Find yourself hiring the wrong people? It may be time to rethink those resumes.

Advertise a job vacancy and you’ll get at least 250 résumés.

Time to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Your biggest challenge is to not get bamboozled by the padding and outright lies. According to Grad School Hub, 40 percent of those surveyed admitted to lying on their résumés and job applications, while 78 percent said their résumés are “misleading.”

And then there’s the danger of disqualifying people who may have all the qualities you’re looking for but don’t look good on a résumé. Maybe they have unorthodox backgrounds or simply don’t know how to market themselves on paper.

Résumés may tell you how well a person performed a previous or current job. But unless you’re looking for someone to do the exact same job he or she had in the past, a résumé won’t give you insight into how the person will perform in the future.

Résumés are useless.

After making all the hiring mistakes and looking into the research and best practices, I’ve decided to do away with résumés altogether.

The best way to assess a person’s suitability for a job is to get a good picture of him or her through multiple perspectives.

Pretend They Have the Job

Instead of asking for résumés, I ask candidates to fill out an online application, which has questions and tasks that simulate the job. For a student coach job, for example, the application could ask, “How would you respond to this question from a student?” For a writing position, I would give a short writing task.

The application form can also include behavioral questions such as “Tell me about a time you took initiative at work.” Questions like that help me see, first, how the candidate frames the question, and second, how he or she demonstrated a specific quality in previous jobs.

These simulations let me know which candidates have the technical proficiency to get the job done. I can easily make a shortlist based on actual performance. It also discourages those who don’t have the required skills, so they eliminate themselves from the process.

More complicated jobs may require more elaborate simulations. I may pay a shortlisted candidate to take on a project. Or I may hire someone on a contract basis for a few months to test the waters before extending an offer.

To get a more holistic view of each person, I use other data points.

continue reading… Inc.

by Danny Iny