How Much Faith Should You Put in a Candidate’s Previous Job Titles?

While we read regular reports about employers all over the world being afflicted by talent shortages due to lack of education and experience in the marketplace, we see less coverage of how the behavior of employers may also be contributing to these talent shortages in the job market.  The balance of reporting may not be right here, as there are many examples of self-defeating employer tactics that may be creating artificial talent shortages.

For example, we have heard that many employers might be over-specifying jobs and narrowing the candidate pool on paper, even though many of the skills asked for are academic and not needed to do the job. We have also seen that hiring processes still contain high levels of discrimination, particularly against the unemployed and older workers, which is also contributing to talent shortages. It appears that if employers were to change their hiring behavior in specific ways they could increase the size of their potential talent pool, reducing talent shortages.

I recently came across another less-documented kind of self-defeating behavior by employers which could once again be contributing to artificial talent shortages. Last year, CareerBuilder and EMSI released a study which showed that, “55 percent of hiring managers who can’t find qualified candidates for open positions tend to hire people who have held the same title as the open position.” Compare this to the hiring managers who don’t have problems finding talent, where only “42 percent restrict their hiring based on previous job titles.” The conclusion here is that hiring managers who limit their applicant pools to candidates with matching former job titles are much more likely to have problems locating talent and to be experiencing or perceiving a talent shortage.

It is sad that  47 percent of hiring managers usually hire people who have held the same job title as they are hiring for, because this shows there is a highly flawed and unreliable form of candidate screening prevalent in the marketplace.

Most of us in the profession know that job titles can be highly misleading and that the duties performed under a specific job title can vary dramatically from organization to organization. A sales manager at company A may do limited people management, whereas a sales manager a company B may do intensive people management. Similarly, a VP at company C, may have the same responsibility as a director at company D.

Of course, it also means that a sales manager from company E might have all the skills and experience to perform the VP role at company F, yet if company F operates a crude job-title influenced hiring process, this person — a competent person — could be quickly screened out of the process, creating a talent shortage where it doesn’t really exist. It sounds crazy that modern hiring processes would be this shortsighted, but the CareerBuilder study shows this kind of restrictive hiring practice is prevalent and possibly leading to artificial talent shortages.

The study’s findings show that there is a big opportunity for hiring managers to increase the size of candidate pools by moving away from a restrictive, job-title focused screening process and moving towards a more sophisticated skills-, experience-, and duty-focused screening process. It’s clear to me that if employers want to reduce perceived talent shortages, they need to move away from a shallow job-title based appraisal of fit and move to a much deeper, more reliable skills- and experience-based appraisal of job fit.