Disclaimer, Organizational Effectiveness Solutions is a Strategic Alliance Partner with Ascentii, so I am a little biased, but let me tell you why I’ve decided to join their team. Resumes are useless and antiquated, and Ascentii offers a disruptive technology that will revolutionize recruitment at a fraction of the cost.

First, I’d like to tell you a quick story to demonstrate just how messed up things are right now. An English Master Adjunct Professor, that had been looking for a full time position with no luck, decided to run an experiment. He posted a fake job posting on Craigslit for an administrative assistant making $12-$13/hour. He received 653 responses within 24 hours, 37% of which had more than 2 years of experience in office administration.

It’s a small anecdote, but it absolutely illustrates the pain of job seeking and the challenges of HR recruiters in finding good candidates amidst the mountain of resumes. A resume is still widely the number one asset in the job search and that’s insanity! What the heck does a resume tell you about a person? What sort of genius can look at 1 page of self authored marketing and give an accurate judgment on a person?

Of course, a professional HR recruiter is trained to scan resumes and do just that! Bullox! All the HR recruiter is trained to do is disqualify all the people who haven’t already been disqualified by an ATS (applicant tracking system). Resumes can show you eligibility, that’s fair. If someone doesn’t have a University degree in the field you want, a resume can tell you that quickly. If someone doesn’t have any experience the resume will tell you that too, but frankly, that is stupid easy to do and really irrelevant when it comes to differentiating between candidates. It also takes a long time, usually about 1 to 3 months, to select candidates for interviews.

Current systems rely heavily on ATS systems to filter resumes that contain the keywords you want. That is incredibly annoying, I hear some like PDF, some like .DOC, and people now create resumes for robots which don’t exactly provide much insight into their personality.

Welcome Ascentii’s Role Fit Survey! Ascentii is able to “predict how successful someone will be in a given job on a consistent day to day basis with 80% to 87% accuracy and with >95% reliability”. How you ask? Just take a 10 minute assessment while applying to the job, and you are scored against 54 competency factors weighted for the specific job, and then are given a score out of 10 that will very accurately predict how well you fit with that position.

Before I say more about Ascentii I want to bash on resumes a little bit more. I actually have a solid list of why resumes are ancient and unreliable!

No Standardization: One page, two pages? Experience first or last? Can I put in my hobbies or not? It is HARD to write a good resume, and a big reason why is that there are very few standards and every recruiter has a different preferences.

Boring: I can understand why hiring managers only spend 8 seconds to review a resume. They are boring to read! If you make it exciting or personable though, you run the risk of being passed over by the automatic filtering systems.

Lies, lies, lies: People lie on resumes, in fact, 70% of college graduates would lie on their resume if it meant getting their desired job. 46% of people lie on resumes in general. There is a whole site devoted to helping people falsify their work history over at Career Excuse.

Depressing: It is absolutely soul crushing sending out resume after resume knowing that there is only a 5% chance a real person will read it and actually respond.

HR Stuck on Administrative Tasks: 58% of the average HR departments duties are administrative, a huge portion of which is simply collecting, reviewing and responding to resumes. I have a huge problem with this because I believe HR has much more important things to do including coming up with the overall people strategy for the organization.

Heavy Bias to Networking: The common rebuttal is, of course resumes suck, so go network. I don’t disagree that networking is still the most important part of recruitment but let’s not pretend that all those online job boards are not important too. There are still thousands of jobs posted daily and people are applying, so let’s fix that system instead of telling everyone to simply go network. You can only hit so many jobs and people, networking doesn’t always scale well and not everyone is good at it, nor should they have to be if their job doesn’t really need those skills.

Bad Hires: The current system doesn’t even result in good hires, Zappos gets this and they offer $2000 to new hires to quit, no strings. 97% decline. Tony Hsieh has been quoted as saying bad hires are the biggest cost at Zappos, resulting in over $100 M so far.

Randomness: Just consider my Finance buddies from the MBA. They send the same resume to multiple banks that are looking for similar positions, and they get interviews for some and not others. Furthermore, two friends with the almost identical backgrounds in Aerospace + Masters + MBA had almost no overlap in the kinds of interviews they were getting despite applying to the same positions. Resumes have no objectivity.

9. Slow: It can take from 1-3 months just to get to the interview stage, AFTER a job posting has closed. So much of that time is spent reviewing resumes, and it is a pain for both the applicants and the company. It’s a costly delay.

Would you rather have some faceless HR recruiter take 8 seconds to review your resume, or would you prefer to take 10 minutes to complete an assessment that will reliably and accurately score you on how well you are able to do the job? Or better yet, would you rather have an applicant tracking system scan your resume for relevant keywords before any human sees it? The only reason I would say no to an assessment is if I didn’t trust it. That’s exactly what I challenged the CEO of Ascentii with before aligning myself with the group.

So how come I trust Ascentii and their Role Fit Survey enough to put my own reputation and business on the line?

Validated: Third party analysis has been conducted by Centacs (Center for Applied Cognitive Sciences) and they have determined that the Role Fit Survey is 80%-87% reliable, 95% of the time. Over 60,000 responses had been analyzed at the time of the report. This was a very rigorous analysis and it is freely available on the Ascentii website. None of the competition is willing to show such a report.

Legally Defensible: Over 100,000 assessments have been done without a single legal dispute, labour lawyers have reviewed all the questions and everything is fair.

Easy: It is a cloud based solutions, takes less than 5 minutes to setup and you can start accepting applications immediately. It costs pennies per applicant and is easy for the recruiter and the applicant.

My Report: I have done many psychometric tests as part of my MBA curriculum and this one was professional, easy to understand and spoke to how good a fit I would be for the desired position. It’s highly tailored and specific to the relevant job.

Objective: The randomness of job search is reduced significantly, so now only candidates that truly are a good fit, not based on a hiring managers opinion on your heavily contrived marketing material (resume), but based on a validated psychometric assessment.

I think it’s dead obvious that Ascentii is the way of the future. Of course, a resume can be used once the candidates are sorted by their scores to test for eligibility. Maybe the best scoring individuals don’t have the experience or background necessary, but now the resume serves a real purpose. The resume should be a secondary level of filtering based on eligibility, but it can never measure suitability.

I’m so happy there is finally a tool out there that can get us out of the stone age of resume based recruiting. Luckily, Ascentii and OES have clear synergies and I believe our partnership will provide some fantastic mutual benefits. If you have any questions at all about how Ascentii can help you, don’t hesitate to contact me at mehdi.kajbaf@gmail.com.