One of the most popular services that career coaches offer is help with constructing a winning CV. And for some reason, there is a desire in clients, policy makers and practitioners to be a little more directive when it comes to CVs. Perhaps this is an arena where people imagine there are hard and fast rules, and see the career coach as the holder of the knowledge. Or perhaps it's a more practical issue that there tends to be quite a demand for this service and stakeholders are keen to capitalise on this popularity by treating it as an 'easy win'.
My philoshophical stance on this is that there is no more reason to be directive when it comes to CV checks than for any other career query, but I can quite accept that others don't share my view. What I do find curious is that although it's the one area that we seem to feel most confident about telling clients what to do, it's probably the one area where there is least empirical evidence to back our directions up.
There is, for example, loads of empirical evidence about what makes people happy at work, but most practitioners wouldn't dream of saying 'now I don't think you should apply for that job because there isn't much autonomy and so it's not going to make you happy'. We just wouldn't. But, we do seem happy to say 'I don't think you should include your Primary School education on this CV'. Even though there is PLENTY of empirical evidence that autonomy makes you happy at work, and NO evidence that inclusion of Primary school education scuppers your chances of getting an interview.
Anyway, I've been digging around the published studies about CVs and it's been quite surprising. The first surprising thing is that there is so very little published about this. I've found perhaps 20 or 30 papers published in peer reviewed journals, but over the course of the last 20 years, it hardly seems to be a hot topic. And if I thought it was sparse for CVs, the evidence on cover letters is much more scarce - I could only find one single study that explored what kinds of cover letters lead to interview. And of course, as usual, most of the research was conducted within the US, and most of it was based on the job searches of final year undergraduates (a very over-researched group because they are so easy for academics to survey) which is interesting, but not necessarily generalisable to all contexts.
The next striking finding for me, is that what employers think they like in a CV, is different from what they actually base their decisions on. There have been a few studies that have shown this, studies where the researchers have questioned the employers on what they base their decisions on, and then analysed the CVs that had actually been shortlisted, and looked at what made them stand out. In one study (Cole et al 1994) the employers said that they based their decisions on work experience and academic qualifications. In practice these employers actually shortlisted people based on their extra-curricular activities, and furthermore, the higher the academic qualification, the less likely a candidate was to be invited for interview. Other studies have shown that there is little interrater reliability in employers' views on CVs (ie two different people looking at the same CV, with the same job description in mind, are likely to end up with very different opinions on the candidate), and that employers make, generally pretty inaccurate judgments about candidates' personalities, based on the facts in the CV.
This mismatch between what recruiters say they do, and what they actually do I think is particularly interesting given that there are hundreds of books and articles purporting to give quality advice on CVs published every year. Many of these are written by people who have had little or no genuine credibility within this arena (and yes, I talk as someone who has written many articles and even book chapters on CVs, but have done only a small amount of recruitment from CVs myself, and until recently, had read none of the good quality research on the subject), and even the best of the books base their advice on the author's own experience of shortlisting from CVs, and on advice from other employers.
This is all another symptom for me, of the huge gulf that exists between academics and practitioners. Why are academics not publishing more about the topics that concern practitioners? And why are practitioners not basing their practice on the research? And I'm not sure what the answer is. Do University Careers Services need to become more like other University departments, where they are expected to produce research themselves? This would certainly make sure that practitioners are closer to the research, but quite where they would get the time, I'm not sure.... Any ideas?
Monday 18 June 2012
Friday 8 June 2012
How do I love thee? Let me count the Js
I've just read a paper that I found quite astounding. My first reaction was to check the date of publication to make sure it wasn't April 1st. My second was to feel al bit overwhelmed about how little I seem to still know about how we make career decisions. And my third was to start to feel that as career professionals we're up against it as we try to influence the career decision making processes of our clients.
The paper was by Ansel and Duyck, Implicit Letter Preferences in Job Choice,and was published in the Journal of Psychology (1999, Vol 143 (2)). It's based on something called 'name-letter' preference and this is the quite well evidenced finding that we have a preference for things that include the letters in our own names, in particular the initial letters. This preference has been shown to have quite an impact on all sorts of life decisions, such as where you choose to live (suggesting that it's no coincidence that my friend Viriginia lives in Virginia Water) and who you marry.
This paper was looking at the impact this name-letter preference on job choice. It illustrated first that within certain professions there is a higher incidence of people with similar sounding names: apparently, there are an unusual number of dentists called Dennis.
They also conducted some experiments to see what kind of organisations people are more likely to apply for, and found that people say that they are more likely to want to apply to organisations whose names are similar to their own. They conducted one experiment where they made up names of organisations that sounded very much like the participant's name showing for example, that a participant called Kelly, was more drawn to an organisation called Kelokoa nd another using names of real organisations, and showed, for example, that a participant called Jack would be likely to be drawn to a company such as Johnson's or John Lewis.
These effect size was small - the researchers are not suggesting that this is the main basis of most people's career decisions. But the effect is pretty consistent and does make a difference.
So what do we as practitioners do with this kind of information? Well, in truth, the effect size isn't big enough for us to worry too much about. But it makes me thoughtful about two different aspects of our practice. First it suggests that we still have very little understanding of how we make career decisions - for all the decades of research that has gone into the field, we're still nowhere near a complete understanding. The more I read about the research, the more irrelevant the safe and straightforward world of Holland's matching theories, but nothing as comprehensive and easy to understand has emerged to take its place. My second concern is about the huge impact that the unconcsious has on our decision making. Not that I'm suggesting that the unconsious has no part to play in the career decision making processes, but I just struggle to see exactly how our traditional practices can help. Our standard line is to address career issues at a conscious and rational level, but how can we compete with these kinds of unconscious processes that we are quite unaware of, and can't control?
The paper was by Ansel and Duyck, Implicit Letter Preferences in Job Choice,and was published in the Journal of Psychology (1999, Vol 143 (2)). It's based on something called 'name-letter' preference and this is the quite well evidenced finding that we have a preference for things that include the letters in our own names, in particular the initial letters. This preference has been shown to have quite an impact on all sorts of life decisions, such as where you choose to live (suggesting that it's no coincidence that my friend Viriginia lives in Virginia Water) and who you marry.
This paper was looking at the impact this name-letter preference on job choice. It illustrated first that within certain professions there is a higher incidence of people with similar sounding names: apparently, there are an unusual number of dentists called Dennis.
They also conducted some experiments to see what kind of organisations people are more likely to apply for, and found that people say that they are more likely to want to apply to organisations whose names are similar to their own. They conducted one experiment where they made up names of organisations that sounded very much like the participant's name showing for example, that a participant called Kelly, was more drawn to an organisation called Kelokoa nd another using names of real organisations, and showed, for example, that a participant called Jack would be likely to be drawn to a company such as Johnson's or John Lewis.
These effect size was small - the researchers are not suggesting that this is the main basis of most people's career decisions. But the effect is pretty consistent and does make a difference.
So what do we as practitioners do with this kind of information? Well, in truth, the effect size isn't big enough for us to worry too much about. But it makes me thoughtful about two different aspects of our practice. First it suggests that we still have very little understanding of how we make career decisions - for all the decades of research that has gone into the field, we're still nowhere near a complete understanding. The more I read about the research, the more irrelevant the safe and straightforward world of Holland's matching theories, but nothing as comprehensive and easy to understand has emerged to take its place. My second concern is about the huge impact that the unconcsious has on our decision making. Not that I'm suggesting that the unconsious has no part to play in the career decision making processes, but I just struggle to see exactly how our traditional practices can help. Our standard line is to address career issues at a conscious and rational level, but how can we compete with these kinds of unconscious processes that we are quite unaware of, and can't control?
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