I want to talk with you today about a situation that just recently happened with a candidate. I had an opportunity to do a personality profile and candidate assessment for a person who is applying for job as product development manager. We reviewed the personality profile, and as we always do, talked about his career path. When I asked him to recount his work history, the candidate said to me, “Gee, I don’t know which version of my resume you have in front of you,” which I thought was a pretty interesting statement. So, I had him talk to me about his career and what he did, and while he was talking, I flipped open his LinkedIn page. When I looked at that, it made perfect sense why he asked about what copy of the resume that I had, because his experience on the LinkedIn page didn’t really bear a whole lot of resemblance to the resume that I was looking at.

For instance, it did show that they had been a product manager back in the early 2000’s, 2001 to 2004. It also showed that he had been the senior VP of sales and marketing since 2005 and the VP of finance for that time as well. Well, neither of the sales and marketing role or the finance role were listed on the resume. The only thing on the resume showed from 2000 to present was the role of being a director or VP of product development. So it raises the question, what do you really expect to see on a resume? Do you expect it to be geared for you, only focused on the things that are important to you and your job, or do you expect the resume to be an accurate reflection of that person’s work history. Does it concern you when you realized that not everything is listed on the resume and that goes to job functions, job titles, dates; and maybe even leaving off certain jobs that they have determined are not relevant to the position that they are applying for. So take a minute if you will, fill out the survey on these questions and let everybody else know what your perspective is.

Thank you very much. We’re really trying to figure it out that as it relates to a resume, should it be bold or bull? Thank you.

Now we are able to look at that picture because it is her Facebook picture and you could see that behind her she has somebody standing there that clearly has some form of a drink in their hand and it was a “happy time” kind of a picture that was taken. That’s what we received.  As I normally do when somebody does their personality profile, I talk to the individual, review the results of that profile with them, make sure that they feel that it is an accurate reflection of who they are, talk to them about their past, what they have done – and then have a one-on-one conversation with the hiring manager, sharing the results of the profile, talking about the strengths, talking about how the person aligns with other successful people they have in their organization and sharing my perspective on the fit for the candidate.

So here are the four questions I would like you to consider from this particular incident.

Number one, should I have talked to the candidate about the fact that their picture appeared?

Number two, should I have talked with the hiring manager about that particular picture?

Number three, if you were the hiring manager and you found out that the person had a picture like that, would it have effected your decision to hire or not hire the person?

And number four, should either the hiring manager or human resources make it a practice to check the social network of a candidate or before extending an offer to that person?

One last point, this is not a candidate that’s in the United States.

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