kind of guests have you gotten? Um, the strangest one was probably a magazine cut out of a superhero with my face superimposed over it so that that person didn't get the job