To get women back to work, throw out your resume requirements

It’s time to look beyond just what’s on paper when making your hiring decisions.

As women look to reenter the labor market, traditional methods may be inadvertently blocking them from progressing through the recruiting process. When employers recruit using a ‘skills-based’ hiring process instead of basing their decisions off of CVs, the number of women hired into senior roles increases by almost 70%, according to new research conducted by recruiting platform Applied.

Resumes may be too limiting, especially when it comes to parsing out female talent and skills, says Khyati Sundaram, a de-biased recruitment expert and CEO of Applied. Resumes may also cancel out applicants who have taken career breaks, which is much more common for female workers.

“The problem is that every piece of information that sits on a CV is a proxy of whether that person can do a job or not,” says Sundaram. “Women, even if they have the skills but don't have the CV that fits the mold, have a hard time making it into the job or even getting into the ring.”

Read More: Why the stigma surrounding career breaks is harmful to women

And not only is the resume obstacle hurting women, but it’s hurting the companies they work for. Organizations with women in senior roles outperform companies run by men by almost 40%, according to research conducted by diversity insights organization, The Pipeline. But as complex as the gender equality issue is, the solution may be more simple.

“The aim of skills-based testing and hiring is to find the best candidates for each role and remove these kinds of biases and triggers that are preventing [women] from getting into jobs,” Sundaram says.

Of the candidates hired into senior roles following a skills-based interview, 52% were women, the research found. This accounts for a 68% increase on the global average, where women account for just 31% of senior positions.

And it’s that lack of a clear pathway for women into positions of power that lead to much deeper-seated issues such as perpetuating the gender pay gap — which has remained stable in the U.S. over the past decade. In 2020, women earned 84% of what men earned, according to data from Pew Research, with little sign of improving soon.

“We haven't changed the way we hire for centuries, even though the needs of organizations have changed and our society is less homogenous than it ever was before,” Sundaram says. “It's a very narrow view and how we as a society [have been] viewing talent for decades.”

Read More: Pandemic pushed more women out of jobs in gender parity setback

Applied is hoping to push for greater change in these recruiting practices. The service approaches hiring holistically, helping women and other minorities navigate job postings without feeling overwhelmed by coded language, and helps them work around restrictive qualifications that don’t speak to their skills.

“Skills could come from a different job with the same job title, but they could also come from a completely different industry,” Sundaram says. “They could come from them being parents who would have learned those skills at home, soft skills like patience and communication — all relevant in a team setting.”

Progressing past those traditional hiring norms is the only way to ensure that women are supported in the workplace moving forward, while combating a labor market that is already working against them, according to Sundaram. And the stakes are high.

“If we don't do that, we will see the same perpetuation of problems — which is that [women and] people of ethnic minorities won't get into jobs,” she says. “They are going to continue to be penalized for a global pandemics which they had no control over.”