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Do you eliminate candidates from positions that are not a match to their previous titles?
In other words, if a finance person applied for a position in HR or sales or marketing, would you consider that a good financial manager understands thoroughly all aspects of the business, sells the budget to the CEO or certain calculations to the auditors, creates relationships with customers and vendors, deals with people at all levels within an organization, etc.? Or would you put their resume aside in favor of someone with a different title on paper? Many CEO's are former finance people and that's no coincidence.
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5 Answers
This is a difficult question, because so many other factors must be taken into consideration.
I think that it's entirely wrong to rule out a candidate just because that person lacks the traditional background for a particular job. Nothing in the workplace is that cut-and-dried anymore. On the other hand, past experience does give an indication of the capabilities of a person.
I think that you have to determine in advance, and as objectively as possible, what characteristics in any candidate are the most desirable, and then prioritize them in the order that the company prefers. Then evaluate each applicant according to that standard. You probably will need a large enough range of "selection points" so that a tie between any two is avoided. That's important, because it prevents you from weighing in favor or against on the basis of anything arbitrary.
For example, it's well known, in the research, that interviews by themselves are as reliable for selecting people as throwing a dart at a dartboard while blindfolded. That's because judgments are made about candidate suitability within 30 seconds of that person arriving. And that means that the decision has more to do with appearance and congeniality, than capability.
The "gold standard" for selection is the interview PLUS some means of assessing what the candidate would do in particular situations. This is where the value of hypothetical situations can be of value. Even so, the likelihood that you'll pick someone who will succeed in the job is just over 50%.
You can improve your decision by using a wide variety of methods; but you must recognize that all methods are flawed, and that at the end of the day there is some risk no matter what you do. The key is to limit any bias in your decision. If you're able to do that, then you can't do any more.
Bruce's response is outstanding. Before interviewing people, it's critical to be very clear about what you are looking for. Typically, these include work experience and past job responsibilities. If a person's job titles don't match, but in explaining the work experience it aligns with the needs, then it would be foolish not to consider the person.
I think it's important to look at the other side of the issue--how accurately do job titles portray work experience. As a very simple example, a number of years ago, I was being interviewed for a job as a sales manager. When the interviewer looked at my resume, my titles were "Marketing Manager." The interviewer said, "Why are you interviewing, you've never held a sales management job." It took me a few minutes to explain that my employer (IBM at the time) called sales managers "Marketing Managers," just as they called sales people, "Marketing Reps."
These days, I see job titles being dramatically inflated and often bear little resemblance to the responsibilities of the person. For example, just last week I met a Vice President of Business Development---the person was a sales person (relatively junior and inexperienced).
Prospective employers do themselves and candidates a disservice by blindly focusing on job titles.
Agreed. It grates on me when I hear IT sales executives say "hardware people can't sell software!"--or the reverse. Really? OK, there was that bad experience with that guy in the midwest in 2009, but maybe that wasn't because of his software sales background . . .
I shudder to think of how many highly qualified, talented people were turned away through similar biases. Not everyone values people all stamped from the same cookie cutter. When I met with the CTO of a large US-based technology company, he shared that one of their hiring criteria for product engineers is a wide diversity of backgrounds and positions. For brevity, I won't go into his rationale, other than to say that he keenly understood that similarity in backgrounds, and uniform approaches to defining and solving problems yield cruddy products.
The same is true for evaluating sales candidates. Wouldn't broad backgrounds of experience have value? I think they do. As Dave points out, job titles are borderline arbitrary anyway. So the discussion brings up an interesting idea: What if HR scrubbed job titles from resumes altogether. Would that require hiring managers to read resumes with greater care? Would that require job candidates to be more explicit in describing their responsibilities and achievements, rather than expecting a nebulous title, eg 'VP Sales,' to carry the ball?
Imagine reading a person's resume and thinking, "what a great background! Who cares about titles?"
A title is never a good reason to disqualify a person, in my opinion, Deanna.
The very best hire I ever made was intentionally interviewing outside of her title. She did not like the work she was doing, and so took it upon herself to learn what she really wanted to do. She engaged in many sit-ins for classes she could not afford otherwise, spent a lot of time in the library and picked the brains of everyone she could arrange lunch with to learn. She also managed to get into a couple of work places unpaid and get her hands dirty. In the end, she had no formal education for the job applied for, no traditional job experience, yet was the best candidate for the job.
A person's drive and proactivity can tell you a lot. And Bruce is correct in that running scenarios, or "hypothetical situations", will uncover a lot about your candidate, particularly if the scenarios are not predictable.
Together, let's put the fun back into work!
Belldon Colme
belldoncolme@gmail.com
Deanna -
I don't think it makes sense to disqualify a job candidate on title alone. If you were clear in your job description in the job listing, and require that your candidates submit a cover letter with their resume, you should have a great idea from the cover letter alone (as opposed to previous job titles) whether or not they may be a potential fit.
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