Why The Resume Is Dead

And, why it shouldn’t be revived

 
His impressive resume, in which Da Vinci listed out his qualifications — reportedly handwritten in 1482 at the age of 30 — isn't far off from how we present our past experience and skills to potential employers today more than 500 years later.
 
In the last millennium, we’ve seen countless updates that have improved upon outdated technologies to make life and work more efficient. Some of the best ones have also widened access to perhaps a better life to more people than before. The Henry Ford-style assembly line made mass-produced cars and goods more readily available, for example, and air conditioning allowed Americans to expand into more areas of the U.S.
 
But what about the technology associated with the search for one of the most important parts of modern life — our careers — and finding the right work culture and colleagues to surround ourselves with for further innovation to propel the next generation forward? The word "curriculum vitae" (CV) is literally Ancient Greek for “the course of one’s life,” but what about the unknowns and in betweens that are often left off the page but critical to our success?
 
While online portals to easily submit resumes and background information have helped with the recruitment process in terms of information gathering, it’s not enough. We’ve found that many of our clients have a candidate pool 150 times the number of employees needed sitting around in repositories that aren’t being used effectively if at all when an opening becomes available. We also know that for an organization of 5,000 people, another 1,000 candidates are needed even if the company doesn’t grow at all.
 
Clearly much more sophisticated and customized technology that assesses the potential of a given job candidate and analyzes large amounts of data is required to tap into the complex job situations candidates and employers find themselves in today.
 
Enter artificial intelligence, or AI, which is helping to create new ways of thinking about the work we do — and importantly, not just what we’ve done in the past, but who and what we can become in the future. We’re using AI and search to crawl the internet to gather large amounts of data from the outdated resume, combining that with LinkedIn profiles, and even Wikipedia in order to learn about how and why individuals and organizations perform, and to cast a wide network that removes human bias inherent in the talent recruiting process. From there, a customized profile of a business is created to learn about how people are functioning and moving within the organization. The goal is to design a workforce that puts the right person in the right role at any given time.
 
We’re able to essentially predict “what’s next” for a job candidate, which is a really exciting innovation in HR because it has the potential to create much more meaningful work, better job performance, and could open the door for more diverse applicants to find a wider range of opportunities and promotion prospects.
 
It’s good for business, too. Studies have proven that by implementing and hiring a diverse workforce, businesses have experienced an increased organizational performance, an influx of innovative perspectives, and high diversification of the labor market.
 
In one UK study, researchers found that greater gender diversity on the executive team could positively affect performance. While these statistics have been out there, many HR professionals and executives often lack the capacity to do anything about them. Most enterprises want a vibrant, diverse workforce with a variety of perspectives and backgrounds, but many lack the technology to create widespread change.
 
This sophisticated machine learning process reads between the lines of the keywords on a resume, which means a person’s potential can be assessed at a high level. That’s critical, because some of the jobs of the future have yet to be created.
 
So how should we assess job candidates going forward? Employers can't simply rely on skills that already exist listed on a resume or CV, or on trying to find candidates who have experience in certain functions that presumably might crossover into new positions — especially when they’re making hiring decisions on a large scale. More analysis is needed, and it’s especially critical when it comes to diversity hiring and retention.
 
AI allows us to see a much more precise, personalized picture of what a person and an organization can do by providing deep analysis and insights during recruitment and long after.
 
Were there more artists like Da Vinci who we perhaps didn’t know about because of a rudimentary resume screening process? How many innovations or masterpieces did we miss out on because of it?
 
Thankfully, we can’t afford to — and don’t have to — leave these questions unanswered any longer. The future of HR is now.

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