Fear No Project Blog – Focusing on the Management Side of Projects

Your new project has just been approved, and now you need to staff it.

Whether you go to HR to get resumes of potential team members, or post available team positions on LinkedIn or Career Builder, your problem is the same. Every resume you sift through seems to have all of the project ‘buzz words.’  Which resume reflects real project expertise, versus “Googled” expertise?

I am seeing a disconcerting pattern in today’s staffing. I look at someone’s resume for a position on a project and it looks like they have done everything and know everything—yet when I count up the years of experience it doesn’t add up.

How can that be?

Here’s how:  Job seekers are advised by various recruiting experts and websites to “fill your resume with the right buzz words to get you noticed” and advise that the buzz words you choose should “come directly from the job description.”  http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2010/12/14/fill-your-resume-with-the-right-buzz-words/

Although these experts caution job seekers to use the words only if you have the expertise, I can tell you that it is not always the case, at least on project management resumes I’ve seen. And it gets worse. “CareerBuilder.com” has a list of universal keywords to “help you attract attention.” OK-In fairness to job seekers, I realize that their resume will be read first by an applicant tracking system (ATS) and if it doesn’t match target key words it will never be reach a human.  (Who decided that a computer scanning program was the best way to screen applicants???)

This makes it really tough for those of us who are trying to staff with real expertise and not over inflated resumes.  After all, anyone can Google key words to review wiki definitions, read examples, and quickly obtain surface level knowledge of a topic. While definitions, facts, and key factors may be Googled, a good project manager can conduct behavioral interviews that focus on how the interviewee solved a particular problem, reacted to a crisis situation, and applied PMBoK knowledge in real life. Furthermore, making simulated scenarios, and exercises such as “fix the project schedule” or “how would you crash this schedule?”, will quickly let you ferret out real knowledge from Googled knowledge.

I dont think that these HR and recruiting firms have it right – in fact I think they are poluting the water with bloated resumes because of the way they use automated systems rather than actual interviews.  I guess they are getting ready for hiring robots rather than humans!

What other techniques do you use to ensure that the staff you bring onto your projects can do the real work of project management?