Why We Should Jettison Resumes

The notion of getting rid of resumes arises every decade or so, enjoys a brief flirtation with the employment field and then returns to its state of slumber. This circadian cycle begins when the inefficiency, inaccuracy and cost of using resumes in recruiting begins to undercut corporate performance and ends when the forces of continuity and tradition have outlasted the impulse for change.

Although there are many facets to such a complex interaction, the resume survives mostly because no one has found a better way to describe occupational credentials to recruiters and hiring managers who make staffing decisions. While its limitations are acknowledged, the resume has remained the most effective medium to catalog, store, identify and evaluate a person’s qualifications. At least, until now.

Today, the Internet and its online databases offer a viable alternative to the paper-based record. This situation has initiated the cycle yet again, but with a difference. This time, we may actually witness a Darwinian event.

Let’s first review the facts. From the candidate’s perspective, writing a resume is an experience similar to that of a root canal. It requires knowledge of stylistic conventions and is usually only attempted when the stakes are high and pressure is intense. As a result, most people hate writing their resume, and almost as many do it poorly. The rest turn to professional resume writers to produce a document that will be a reasonably accurate statement of their work record and acceptable to employers.

From the recruiters and hiring managers’ perspective, the resume is an inscrutable, often wordy, frequently incomplete characterization of someone’s workplace capabilities. It offers nothing more than a hint of what the person can do or will be like. The resume must always be supplemented with a telephone interview, numerous face-to-face interviews and a battery of skill tests and reference checks.

However, many recruiters keenly support keeping the resume. They argue that its look and feel is a good window on the personality and the writing skills of a candidate. It’s a nonsensical argument given the growth of the resume-writing industry and the structural handcuffs of the chronological, functional and hybrid formats. In fact, there’s nothing personal about the modern resume, except the data it contains. There are far better ways to get a writing sample than this artificial, highly formulaic construct.

The real reason that the resume has survived for so long is that recruiters and hiring managers are used to it. They’ve seen it before, they know what to expect from it and they have devised ways to work around its considerable shortcomings. Using the resume in recruiting is a habit, and while such behavior may have been benign in the past, it is now undeniably a threat to organizational well-being. Tolerating the resume magnifies the injurious impact of talent shortages on bottom line performance because it introduces huge inefficiencies in an already demographically constrained labor market. The resume is only slightly better than playing blindfolded darts when it comes to candidate identification. And that reality increases the risk to an organization’s shareholders and thus the viability of the organization.

So, what’s the alternative? The Internet offers a far more precise and efficient way to communicate an individual’s occupational expertise and experience. First, it collects and stores such information in databases. These databases use the power and speed of computers to search huge volumes of data quickly and identify individual candidates with the right skills for a specific opening. In essence, they unchain recruiters from the grunt work of sorting through large numbers of prospective candidates to eliminate those who are obviously unqualified for a given job. They can enhance a recruiter’s productivity by ordering those candidates who are qualified so that the recruiter can focus on assessing the best prospects first. Second, the Internet makes these databases available any time of the day or night and from just about anywhere in the world. They enable recruiters and hiring managers to share information across time and space barriers and thereby speed up the assessment and selection process.

These online databases do have their limitations. When candidate information is embedded in a resume, as it is at many corporate employment sites and commercial recruitment web sites, even the most advanced computers slow to a crawl as they search through the dense text of those documents to ferret out qualified candidates. That text produces clutter which makes it more difficult for computers to identify the individual skills, knowledge, experience, goals and accomplishments embedded in the resumes. As a consequence, inaccuracies creep in and the computers either overlook candidates who are qualified for a position or select others who are not. In effect, recruiters lose both the speed and the computing power of online databases.

The Internet has the potential to revolutionize the recruiting process, but only when the data it stores and searches is presented in some form other than the standard resume. That form would eschew prose and rely on a set of fixed fields that dictate what data are to be provided and in what scope and format. The result would be a kind of virtual fingerprint, a detailed expression of the pointers that characterize a person’s unique occupational identity, that can be easily and accurately read by both computers and humans.