Are applicant's resume telling you anything about his personality
One of the studies, reported in Journal of Business and Psychology recently, tried to understand Recruiters’ Inferences of Applicant Personality Based on Resume Screening. Responses from 244 recruiters were analyzed and the authors ,Michael S. Cole of Department of Management, M.J. Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX 76109, USA and Hubert S. Feild, William F. Giles and Stanley G. Harris of Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA, found that
- the recruiters didn’t arrive at an agreement with each other about what the resume said about an applicant’s personality.
- The applicants were separately tested on Big 5 (OCEAN) test and the correlations made between recruiters’ inferences of personality with actual Big 5 scores from the applicants, low levels of validity were found.
- Despite the two findings above, rater perception of extraversion, oppenness to experience, and conscientiousness predicted their assessment of employability of the applicants.
What that tells us is that as an recruiter you need to restrain yourself from trying to infer personality from an applicant’s resume. Use resume to screen applicants out by the qualification and then follow that up with with a number of much more valid tests, structured interviews, in-depth reference checks, background checks etc.
