Recruiters Increasingly Favour Personal Interviews For Hiring Owing To False Resume Claims: Survey

The survey by HirePro found that 85 per cent of job seekers made false claims on their resumes, and use standard resume templates, professional resume writers, and AI tools to lie on their resumes. 

Recruiters are prioritising interviews increasingly to hire people after it was found that a majority of the candidates made false claims in their resumes, a report by HirePro said on Monday. The survey by the recruitment automation and assessment solutions provider HirePro found that 85 per cent of job seekers state false claims on their resumes, compared to a decade ago when this statistic stood at 65 per cent. The survey stated that these job seekers use standard resume templates, professional resume writers, and AI tools among others to lie on their resumes. 

The report, titled ‘No Resumes Please: Paving the way for talent-centric recruitment’, is based on the analysis of resumes of 40 lakh candidates, 3,000 job postings, a survey including 3,000 hiring managers, and feedback from more than 500 corporate customers. The survey revealed that 70 per cent of recruiters read through resumes but depend on interviews mostly before hiring someone, reported PTI.

HirePro COO, S Pasupathi, noted, “Recruitment in today's job market demands a fresh approach. Relying solely on traditional resumes has proven to be a precarious endeavour. Surpassing resumes, skill assessments have become a more reliable tool in the recruitment process and prove to be a highly effective and efficient approach.”

The survey further found that employees selected through skill assessments fared better than their counterparts in their roles. In the IT sector, candidates chosen through assessments performed better by 73 per cent than those hired through traditional methods, the survey stated.

The report noted that in a job posting, 250 applications are received, whereas less than 10 get finalised, therefore, this leads to recruiters being overburdened and rushing through their decisions resulting in genuinely qualified applicants losing out and substandard ones getting hired. 

In the last five years, recruiters have changed their focus while evaluating resumes, the report found. Five years ago, factors such as job stability and keyword matching were given 49 per cent and 39 per cent weight respectively. This weightage has since declined to 33 per cent and 27 per cent respectively. 

Currently, the focus is placed on individual assessments which have seen an increase in weightage from 26 per cent earlier to 49 per cent now. While experience remains important as a factor, it’s weightage has declined from 63 per cent to 48 per cent, the report found. 

With the growth of generative AI and autocorrect tools, the significance of formatting and grammatical accuracy has reduced from 19 per cent to 14 per cent. More than 75 per cent of recruiters expect that skill-based hiring will become the priority in the next 18 months as 65 per cent of employers have already started giving more importance to skills over work experience this year.