This is part 1 of a series in which I will examine the evolution of the resume, from paper to PC, digital postcard, sound bytes, social networks, and video representations. I’ll pull industry leaders who head up companies that have chosen one of these mediums to transform the resume and ask what the future holds for the resume and if the plain hard copy will still remain an important part of recruiting going forward.
Colleen Aylward, CEO of InterviewStudio, heads up a company that creates a resume with a professionally edited video. She’s also the author of Why CareerBuilder Failed with Video Resumes on Cheezhead.
I asked Aylward why she thinks the resume has come so far, from print to pc to audio to visual, and why she thinks it’s important that the resume continues to evolve. Here’s her response:
Technology has enabled that in the digital “revolution,” any form or process that could be automated using Word, Excel, flow-charting or a database was jumped on and converted. The aim has always been to enable more work to be done faster, more information to be accessible to many, and most recently, for fewer people to own more data.
So I think the eternal quest for truth is part of the impetus for this change from the paper resume to the “full profile of due diligence.” It is not that the resume has grown and changed so much, it is that the resume is now being incorporated into a bigger profile, whether it’s InterviewStudio as a product, or a longer hiring process where due diligence in LinkedIn and Facebook and Zoominfo and Google has simply been added to the iterative process, that includes the traditional resume, their social network, their links and blogs and endorsements and recommendations and results of any tests they want to show.
It’s important that this “profile” keep evolving and I think the resume will not die. In many ways, the LinkedIn profile was fashioned after the traditional resume in the chronological listing of titles and accomplishments, so it is really promoting that continued use of the way we look at a person: “Where did you get your degree? What was your first job and how did you progress? How did your job titles move upward?” and so on, So we, as humans, and HR professionals, still will want to see these progressions, and until job titles are rendered meaningless, we still want to see those and the stairstepping of those over the years, since we make assumptions according to these.
So, yes, the evolution from stand-alone resume to full profile needs to continue in order for the best matches to be made in the employment marketplace, but here are the caveats:
*Data Sources of due diligence need to be verifiable and reliable
*Data points need to be used in some consistent fashion across candidates
*Data needs to be easily and quickly accessible to recruiters
*Recruiters need to be trained or re-trained in the use and translation of all these due diligence points
My question for our readers would be this: has the transformation of resumes into video been handled responsibly by vendors, and despite legal issues that continue to keep some companies hesitant from utilizing such technology, is the video resume here to stay?
December 15th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
This is definitely one of my favorite topics of coversations. Nicely written, but I don’t see a “part 2″ yet. Have you ended the series? I would love to see the end of the written resume, personally.
It would be great if job titles could be rendered meaningless and hopefully we can achieve that some day. As for video resumes, I do not envision them, with or without the legal issues, being relevant long-term. If cover letters have already become obsolete because they are just “too much paper”, how can video help land a “mainstream” job?