Using Intuition to Find Resume Gold AI May Never Uncover

Anthony Vaughan is a workforce researcher and strategist working at the intersection of leadership, workforce strategy, and the technology shaping the future of work. Through E1B2 Collective and The Business of Alignment Podcast, he leads one of the largest ongoing executive research platforms in the HR and People space, drawing insights from more than 1,000 conversations with CHROs, founders, and HR technology executives.

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Aldous Huxley once said, “Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”

I would take that one step further: we have an almost infinite capacity for taking ourselves for granted.

This is especially challenging when it comes to recruiting because the most compelling and memorable stories – the best predictors of success – are almost never on a resume. When they are, those experiences are often camouflaged behind a completely ineffective presentation.

My first exposure to this happened during my career in Client Service at Chicago advertising giant, Leo Burnett. When I first started as a volunteer recruiter, I interviewed a ton of people because I was having so much fun. After six months, the head recruiter called me down to her office and said, “Congratulations, you are now a full-round interviewer.”

Somewhat confused, I replied, “I thought I already was.”

That’s when she smiled and told me that the recommendations of new interviewers don’t count for at least the first year. Given the fact that all eight interviewers need to say “Yes”, it wouldn’t be fair to a candidate if one of those people, due to inexperience, made questionable decisions. So, after a year, new interviewers are evaluated and coached by internal recruiters on whatever they need to do differently. Within another six months, if all goes well, they make the team. Once the lead recruiter finished explaining the process, she looked at me and said, “In your case, your recommendations have been on par with the best recruiters in the agency so we are making you a full-round interviewer now. But there was one exception we need to talk to you about; you recommended hiring someone no one recommended.”

Then, she put the folder in front of me.

Feeling slightly defensive, I opened the file, looked through the report, and said, “Oh, I remember her. She is not the typical, polished, Leo Burnett type. The reason I recommended her, and why I would want her on my team is that she, as an intern for an oil company, came up with an idea to change the way they shipped oil on a river on the east coast. As a result, the company was on target to save several million dollars a year. There are people who go their entire career and never have an accomplishment like that. We can give her the polish, but we can’t teach her to think.”

I’ll never forget the recruiter’s surprised look when she said, “Good for you for finding that out and shame on her for not telling any of the seven other people who interviewed her that day.” Once again, the accomplishment was buried completely.

A few years later when I worked in outplacement, I coached a microbiologist who showed up with a mind-numbing 14-page resume, most of which I didn’t understand. After a lot of digging, we uncovered an accomplishment that didn’t appear in any of those 14 pages: he singlehandedly kept the small company running an additional 18 months by developing four products that generated $1.5 million in revenue with only $50,000 in development costs. A few days later when I shared his resume with a friend at a pharmaceutical company, she said, “He looks amazing! Where did you find him?” That is definitely not the reaction she would have had upon seeing his original resume.

My individual coaching clients have all shared the same issue in varying degrees. For example, a recent college grad who desperately wanted to be an advertising copywriter buried his best evidence in a line that read, “Raised money for the Chicago-Minneapolis AIDS Ride”.

Trusting my intuition, I drilled down and discovered he raised $10,000 through two targeted mailings to a list of 100 people he knew who were already established in their careers. When I asked how many of those people donated after the first mailing he said apologetically, “Only about 50.” Since those people “only” donated $5,000, he designed a second St. Patrick’s Day-themed mailing and sent it to the 50 people who didn’t respond the first time. “Only” 25 responding to that mailing.

People worry about bragging, but there I was, face-to-face with a candidate who was clearly disappointed in himself because it took so much effort to raise $10,000. At that moment, I looked at him and asked, “Do you have any idea what the response rate of a successful direct marketing campaign is?”

When he heard that the best campaigns, at the time, might only generate a one or two percent response, he was shocked. And visibly more confident. There was no better predictor of his success as a copywriter than his ability to get a cumulative 75% response rate from two mailings, whether he knew the recipients or not. Better still, he obviously wasn’t making it up. After all, he didn’t think to include any of the relevant details on his resume.

Then there was the coaching client who listed an award from a company that wasn’t among her previous employers. The name of the award sat there on the bottom of her resume looking about as impressive as Employee of the Month. Once again, my gut told me to ask. That’s when she smiled and said the award came from her client. Every year they honor the person who had the biggest bottom-line impact on their business. This was the first time in the company’s history they had given the award to a non-employee. Wow!

I could fill another book with examples because it’s true in almost every case: the most compelling experiences are almost never obvious on the resume if they are there at all. Often, the person doesn’t even consider including it because it wasn’t something they were paid to do.

The good news, from a recruiting standpoint, is that finding the best evidence of a candidate’s success comes down to intuition and asking the right questions. And that’s something AI isn’t likely to replace. At least not until next week.

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