Abhijit Bhaduri’s Blog
I write about careers, skills and the world of work. The cartoons and sketches are mine.
Don’t let AI write your resume - here’s what you should do instead
AI Generated Resumes all sound the same. It leaves out your personality. Here is what you do instead.
Using AI to Improve Talent Acquisition
While the job descriptions may be the same, you probably do the same job very differently from your predecessor. Personality shapes several aspects of the role – our ability to bounce back after rejection (Sales roles); risk taking ability; our method of competing with others or even how much we voluntarily socialize with colleagues can be traced to personality. A caveat: use a personality assessment tool that is scientifically validated and reliable. Humantic uses AI to assess the candidate for Big Five personality traits without requiring her to answer a questionnaire.
How to Fix Your Hiring Process
People are the greatest competitive advantage. Yet most companies struggle to recruit, train and retain capable workers. Nothing seemed to have changed since 2008. Here is what NYTimes found in 2008"Managers surveyed by the firm blamed everything from short-term financial pressures — which keep them from investing in talent development — to less-than-capable human resource departments for the persistence of the problem."
Is technology the answer to improved hiring?
I have heard of many people who use only their gut to evaluate a candidate. Remember by tossing a coin to make a hiring decision, there is fifty percent chance of the candidate being very successful - statistically speaking. By studying the successful hires made by the C-Suite of a top organization they were horrified to discover that their successful hiring record was far below the coin toss method. How did this happen? They had never tracked the leaders' skills in interviewing. Leaders were using their own heuristics to choose candidates. When the new hire turned out to be a poor performer, they blamed the candidate and never for a minute stopped to think that the decision to hire that person was theirs.
How to find a “jagged” resume
Pursuing an unusual goal is not the sign of having a jagged resume. It is usually an accomplishment that makes you wonder, what motivated the person to take up the challenge. It usually is something that brings out the desire in a person to persist despite setbacks and hardships. The person may finally not even have succeeded. But it is quality of persistence that a jagged resume will show far more effectively than a regular resume.
The Adam Grant Interview
In the long run, the most effective style is not taking or matching, but giving: helping others with no strings attached. Givers tend to build deeper and broader networks than takers and matchers, investing in meaningful relationships that provide motivation, social capital, and access to new ideas. Adam Grant spoke to me about hiring, networking and his own approach to managing time.
Interview: George Anders
Look at candidates' peripheral experience, instead, to see who has great tenacity, ingenuity, creativity, etc. that has been expressed outside the workplace so far -- but could be harnessed on the job. When I was at Google last year, they were intrigued by a resume from someone who had run the 1,000-mile Iditarod dogsled race in Alaska four times. That's a very hard race. Very few people do it once. Someone who did it four times has a stubbornness and a focus that is quite remarkable. You wouldn't hire such a person if they didn't have the right technical degrees, credentials, etc. But someone who was 94th percentile in work, with that extra background, might be a more promising candidate than someone with a 96th percentile ranking on mainstream measures and no other signs of standout dedication.
