The resume discussion rages on. Today’s ERE article by Dr. Williams is an excellent discussion about why skills are important in hiring. Resumes cannot clearly display a candidate’s skills so you have to do more digging. Here are a couple of excellent excerpts from the article (emphasis mine):

Once you get past an executive’s glowing resume, dig for details. Most important, try to understand the skills and motivations he or she will bring to the job. Often these will not be evident in the resume, nor will they be evident in the interview. Both usually address results, but “results” are often not the same as skills. Think of results as the score at the end of the game and skills as how the game was played. You need to know skills.

And this one:

Always remember first-line managers are cited as employees’ greatest source of stress. And stress can be a significant reason for turnover. Incoming and first-line management promotion decisions are the easiest to tackle. Simply forget about “promotions as a reward” and focus on “promotions based on job skills.”

As they say, read the whole thing.

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I’ve run into this resume issue many times and have realized I may be missing the boat here. When I look at a resume, here is what I believe I can learn:

-Work History – Obviously, where they have worked, positions they have held, successes they have achieved, how long they have earned a paycheck in an industry. Oh, and it is probably embellished. And next-to-impossible to completely verify.

-Education – I can find out where they attended college, what degrees they earned and whether they graduated magna or summa cum laude. And this is the section that contains the most falsehoods on any given resume. The information must be verified.

-Organization of Thoughts – I like to see how the candidate presents their employment information. Structure is well-defined here. They may have paid for resume-writing services so I cannot assume it is their creation.

I suppose if I wanted to be snarky, I could mention that I can learn their contact information too. But what else?

By now, you probably get my point. A hiring manager can assume many aspects of a candidate from their resume. But the actual data that you collect to support your assumptions about that person is minimal. And that is the trap of overreaching on pre-interview decisions based primarily on an applicant’s resume.

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From the rumor mill:

Setting the stage for a possible bidding battle, Microsoft Corp. is mulling an investment in Facebook Inc. that would value the rapidly growing online hangout at $10 billion or more, according to a report published Monday.

Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal said Microsoft is holding preliminary discussions that could culminate in a $300 million to $500 million in Facebook, a Palo Alto social-networking site founded just 3 1/2 years ago.

Interesting, but here is the information that caught my attention:

An outright sale of Facebook is considered unlikely. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 23-year-old co-founder and chief executive, has repeatedly expressed his desire to remain independent. He rejected a $1 billion acquisition offer from Yahoo Inc. last year.

23-year-old CEO is remarkable.

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