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?
No comments:
Post a Comment