Résumé Screening for A Players

So the key to success, you've heard me talk about in previous videos, is to hire A players. People that live our core values hit KPI driven goals often. To get A players, you have to be able to pay for them. They're gonna be more expensive.

That's okay. They're one great employees better than three good employees. You can pay them up to twice their salary and still be successful. And yes, you have to do things culturally.

You have to not demotivate them. You have to be able to remove C players that are going to make them leave. Those are the kind of things you want to be able to do as an organization. But a lot of cases, we're gonna fail right off the bat when we hire an A player, which which is we don't do the resume screen correctly.

So what happens is we mostly screen for experience criteria with resumes. These are time in our industry, number of years in a position, as if those things somehow equate to success, they don't. What we want are success criteria. And here are the three things that I've learned a few years ago that helped to find A-players, and they're going to take a lot longer in the screening process.

This is why it's directed at the CEO, at the head of HR, and hiring managers, because this is a fundamental change system wide if we want to be able to hire the right person. One, you want a history of achievements and metric success. What I mean by metric success is A players know that they need to be able to put metric accomplishments in their resume. I was able to improve this from X to Y with numbers from 20% from whatever number from X amount million to Y amount million over time.

I was able to reduce this number from here to here during this period of time. Recruiters know they need that in their resume. If you just see a list of job responsibilities, throw that resume in the do not review pile. Number two, we want to see a history of promotion.

Yes, there are positions when you get into higher level positions, when you get up to director, VP, C-level suites, those aren't going to move as much because there's not much room to go. But when we're talking about specialist, coordinator, manager, et cetera, we want to see those positions get elevated every one and a half to two years. You will start to see a pattern of success among A players that get promoted throughout their career. Number three, no job hopping.

And one guideline to follow. And yes, it's not a hard and fast guideline. It's just one to really look closely at. It's no more than two jobs in the last five years.

But really what it's about is no two-year job hopping. We do not want to take people that have two-year job hopping stints because it's a job, not a responsibility. Jim Collins, that's key. What we're seeing is people that want to job, not a responsibility.

Now, are we going to miss out on a few A players potentially by screening this way? Yes, but you're definitely going to get rid of C players and B players this way. You're not going to be screening them into the system. What you want are A players.

So think about this. An A player that knows they have to interview for a job, they've probably researched how to write a resume in advance. And you know what? Yep, there are some that will lie.

And if you, you know, they're going to state a metric that isn't correct. And with the top grading interview process, if we're following that consistently, as I've talked about in previous these videos, we're going to be able to assess those people at nine out of ten times. So there is a strong correlation between people that can demonstrate metric success in their resumes and people that are A players, much stronger than there is people that are lying. And if you look at highly successful companies like Nvidia, and yeah, I know Nvidia stocks come up and down recently, and I don't agree with everything Nvidia does.

There are some philosophies on one-on-one coaching that I don't particularly agree with, nor I think that are the best and most successful ways to go about what but they do have a resume screen criteria that mirrors that very closely. And this is not NVIDIA's resume screen criteria. This is the criteria that you learned years ago at Compass. And what's going to happen is if you have to screen through resumes, yeah, you're going to go from, hey, finding one candidate in 60 resumes to finding one candidate about 140.

Here's what's going to happen on the back end though. You're not going to spend as much time on training their bad habits. You're not going to spend as time, as much time coaching them up, to be able to get to, you know, bare minimum, you are not going to worry about their behavior. Their habits, their routines.

And this is why I'm addressing the CEO and hiring managers and HR aids, because this is again a critical system change. So if you want to get A-players in the organization, you've got to be able to screen for those three criteria. Notice there are a few things missing. I did not say screen from the industry.

By the way, unless you're in medical, legal, or some other profession that requires certification, history in our industry is actually a neutral to negative correlation for success for most positions. And that's because our brain will look at years of experience on a resume and we will look at another resume in a comparable role, not from our industry, and see their success and we will pick the one with more experience. That is a failure in hiring every single time. If you want to get more successful, do those three things: screen for achievements and metric success, look for history of promotion, no job hopping.