Undocumented qualifications
Jay Shetty said, "We confuse inexperience with being unqualified." That really resonated with me.
It is easy for us to glance at a resume and make assumptions based on what we see. Studies have shown that any resume gets about 7 seconds of viewing time, so the assumptions made are often quick, reflexive, and a result of conditioned bias.
When we are hiring for a leadership position, we want to see someone have experience in that same position elsewhere. The more documented experience, the more qualified we believe them to be. The opposite is also true: the fewer documented experiences, the more unqualified we think they are.
I think the key word here is "documented."
Only certain things are able to be documented on a resume. These are tangible things like job titles, projects, public recognition, status affiliations.
We gravitate toward those lines on the resume because it is concrete and visible. We can measure it and compare it. Also as job seekers, we are therefore compelled to seek opportunities that are able to be documented in this manner.
This is one of the biases we've been conditioned to believe, on both sides of the table.
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The reality is that tangible qualifications are only a part of what makes a person valuable. There are other ways in which we have value that are not easily documented on paper.
These are the intangible qualities like personality, character, trustworthiness, values, goals, emotional intelligence. We don't have ways of documenting any of those. Nor do we have a way of measuring them for sake of comparison. We end up not including these in the equation when determining whether someone is qualified. And our typical hiring decisions become solely made based on tangible experience.
However, any organization is at the core a human enterprise, so humanity is important whether we are able to acknowledge it or not.
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Simon Sinek uses the example of the Navy SEALS. They strongly prefer to have someone who is a medium performer with high trust rather than someone who is a high performer with low trust.
It's difficult to document or measure something like trust, but it is a feeling that we can almost always agree on.
The SEALS have articulated trust as a crucial factor for selection. Simply identifying that helps focus their attention on noticing it while evaluating their people.
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It makes me wonder: have we in the arts identified the intangible qualities we care about in addition to the tangible qualifications? Have we made the choice to notice these qualities recognizing that they are impossible to document on a resume?
How can we design hiring processes that bring these undocumented qualities to the fore?
Here are 3 ways to get started:
1) Communicate the desired attributes in the job description and interview.
Job descriptions are typically full of required skills and years of experience. What if we were intentional about listing the intangible qualifications? We can infuse our interview process with specific questions or activities that are designed to reveal the desired attributes. One of my favorite examples is Zappos asking their shuttle bus driver how they were treated by interview candidates.
2) Solicit input from references as the first step.
Usually, the first step is to weed out candidates based on the documented qualifications. What if we weed out candidates based on these undocumented qualifications? A quick survey can go out to references to rate candidates on emotional intelligence, trustworthiness, character, sense of purpose, etc.
3) Evaluate people on goals, values, and character in addition to skill-based performance.
We can start to tweak our performance reviews and interview processes to include these points. This has the added benefit of building portfolios as documentation for these qualifications that are traditionally hard to measure. This kind of portfolio can be helpful in the current job as well as the next job.
What are some other ways we can step away from automatically seeing inexperience as unqualified?
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