What Not To Include on Your Resume!

In the sphere of career building as with so many other walks of life, technology is playing an ever greater role. Job hunters are being advised to develop their LinkedIn profiles, build personal websites and to be very careful about what they post on their Facebook pages. The venerable resume is being supplemented by invitations to create and upload a short video allowing you to pitch for a role or to explain how you would solve a fictitious business problem, for example. Recruiters not only get to review your track record but they also know what you look like and get a sense of your personality.

But is all of this advantageous to you the applicant? The answer it would appear, is yes and no. Research conducted by two Israeli academics Ruffle and Shtudiner which was published last year examined the impact of including a picture on your resume. They sent out over 5,000 CVs, in pairs, to over 2,500 job openings. In each pair, one CV was without a picture, while another almost identical CV contained a picture of either an attractive male/female or a plain-looking male/female. The results were fascinating. Employer call backs to attractive men were significantly higher than to men with no picture and to plain-looking men, nearly doubling the latter group. However, and perhaps surprisingly given the conventional view that attractive women get all the breaks, this beauty premium did not hold in the case of females. In fact, women with no picture had a significantly higher rate of call backs than attractive or plain-looking women.

So what explains these surprising findings? Additional analysis and follow-up research revealed that women were overwhelmingly responsible (93 per cent) for deciding who gets called for interview. Female jealousy of attractive competitors in the workplace and negative perceptions of candidates who attach photographs to their CVs were deemed by the authors to be the likely explanations for the penalization of attractive women. So much for the notion that decisions made in the workplace are rational! And the next time you are applying for a job, a little bit of prior research may be very useful!

EFFORT VERSUS TALENT

Yesterday, the Irish international soccer team kicked off their European Championship adventure with a match against Croatia. Despite qualifying for the finals, the team has shipped a lot of criticism. Under the guidance of Italian manager Giovanni Trappattoni, they eschew fancy, skilful football for a pragmatic approach that emphasises organisation, discipline and effort.

Today’s fast paced, information-rich world is a demanding and competitive environment as well. Work is increasingly mentally tough, requiring the ability to process large amounts of information quickly and to come up with creative and innovative solutions. So should we recruit talented people or hard workers? And more importantly how should we manage them over time?

To this end it is worth revisiting a classic piece of research on children which was published by Carol Dweck over 10 years ago. She took several hundred New York schoolchildren and gave them a test. Afterwards she praised half for effort (‘you must have worked really hard’) and the other half for intelligence (‘you must be smart at this’). Then she offered the children a choice of two further tests – one at the same level as the first and another more difficult. The results were fascinating. Of those praised for effort, 90 percent chose the harder test and the numbers were reversed in the case of those praised for intelligence. Dweck’s conclusions were that the intelligence group were scared of failure while the effort group were keen to learn from their mistakes. This conclusion was reinforced when the pupils were offered the choice of looking at the test papers of those who had done better or worse than them. Almost all the intelligence group chose to boost their self-esteem by looking at the work of those below them, while most of the effort group examined better test papers to understand their mistakes. In subsequent tests, the effort pupils raised their average scores by 30 per cent, while the intelligence group average dropped by 20 per cent.

The implications are obvious. Whether you are working with children or knowledge workers (and sometimes the differences are not all that clear!!) it is much better to focus on effort than on outcomes. You want your employees to be challenged by complex problems and to be keen to put the effort into coming up with solutions. Moreover, you do not want them to be afraid of failure because discontinuous innovations almost inevitably have high failure rates. These have to be tolerated to ultimately get the results that you want.

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