Lessons for startups: Is resume a bad way to hire people?

Bad hires have palpable costs and effects on a business’s bottom-line, team morale and engagement. This makes it imperative for start-ups, small and medium enterprises to use fact-based hiring decisions.

The hiring process starts with the most wanted screening tool; the resume. What a resume does is, reveal past experience and skills of who you should shortlist for an interview. Therefore, a resume is not a bad way to hire people. However, relying solely on a resume is.

A resume is a pointer to whether a candidate has done similar jobs in the past. It builds a perception about a candidate’s skills and expertise but perception is sometimes far from reality and the experience; skill may not translate to performance on the job.

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The gap between new hires and performance on the job in the first 90 days is because hiring decisions were based on resumes and oral interviews.

Resumes do not truly reveal job performance and a 45 minutes -1hour interview does not entirely reveal a candidate’s ability to deliver neither results nor the behavioural competency to collaborate in the team and fit into the company’s culture.

No doubt, past experience predicts future performance. Other fact-based alternative ways to hire people include:

• Cognitive or psychometric test, which reveals a candidate’s mental agility, analytical and decision-making abilities. Better suited for jobs that require little or no experience. Candidates who succeed in this test show great potential to learn and grow on the job. Often used for graduate and leadership and management trainee programmes.
• Work samples and role-specific tasks reveal the competency level of the candidate on the job. Best suited for experienced hires. This includes an onsite test to solve role-specific problems, presentation of a solution to a problem critical to the success of a particular business area.
• Personality questionnaire and interview: Generally, for all types of hiring. Most especially for leadership positions, mid-level and senior-level positions who have an influence on one or two teams.

In as much as a cognitive test, work samples, role plays et cetera are great candidate screening processes, personality testing which reveals the behavioural competency of candidates has proven to drive more business results than role-based skills.

Start-ups and SMEs need to get involved in fact-based hiring decisions. The Nigeria business ecosystem is already hard, you should not add to it by recruiting mediocre hires.

Whether resumes were referred by a family member or close business associate, make it a point of duty to take the candidate through fact-based screening processes. Alternatively, outsource your hiring needs. It saves you time to focus on strategy and grow your business in the mid to long term.

Amaka Ezeh is a human resources business partner.