I originally wrote about crafting winning resumes in Six Resume Rules - Resume Writing and Job Hunting, Part 1 and Writing Resumes for Automated Screening Tools - Resume Writing and Job Hunting, Part 2 here on AllBusiness and a series of Resume and Job Hunting blog posts on BizMediaScience.
I mentioned in those posts that NextStage has a tool that some companies use to screen applicant resumes and people who've read Reading Virtual Minds Volume I: Science and History know that we eat our own dogfood here, meaning we use our own tools to determine if someone will be a good fit here or not. So far so good.
Job seekers can now make use of that tool and NextStage's patented Evolution Technology via the NextStage ResumeRater tool.
NextStage's ResumeRater tool is being used by several companies and professional headhunter agencies. The feedback is good and we've already made a few modifications (based on user comments) since we introduced it earlier this month -- applicants can now see how well they'll do in an HR screening.
What NextStage's ResumeRater Tool Does
NextStage's ResumeRater Tool is a format recognizing text analysis tool than reads resumes in e-mails, DOCs, htmls, LinkedIn Pages, ... form and is based on Nextstage's patented and award winning Evolution Technology (ET). ET is the only patent (as far as we know) granted by the USPTO that "allows machines to understand and respond to human thought". Why do we specify format recognizing? Because people respond to DOC files, web pages, e-mails, straight text, etc., differently even when the same information is contained in each item.
The NextStage ResumeRater Tool has been in use (in various incarnations) since 2001, was publicly demonstrated in 2005 and refined at the request of executives from a large job site that begins with "M." The current version is based on conversations with several hundred HR, headhunter, and job search professionals who described their ability to look at a resume and know intuitively whether or not the applicant was "going to work out or not". Analysis of these conversations isolated the seven factors currently determined by the tool.
What NextStage's ResumeRater Tool Determines
The NextStage ResumeRater Tool determines if an applicant
- will be helpful in their job
- can work in or requires a group environment to be successful
- requires supervision
- is reliable
- is trustworthy
- is competent
- has confidence in their abilities
- HR Specific -- Is Green Pile or Red Pile
- Applicant Specific -- Whether or not the resume will get noticed
The NextStage ResumeRater analyzes resumes then calculates and reports on several elements that are of interest HR professionals and job applicants alike:
- For HR Professionals -- NSRR saves you from first-pass-itis by letting you know what resumes should be green piled and red piled. Note that this use is best done via bulk usage of NextStage ResumeRater (available through the NextStage KnowledgeShop).
The quick take-away for HR Professionals is the GreenPile/RedPile chart at the top of the report. - For Applicants&Job Seekers -- Long before an applicant's resume is sent to a manager for review, HR personnel make a decision on the applicant.
This decision has more to do with the HR reader's unconscious decision regarding how much work the applicant will be for HR after they're hired and very little to do with an individual's job-specific skills.
For example, someone applying for a programming background who has excellent skills may never get in the door because something in their resume -- usually something the HR reader can't even put their finger on or consciously recognize -- red flags the applicant, causing the HR applicant to skip on to the next resume in the pile.
Specifically of interest to job seekers are two charts; Confidence Demonstrated by this Resume and Did They Notice You?. Confidence Demonstrated by this Resume (shown on the right) shows how much "job confidence" your resume unconsciously communicates to an HR reviewer. It's rare that someone writing their own resume will demonstrate lots of confidence because the act of writing a resume is to state you want something else, more or other, and any such declaration puts the resume writer in a psychologically vulnerable position.
Did They Notice You? (shown on right) indicates how likely a resume is to pass a quick scan and get noticed.Applicants and job seekers need to understand something about resumes and resume readers going in. Consider these two comments from HR professionals who helped craft this tool:
I look for confidence and few people actually write a "confident" resume. And once people get to a certain point in their careers it's not what you know, it's whom you know. You'll use your network to find jobs or people will come looking for you based on your public resume. In New England, people who make less than US$65k/year are hired for what they know how to do, people who make US$65k-95k/year are hired because they know what to do and where to find others who can do it, people who make over US$95k/year are hired because of whom they know.
I tell job seekers to write their resume once when they start a new job then take it out six months later to see if they still believe it. People put stuff in their resume that's a flag for BS. At a certain point in a career path, if you have to write a resume to explain who you are, you're already in trouble. You're essentially in the distasteful process of marketing yourself. What you really want to be doing is marketing your product -- or, at least the product of your intellect and skillset -- not yourself, since your real interest is not in selling them yourself but in selling them what you can do for them (i.e., renting them yourself). "Send me your resume," is a cautious, formal way of saying, "Hey, I've got no clue who you are, and I'm not about to talk seriously with a complete stranger." The best resume is a sample of your work, since that's what's really important, isn't it?"
The charts shown on this page are from a well paid, Boston-New York based professional who openly admitted his last three positions (all mid-six figure executive marketing roles) all came from letting his contacts know he was job seeking, his physical resume had little to do with getting his positions and was offered only as a formality. Another individual whose resume scored in the "entry position" range got a low six-figure, work-from-home position simply by asking a contact for one. No resume was involved whatsoever.
Please note that all values are in NextStage Standard Units. These values are internally consistent to the NSRR report. Successive runs of identical material should only vary a few SDVs unless the Language Engines are updated. Update times are posted on the NextStage Evolution site and in our RSS feed.
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics. Upcoming Trainings:
- 22 Oct 2010 - Mastering Push and Pull Writing (Writing Headlines that Cause Action) in Bedford, NH
Upcoming Conferences:
- Analytics Schmanalytics: How Neuromarketing Is Changing the Future of Marketing Analytics Forever at FutureM in Boston, 6 Oct 10
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