Imagine you advertised an open position, and are now sitting down to review a stack of 100 resumes.

A few months ago I was talking to a CEO about one of his senior managers.  This manager believes he can read a lot into a resume, so he summarily rejects quite a few resumes when he is hiring.  The CEO decided to test this manager's selection skills by forwarding his own resume using a different name.  The CEO was, of course, rejected as unworthy of an interview.

One of the biggest causes of your staffing problems may be your own resume bias.   No, I am not referring to age, gender, race or religious bias.  Hopefully you are not biased in that way - none of us want to think of ourselves as biased in any way, but most people are "resume biased."

We presented a strong slate of candidates to a client this week.   The recruiting process had gone well up to that point and, anticipating good news, my Project Manager was intensely curious to hear feedback from our client.  (We also knew they had been looking for quite some time prior to engaging us on the search, so we knew they had high standards).    We discussed all six candidates at length with the client and the conversation seemed to go very well.