The Death of the Resume
Kent Burns

The resume is going to die a slow, ugly and painful death - and it’s already begun. The massive paradigm shift that is taking place in the employment landscape, coupled with technology, is responsible. The ever-widening gap between open jobs and qualified candidates is being exacerbated by the impending retirement of the baby boomers. In the midst of a candidate shortage, why isn’t the resume alive and well? Why is the cornerstone of the employment search and fulfillment on life support in the midst of such robust opportunity? Let’s look at the factors that are ringing the death knell.

Resume Traffic

The resume isn’t dying because there are too few of them. HR Managers and recruiters are getting more resumes than ever before. So…if the number of open positions that must be filled is increasing…why isn’t this a good thing? Simply put, it’s too much. HR Managers and recruiters so overwhelmed with resume traffic that a significant percentage of resumes - perhaps as high as one-third to one-half - are never reviewed. Like fast-food, the resume deluge is fat and bloated, of generally poor quality, and of declining interest to those interested in a healthier, leaner way of operating.

Candidate awareness of employment opportunities and the related candidate self-service job application model have driven incredible increases in resume submissions. Before the job board era, passive candidates were unable to easily evaluate opportunities. The universe of job openings was largely unavailable to them directly. Now candidates search openings via job boards and company websites 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. With resume submission only a mouse click away, they often apply to multiple positions with reckless abandon. It’s not uncommon for me to contact a candidate who confesses (somewhat sheepishly) applying to so many job postings they haven’t a clue which one I am calling about. The candidates can’t even keep up on the action, and they only have to worry about one resume – their own.

Employers are running ads in newspapers, posting to multiple job boards, monitoring automatic resume search agents, managing an employee referral program, and sometimes engaging in direct solicitation of potential candidates. They may or may not have an HRIS that helps manage data. Add to that a lack of specialized knowledge in various functional areas and conflicting priorities that take away from a focus on sourcing and staffing, and you have a recipe for inferior results.

Errors, Exaggerations and “Spin”

The resume is, after all, a calculated presentation from the candidate, expressing what he or she wants you to know about them. It may have little to do with what you actually want and need to know about them, however. There has always been inherent risk in relying too heavily on the resume as an indicator of talent or capability. Errors, “spin,” exaggerations, and lies are all part of the resume landscape. We’ve seen the news stories of high profile individuals who have been toppled from their places of influence and power because of an inaccurate or misleading resume. Some candidates work diligently to mask weaknesses or overstate strengths using clever language, formatting and omissions or embellishments. These tactics transfer the burden of validation to the company’s interview process. The pressure to avoid a costly bad hire is on, and only companies with the most sophisticated hiring practices will have the arsenal to catch many of these poseurs. The majority of them go undetected until they are on the payroll and problems begin to surface.

Resumes also cannot address chemistry and fit, which a recent Korn Ferry survey says accounts for 42% of the successful selection process. Perhaps you’ve heard the saying “people get hired for what they can do; they get fired for who they are”. Again, the resume comes up short, as the burden is transferred to the company’s interview process. To assess chemistry and culture fit, world-class companies take a different approach. Statistically validated web-based assessment solutions are leveraged to demystify personality and character traits, leadership competencies, as well as the formerly elusive “job fit.” Interviews are behaviorally-based and standardized – and quality monitored for effectiveness. Background and reference checks serve as an important “check and balance” against dissimulation. Smart firms vow never to return to the sloppy “warm body” hiring methods of the disastrous late 1990s.

Searchability

For those resumes that somehow float to the top of the heap, are reviewed and look promising, the next challenge is information management. Resumes are as unique as the job candidates who create them. Lack of standardization creates an inherent challenge with classification, storage, retrieval and comparability. Companies have found that having a million disparate resumes and a text search function is only marginally better than a million paper resumes. The lack of meaningful filters creates inconsistency, even chaos, and drains important HR resources.

HR Managers and recruiters who subscribe to the various job boards spend countless hours searching resumes. Although there have been improvements, the search capabilities of the job boards is inefficient at best, and woefully inadequate at worst. I wish I had a nickel for every time I ran a search on a leading board and got between 500 and 1,000 resumes that “met” my criteria. And that’s only for one of my open searches…it is not uncommon for HR Managers of large companies to lament that their open search volume exceeds 100 positions.

How do we get around that? We do need some type of statement of qualifications to orient us to the person-job match, don’t we? The resume will be replaced with a Job Application Form (JAF) that provides a standardized format for capturing, comparing, searching, and archiving candidate information. The JAF allows the hiring manager to define the information to be produced by the candidate and to receive it for systematic review, in the order, format, and level of specificity (or generality) that makes optimal sense for the company.

Additionally, the JAF model will involve objective talent quality filters, using validated assessments and state-of-the-art data management solutions that ease the burden of the swamped recruiter, HR representative and hiring manager. The job applicant will supply only the information deemed critical by the employer via the JAF and will then complete the necessary assessment battery. From that data, a report will be created and assigned a score. The candidate score will be compared with the “cut score” established by the employer to determine if the candidate will be recommended for interview. The particular assessment battery used and corresponding cut score will be established by employers based on a detailed job analysis for that specific position.

Motivated candidates will take the time to complete the JAF and assessment process. In fact, their willingness to eschew the scattershot resume flood “process” will likely save them time as well as the firm’s time. Candidates unable or unwilling to complete the JAF have effectively screened themselves out of the selection process, an excellent “first-cut” that separates the non-serious “noise” factor from the cohort of truly viable applicants. And more efficient evaluation of the application JAF by the company means freeing up of resources that can be deployed in other important areas of HR and hiring. Everyone wins.

The Future

The resume just doesn’t work in the new paradigm environment. Resumes are inefficient relative to the structured JAF alternatives now becoming prevalent in applicant tracking and talent management systems, and thus will prove to yield diminished value. Stellar organizations renowned for their talent management, like Eli Lilly, P&G, Capital One, U.S. TSA, Target, and many others have abandoned the resume long ago, and have embraced the JAF-assessment selection model.

What does it mean for recruitment? Same thing. Recruiters and their clients lose when a mismatch is made on the basis of the poor resume – job position fit, impressionistic at best, misleading at worst. The JAF allows the recruiter to more finely tune the match-up between his candidate pool and available positions.

We’ve come a long way from when an HR Manager’s big problem was a pile of letters filled with resumes for an employment ad they ran in Sunday’s newspaper. It may take a while, but we are headed for a time when we look at resumes the way we now look at music recorded on vinyl.