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How fluffy words relate to house prices and job offers
On October 13, 2005 by Jamie Madigan
I'm currently reading through a book called "Freakonomics" by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. The authors use economics to explore and explain everyday problems like crime, cheating on standardized testing, and getting parents to pick their kids up from daycare. It's a great read so far, and a couple of things have really struck me.
The first is how similar economics (at least described in this book) is similar to psychology, particularly when you're talking about working with archival data. Psychologists may make more use of controlled experiments, but otherwise a lot of the tools are the same --hypothesis testing through data analysis, use of inferential statistics, the general study of human behavior, the study of motivation, and lots of number crunching.
The second thing that struck me was the section on real estate agents and home listings. The authors describe a study that showed how some words and phrases ("marble," "spacious," "great neighborhood," etc.) had significant negative or positive correlations to a home's sale price. It wasn't that words like "spacious" were necessarily euphemisms, either. It was just that the realtors who wrote those descriptions only used those words when they had nothing more specific to fall back on. Words like "Marble counter tops" or "remodeled kitchen" sell themselves and realtors want to mention them in the limited space available for home listings. But if a house has no outstanding qualities, the realtor won't just leave the description blank or make it make it delightfully pithy. She'll fill the available space with less meaningful fluff like "charming" or "spacious." And lo and behold, house listings with meaningful and attractive words get more attention and command better prices than vague descriptions full of fluff.
I think you may see where I'm going with this: Does the same thing not happen with resumes for job applicants? How many times have you seen "excellent communicator" or "highly motivated" on a resume or cover letter? Good recruiters learn to ignore those meaningless and vague bullet points. Instead, they look for more concrete words that describe the actual qualifications and experiences they're looking for. It's just plain annoying that you have to wade through the fluff to get to the meat, and if no meat is immediately forthcoming the resume may find itself in that round filing drawer underneath the desk.
Somebody must have done research to verify and quantify this kind of thing, though. A cursory search with Google and the American Psychological Association's PsycARTICLES database don't turn up any immediate results, but if anyone can point something out, I'd appreciate it. Otherwise, this might make for an excellent little poster or paper. It'd be easy to generate the shell of a study: generate a list of hypothesized keywords, acquire a sample of resumes, count the number of times the keywords appear, and then link them to outcomes like time spent in a job search, starting salary, or even just an objective rating of the resume's attractiveness.
Existing comments:
Posted by Bryan at October 15, 2005 6:22 AM:
Would also be interesting to see how those resume words correlated with job performance (in previous jobs and/or after the person is hired). It would be particularly interesting if screeners thought they knew which words indicated a successful candidate when in fact other words did (or there is no relationship). This would fall in line with the finding that everyone thinks they can do interviews well :)
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