Death of the resumè

My friend Hasan Diwan tagged me on a note in Facebook, asking for thoughts:

The relationship economy suggests the traditional resume should die a quiet death. A resumè (or a CV) is a single-page summary designed to open the door to a job just enough to entice the company to interview you. In this sense, the resume will always survive, in one form or another. Perhaps it will merge in with the cover letter? Any other readers have thoughts. Please share them.

I am not sure what the resumè will evolve to, only that it will…but I am willing to bet it would still be text-based.

Say what you will about keywords, but how else are recruiters supposed to retrieve relevant search results out of millions of resumès out there? Perhaps it would evolve to be multimedia, as we are now seeing with video resumès and the like, but the fact remains, the recruiter or hiring manager still need to find their way to the resumè.

I think Dan Robles is definitely going somewhere here:

It must be read, analyzed, sorted and vetted by social networks and communities of practice. It must integrate with knowledge assets from anywhere in the world. A self-perfecting algorithm must be developed for a predictive percentile search engine in a pull system that seeks, matches, and deploys the ’secret sauce’ of success, specific to any application, anywhere, any time - and fast.

But my two cents: “vetted by social networks and communities of practice,” I read “huge potential for this algorithm to be gamed, just as we game Google’s algorithms.” It seems it would be a bigger mess, eh? Besides…this is already being done.

“Vetted by social networks and communities of practice…” Staffing firms are in a sense micro social networks and communities of practice made up of candidates, recruiters, clients. Candidates and their resumès are vetted in the recruiting process by recruiters and then by hiring managers who provide additional feedback. Staffing firms who have close relationships with their candidates and their clients definitely have this “secret sauce of success.”