Are we too quick to reduce people to CVs, job titles and experience? LeighAnne Jordan explores what we miss when we lose sight of the person behind the candidate.
I’m at The Talent Gathering at Murrayfield later this week, where a room full of people will spend the day talking about talent from all sorts of angles.
One of the sessions I’m particularly interested in, asks whether talent is still fit for purpose. I’m intrigued to hear where that conversation goes, because I suspect most of us who have worked in and around HR for any length of time have occasionally wondered whether the language and processes, we use really capture the people themselves.
It’s a question I’ve been reflecting on a great deal lately.
I speak to people at very different points in their careers. Some have a clear idea of what they want next or are vaguely curious. Others are genuinely happy and have no intention of going anywhere.
Those last conversations can be particularly interesting for someone as curious as I am!
Without an immediate role to discuss, the conversation becomes more open. People share experiences that may not stand out on their CV and you gain a clearer sense of what energises them and what no longer serves them in their career.
It made me realise how much of a person can be lost when we reduce them to just a candidate and lose sight of the human behind the CV.
We need job titles, CVs, role profiles and experience criteria. Of course we do. They give us a way of making sense of things. But they are only a shorthand for a career that is usually much more complex and much more interesting.
Perhaps this is also why conversations about talent can become slightly abstract at organisational level.
We talk about pipelines, capability, succession, retention and mobility because businesses need to think at that scale.
But somewhere underneath every one of those words is an individual making quite personal decisions about what they are good at, what matters to them and how they want to spend the next few years of their working life.
It’s one of the reasons I’m starting a series on my LinkedIn feed called Have you met…?
Have you met...?
Every couple of weeks, I’ll introduce you to a few of the people I’ve been talking to.
Their privacy will always come first, but hopefully you’ll get a feel for who they are and why our conversation stayed with me.
If someone makes you curious, drop me a note. And if you’re reading Have you met…? and thinking, “That could be me,” my door is always open.
Everything starts with a conversation.
