Upfront Business Development
Articles
How to Analyse CV's
Strategic Development Director
The task of assessing CV’s is a relatively straight-forward one, driven largely by common sense and personal experience. Since people reading this will be looking for various different levels of emphasis and expertise across a huge range of core competencies, it is impractical for the purposes of this article to run through all scenarios. Needless to say, you are looking for sufficient demonstrable evidence in the content of the CV that the experience and skills listed match as closely as possible to your “ideal candidate”. It is then the role of the interviewer to robustly test whether these CV claims are in fact well founded.
There are however a number of generic “red flags” you should be aware of, and check for on a routine basis:
Tip 1 Test Experience
(1) Experience which is all in a different sales methodology to your own (e.g. New Business v Account Development roles, Strategic sales v an SME targeted commodity sale, and so on)
Tip 2 "Job Hopping"
(2) “Job hopping”. That is, the candidate in question has consistently stayed in new roles for short periods of time (less than 12-18 months). This happens for one of three reasons: (i) They are unsuccessful and have been let go, or are pending redundancy, (ii) They get bored easily and constantly need a new challenge, or (iii) They are extremely unlucky or bad at picking future career opportunities. None of them bode particularly well for an employer. If you feel compelled to ignore this point, at least ensure that you always take a reference. Spotting this as a “red flag”, then employing someone without checking their story is not smart
Tip 3 No Specific Chronology
(3) No dates against time served in each role. Whilst this is sometimes because they cannot recall the exact times (especially with older salespeople who have over ten years experience and multiple roles), it is more frequently a sign that there is some “hidden” roles within their past experience which have been edited out of the CV. Ask them to give you exact dates, and say that you will check these against references, and look for their reaction. People who have things to hide find it very difficult to remain convincing under pressure
Tip 4 Challenge Vague Statements
(4) Challenge statements that say “over target”, or “consistently over 100%”. When people lie, either verbally or in writing, they rarely do so with exact percentages. Ask for the actual performances against target. Any salesman worth employing will know exactly where they were against target, and CV’s that provide detailed information such as, “137% against target in 2007”, or “closed two deals in ’08 for £244,000 and £188,000” rarely turn out to be false claims, especially when supported by a “brag file” at interview (a collection of paperwork which demonstrates the prospective employees performance against target, including employer documentation or P60’s)
Tip 5 Location
(5) Location: It may seem like an obvious one (and indeed it is) but too many people are tempted into employing people who live too far away from the original “ideal” for the role. Good candidates will often profess to have no trouble with long commutes but in reality people more than an hour away from the office or their territory rarely work out. I learned this lesson the hard way having employed around 12 people like this in three years. Only one worked out, and most of the others left long before I asked them to, as they found the commutes simply too exhausting.
Tip 6 Do they want the job?
(6) Contradictory messaging between the CV and the job applied for. You will often see CV’s of candidates who are applying for a sales role yet the word “sales” almost never appears throughout the CV. For example, you may have someone applying for a role that has a degree in marketing, and everything from the opening summary statement, to the detail of how they describe their roles and responsibilities in previous roles is consistent with the type of language a marketer would use. Phrases may include, “devising a proposition”, “analyzing client data”, “creating campaigns” and so on. Similarly you may see someone who is applying for a new business sales role who uses more account management terminology or vice versa. In assessing the suitability of any candidate you should not simply listen to what they tell you but ask also whether the story they are telling you is consistent with everything you have read and witnessed beforehand. Often these inconsistencies are not because they are lying about wanting the job you have on offer, but because the language they’re using is calling on their previously less relevant experiences. When you have the full picture, you can decide whether you want to take that risk or not.
Tip 7 “Extra curricular activities”
(7) “Extra curricular activities”: This is a highly contentious but sometimes significant point. As an interviewer you are trying to create a consistent and objective view of a potential employee’s background, skills and attitude to work. Whilst it is clearly ridiculous to suggest that someone who references “surfing” and “socialising” as their two favourite pastimes is automatically laid back and lacking ambition, it may be something that adds weight to such a view when accompanied with all other available information (interview, previous experience and performance, and so on). Equally someone who mentions “an active interest in politics and public speaking” won’t necessarily be tremendously focused and ambitious, but their propensity to be so based upon their selection of hobbies in their CV is greater than the surfer will typically be. Of course, I stress again that taking these in isolation is useless to you as an employer. It’s the general trend and theme that you will often want to explore.
It is worth mentioning the most frequently referenced red herring in this area is that playing sport automatically ensures that the prospective employee is competitive. Some of the most competitive people I know are fat and play no sport whatsoever, and it could in fact equally be interpreted as a candidate whose ambitions lie outside of business.
Whilst there are other things you may analyze on a CV, those mentioned above are the most significant and frequently occurring in selecting who you will choose to bring to interview. Of course it is true that you will sometimes find terrific candidates with poor CV’s and vice versa, but you shouldn’t use this as an excuse to spend time looking at everyone. Even if your pool of candidates is small, I would advise you to find alternative CV search resources instead of spending time interviewing poor people. The whole point of analyzing CV’s in advance is to ensure that you have more time to spend with the better candidates. HR and recruiters can help you shortlist if necessary.
