Is this the end of the resume?
Resumes have long been the bread and butter of recruiters, from Da Vinci’s first resume in 1482 to early 20th-century resumes that included applicants’ weights, heights, and religions. They provide a way for candidates to present themselves, their experiences, and their skills at a glance. Resumes are an essential part of the job search – for now.
As the world changes, should the way we hire change too? In the age of AI, is the resume still relevant? And if it’s time to retire the resume, what might hiring look like instead?
Screening out vs. screening in
“I’ve been trying to light them on fire,” Lauren B. Jones says of resumes. Jones is the president of Leap Advisory Partners, after decades of experience in the staffing industry. When she began working in professional services as a recruiter, she “didn’t submit resumes; I sent [clients] the most qualified person that they asked for.” In her view, resumes have become a barrier between the client and the candidate. Instead of reflecting the candidate holistically, they’ve become a static snapshot of a candidate at one point in their career.
And yet, Jones says, resumes are still heavily relied upon. If a candidate doesn’t fit a job based on their resume, they’re screened out of the hiring process entirely rather than screened into a talent pool. A candidate doesn’t stop and start with a resume, she says; they may have transferable skills that could be a better fit for other requisitions. “When I was leading a team of recruiters, I always told them, do not recruit to a [requisition],” she added. “Recruit to your area of expertise.” No two light industrial engineers or Java developers are the same; recruiters who specialize in a niche and build a talent pool suited to that niche stand better poised to deliver top talent.
“One of the benefits of working with staffing agencies is that you’re buying a relationship,” says Jack Copeland, CEO and Co-founder of Staffing Future. After years of working for and consulting for recruiting software companies, Copeland co-founded Staffing Future to drive, engage, and convert leads for staffing companies. When working with a staffing agency, Copeland says, “You’re going, ‘Okay, I trust this organization that’s provided me with contractors, and they’re going to redeploy talent that they’ve worked with before and that they will vouch for.’” By over-relying on resumes to both understand their talent and present candidates to clients, staffing firms could be undercutting the very aspect that helps them stand out from job boards: a deep knowledge of their talent pool.
So how do firms get to know a candidate beyond the resume? It all starts with a conversation, says Jones. “Ask your candidates, what are their short and long-term goals? Why are they in the job market today?” she says. “Answering those questions can help you have a really meaningful conversation.”
Resumes in the age of AI
AI has changed the way people hire – and as a result, it’s changed the resume. “In general, the concept of what we see as a resume right now won’t be relevant in five years,” says Copeland.
Candidates now have access to tools that can tailor resumes specifically to individual job applications. And just as candidates are using AI to write resumes, both hiring managers and recruiters are using AI to read them. Jones spoke about “resume skinning,” a practice in which candidates add keywords to their resume in white font, so those words are indecipherable to the human eye but read by an AI agent.
“What you have is this expansion of basic data, and then this de-expansion, taking resumes right back down to their core,” said Copeland. As resumes become a document that’s only written and read by AI, he said, “people will start to move straight to AI qualification.”
Using AI to screen and qualify candidates at scale – without relying solely on resumes – might look different for every firm. It could involve leveraging psychometric testing to gain a deeper understanding of attitude and aptitude, or building talent pools for specific skill sets. “Who knows?” said Copeland. “But there’s definitely a route that [firms] have to go down in order to be able to differentiate from the job boards.”
The rise of skills-based hiring
As the industry moves away from reliance on resumes, it’s moving towards a new hiring trend: skills-based hiring. Like other buzzwords, the definition of skills-based hiring varies. Typically, it refers to hiring a candidate to achieve a particular outcome. In practice, this could involve agencies shifting towards statement-of-work-type projects; the move towards total talent solutions is currently a point of growth in an otherwise uncertain recruitment environment. “I used to tell my clients, particularly in the manufacturing space, ‘Don’t be so focused on who’s on your line; be focused on what that line gets done,” said Jones.
Skills-based hiring can often be easier in manufacturing and healthcare, where candidates need certifications to validate that they have certain skills. But skills-based hiring is also a common trend right now in the C-suite. “The desired outcome of the organization that’s hiring a fractional CMO is probably going to be a few big deliverables that you’re trying to accomplish to scale the organization,” said Jones.
“More firms are moving to project-based hiring,” Jones added. “Why? Because I can charge a specific amount for the desired outcome. Then I’m in charge of keeping it in budget and making sure that I’ve got the right skillset there for those desired outcomes.”
The future of the resume
As AI makes it easier for recruiters to connect with candidates at scale, skills-based hiring rises in popularity, and job boards gather more candidate data, the resume may be at risk. After all, gone are the days when one hiring manager or recruiter needed to screen candidates by reading documents and conducting in-person interviews. The modern recruiter has more tools at their disposal than a piece of paper to find the perfect candidate. The resume has had a good run, but like other 500-year-old inventions, it may finally be obsolete.
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