Women Tend To Showcase Fewer Skills on Their Resumes Than Men, Finds Talenya Study

Despite business leaders prioritizing diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) strategies, inclusive representation remains relatively low. Talent acquisition managers constantly complain that the recruitment pipeline is not diverse enough to hire top talent. A recent studyOpens a new window by Talenya, however, found that the diversity issue is not due to the lack of quality talent among women and minorities, but with the traditional search tools recruiters use to find them.

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Where Are Recruiters and Talent Acquisition Leaders Going Wrong?

The report, which is titled, ‘Exploring The Recruitment Pipeline Fallacy: Resume Skill Gaps Bury Underrepresented Minorities’ analyzed over 10 million candidate profiles and noted that talent data is often outdated, limited, and dispersed. The study also reported that recruiters often perform a Google search to find full information on diverse talent, which is often misleading.

Here are some key observations from the study:

Recruiters miss out on key talent due to inaccurate search

Majority of recruiters use keywords to find talent. This makes finding diverse talent more difficult as minorities and women tend to list fewer skills in their profiles than their white male counterparts. As a result, recruiters often miss out on key talent profiles when they search using only keywords.

Keyword search is based on Boolean logic, an idea that all values are either true or false. The study said, “Boolean search lacks the granularity of skill importance such as “Preferred”, “Advantage”, and others.”

LinkedIn also adds an additional barrier to the search. The social media platform only shows candidates who are connected to the recruiter by up to 3 degrees of separation.

Talent leaders exclude candidates with missing skills

The Talenya study used predictive algorithms to identify missing skills among individuals and observed that diverse candidates are “falling short at selling themselves” on professional networking sites. It is evident that candidates, diverse or non-diverse, get excluded from recruiters’ searches when they miss out on adding inferred skills.

The study further showcased by adding inferred skills African American candidates could close the skills gap by 17%. For women, the skills gap closed by 10% after adding inferred skills, whereas for Asian and Hispanic candidates the skills gap closed by 15% and 14% respectively.

Talenya analyzed all public profiles across diverse categories to identify the skills gap

Source: Talenya

However, the study found no significant difference across specialties like finance, customer success, R&D, sales and marketing. Also, the profiles that were analyzed were of skilled workers, so the results might be irrelevant to talent that lacks an online digital footprint.

Hiring managers ignore candidate who write less

According to the Talenya, women outnumbered men by 12.3% in the group with the shortest profiles. However, men outnumbered women by 18.8% and 71.4% in the groups with medium length profiles and longest profiles, respectively.

The study examined women and men’s profiles depending on the number of words: short, medium, and long.

Source: Talenya

With the tendency to write more text on their profiles, men also mention more skills than women. Women’s profiles had 34.2% fewer skills than those of men. This stark contrast makes recruiters overlook or simply ignore candidates. The study said, “With so many profiles to review, recruiters prefer to look at profiles that are rich and full of content to make an informed decision on whether to contact such candidates and invite them to an interview.”

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Can the Talent Pipeline Be Diverse?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have taken the center stage, especially after the pandemic, in the workplace. However, the efforts being taken now are rather a lip service than concrete steps towards an inclusive workplace.

But blaming the recruiters is also not justified as finding quality diverse talent is a tedious task because data is dispersed, limited, and often outdated. Recruiters must not rely on keyword search only and explore AI and machine learning technologies to maximize diverse talent representation in the recruitment pipeline. A company that does not prioritize DEI often misses out on talent and opportunities to tap into its employees’ potential.