Is the resume dead? Maybe. But here’s what really affects recruiting.

Posted by: Joel Capperella

Over the last few weeks, I have noticed a surge in the number of blog posts and articles being published about the death of the resume. Several of them, such as “The Cloud Will Kill the Resume,” published on TechCrunch, point to visual resume services such as re.vu, vizualize.me, and about.me as the cause of the traditional resume’s ultimate demise. The trending argument seems to be that in today’s fast-paced and increasingly visual world, recruiters prefer an easily consumable presentation of the employee’s work history and credentials versus the traditional text-laden, bulleted resumes.

It will be an interesting trend to watch for sure, but it is really just one facet of a topic we have been discussing at length here on The Seamless Workforce — how social media platforms affect the recruiting process at large.

After all, reviewing candidate resumes is only one aspect of recruiting. While visualize.me and re.vu might change the way resumes are consumed, they don’t bring anything new to the table in terms of analyzing and evaluating how a candidate’s work history matches up with the skill sets and experiences required by the open position.

What I am more interested in is how the recruiting process in its entirety will adapt to social media and the always-on, instant-gratification culture perpetuated by the ubiquity of mobile devices.

Here are a couple of the changes we see taking place and recommendations for how your organization should respond.

1. Accessibility. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networks open up entirely new methods for candidates to initiate conversations with your organization. This includes employees, public-facing and not, at various levels of the organization. As it relates to recruiting, this means candidates have unprecedented access to hiring managers who before might not have been intimately involved in the early stages of candidate screening. The decision here shouldn’t be whether to completely block access to hiring managers, but rather what the guidelines will be for inevitable breaches in standard sourcing workflow.
2. Timing. Technology also makes the timing of communication between candidates and recruiters or hiring managers less systematic. Social media users are used to real-time or near-instantaneous responses, and even expectations for the quickness of email responses have increased with the understanding that most (if not all) professionals have constant access to their work email on their mobile devices. Organizations should recognize these expectations and ensure that their recruiting processes allow recruiters to accelerate conversations with qualified candidates.

Changes in accessibility and timing brought about by new technologies will likely require organizations to adjust their recruiting process and eliminate any rigid workflow guidelines that would prevent participants from responding intelligently and quickly to candidates in these new media. Admittedly, doing so comes with a new set of challenges.

Organizations still need to ensure consistency across the recruiting process and should establish performance benchmarks to ensure its effectiveness. Additionally, getting the buy-in of hiring managers that are used to a predefined, rigid process might be difficult. Education should be built into the updated process to inform individuals of the benefits of the less structured, more intimate recruiting model, and teach them how it can be exploited for maximum potential.

The novelty of digital business cards such as about.me or infographic services like re.vu and visualize.me easily puts them at the center of attention. But they are only the most recent in what will likely be a long string of technology innovations that will affect how organizations interact with and hire new candidates.

Ultimately, which tool is used in the recruiting process is inconsequential. What is important is that the process evolves with these services so that recruiters can move beyond simply sourcing candidates to truly engaging them for the benefit of the organization and the talent community.