Bright Recruiter: Articles

A study by The Ladders suggests that recruiters look at a resume for an average of six seconds, and primarily scan two areas of a resume – a candidate’s last job and his or her education. That is, a recruiter ends up making a decision based on a small amount of qualifying data absorbed from six short seconds.

Enter the Bright Score. What our research at Bright surfaced is that there is a disconnect between what a first-line recruiter looks for in a resume and what the hiring manager cares about. Remember, the hiring manager is the person with resume in hand, sitting in front of the candidate in the interview. Hiring managers care about gaps in resumes, skill progression over time, positions held, experience level, if the candidate worked at a competitor, if the candidate knows someone at the company, and over a hundred other factors. We know that six seconds isn’t enough time to process the hundreds of resume variables and subsequent key attributes in candidates that the hiring manager cares about.

The beauty of the Bright Score is that it can look at those hundreds of resume variables to identify the best candidates for the interview instantly – thus turning recruiters into superstars in the eyes of the hiring manager.

Steve

A lot, actually. According to a peer-reviewed study by Jonathan Levav, a professor at Columbia University, an inmate is between two and six times more likely to be released if they are one of the first three prisoners considered in the day versus the last three prisoners considered.  After looking at more than 1,000 rulings in 2009, the study concluded that a favorable ruling for prisoner release peaked at the beginning of the day, steadily declining through the day from a probability of 65% to zero, and then “spiking back up to about 65% after a [judge’s] break for a meal or snack.”

Levav's study concluded that a judge who is well-rested and full-bellied is more lenient than one that is not.

What the study really revealed is that humans are humans, and that bias comes in many forms. What we know is that human recruiters and talent acquisition professionals suffer from the same bias and glucose fluctuations as the rest of us. They have good days and bad days, good hours and bad hours.

But here’s the good news: our Bright Score is there to do the bleary work of evaluating resumes when you're hungry, sleepy, or stressed. The Bright Score is a recruiter's and job seeker's best personal assistant.

Steve

P.S. See the study here: Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.  Thanks to Matthew Stollak, a professor of Business Administration and P.h.D in HR, for sending this along.