I was looking for a more suitable word to describe how useful a CV is, but I couldn’t come up with a more fitting one. I’ve just seen that a colleague who covers human resources has written an article on what to put on a CV, and it reminded me of some recent statistics: 70% of job applicants lie on their CV and lie in the interview. Then again, HR doesn’t want you to be completely honest either, not least because they wouldn’t pick you if you were.
CVs are all virtues: people skills, negotiation skills, used to working to targets, resilience in the face of adversity, leadership ability, and so on… The part I like best is “intermediate English”, which actually means somewhere between poor and non-existent. Of course, the big question for the company would be: do I need someone who speaks English? Would I reject a candidate for not being fluent in other languages? Companies sometimes turn down candidates for not mastering a second language when in reality they deal with someone from abroad once or twice a year.
Perhaps CVs, along with companies outsourcing hiring to “expert recruiters”, are to blame for so many companies being on the verge of bankruptcy: they hired a leader with no leadership ability and a ship’s captain who couldn’t sail in rough seas. What’s more, choosing someone for what their CV says is about as useful as being in a relationship with someone because we like the colour of their clothes.
Not to mention the requirements set for certain jobs, which are sometimes unnecessary and rule out good professionals. I always clashed with this approach, especially when we were looking for salespeople: some companies wanted a salesperson with a degree in… and so the company ended up with a graduate in… but we were still short of good salespeople, whom we couldn’t find because we insisted on that degree in…
On the other hand, when a competitor’s salesperson was “crushing” you out in the field, I’d call them to try to win them over and make them an offer to join our company. You wanted that person working for you, and you were willing to improve on the terms they had at their company just to bring them over. Funnily enough, they didn’t have that degree in… so if they had left their CV with us, the HR department wouldn’t have selected them. This leads to two clear conclusions:
- Companies think they know what they’re looking for, but they really have no idea what they need.
- The CV is utter nonsense.
I’ve already given some tips on how to spot a bad worker before you hire them, some of them perhaps unorthodox but very useful for companies. For job applicants, we covered some body language techniques to bear in mind in the interview. Still, setting aside all the paraphernalia that surrounds hiring, the truth is that in the end a worker should be judged not by what they have, but by what they can do with what they have.
Featured image: Rondal Partridge, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
