To Hire the Best, Companies Need to Move Beyond the Resume

To Hire the Best, Companies Need to Move Beyond the Resume To Hire the Best, Companies Need to Move Beyond the Resume A lot of us know this already, and yet,people are still using resumes largely because nobodys too clear on what should replace them.Social media?Videos?Contests? All of these have been mentioned as substitutes, but theyre all kind of half-baked and only tell a partial story.Instead, I suggest that companies rely more on third-party feedback in essence, the candidates online reputation andfocus on hiring doers, notlage tellers.The Problems With ResumesIf your company still relies on resumes to screen people, youre almost certainly overlooking some of the best candidates whose resumes, for whatever reason, arent quite right. Maybe they didnt put the right keyword in. Maybe they didnt go to the right college or take the right major, but theyve still got the skills you need.If you rely on resumes, youre also making yourself vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous people who lie on their resumes or simply stretch the truth a bit.Resumes say what a candidatecan do, but saying isnt the saatkorn as showing. Furthermore, saying something self-promotional is definitely not the same as having a validated third party someone who knows the candidateswork vouch for the candidates skills. For these reasons, resumes are increasingly unimportant, and the sooner you move beyond them, the better.Instead, you should focus on what really matters What people can actually do and their reputations based on feedback from others who have worked with them, particularly when they are available online and are based on real, paid work.Evaluating Candidate ReputationsHeres a simple example of how online reputations are changing hiring approaches today. If youre looking for a plumber, you probably arent going to request theirC.V. Youre going to look on a site like Angies List, where you can read reviews from actual customers.Similarly, if youre looking to hire a dev eloper, their resume is less important than their work history. You can see a lot of a developers work historyon code repositories like GitHuband Stack Overflow. But sometimes developers do a lot of work for personal projects or open-source projects, filling up their GitHub profiles with large volumes of work that isnt actually vetted (and may not even be used by anyone).Instead, you want to see what kind of work theyve done for paying clients or employers and how well that work was received.Theres another aufgabe with the public repositories like GitHub and StackOverflowThey are incredibly unfair to people who cant afford the luxury of spending a lot of time on unpaid side projects. If you have to work for a living, you may not be able to spend hourscontributing to the Linux kernel or an open-source emoji-sharing platform. Your paid work needs to speak for itself.Just as startups shouldnt spend too much time perfecting business plans or making their websites pretty before theyve ma de minimum viable products and found some people actually willing to pay for them, individuals shouldnt spend too much time gussying up their work histories. Instead, they should identify thetalents and skills they have that employers or clients want and then prove that they have those skills in the marketplace by getting someone to pay for it.For recent college graduates, validated references and portfolios of work can help offset the age-old problem of the resume with nothing on it. In fact, universities could even help their students build portfolios of paid work by offering credit tostudents whoundertake educational but practical projects, get paid for them, and get positive feedback from real clients.Instead of an internship of dubious quality, what if an aspiring software engineer spent 100 hours doing paid coding work and got real, meaningful feedback on it?Recommendations matter, particularly if they come from people you know. Some social networks are able to do this Yelp, f or instance, highlights restaurant reviews from people youre connected to, which are way more valuable than reviews from random strangers who, for all you know, never even visited the restaurants theyre reviewing.Similarly, LinkedIns professional skill endorsements carry little weight. Its not very meaningful when someone sees an automated suggestion and clicks a button to endorse a person for a random skill. The fact that a candidate has 57 endorsements on LinkedIn for a particular skill from people you dont know is pretty close to worthless. But a written recommendation on LinkedIn from someone you know and trust is incredibly valuable, because it comes from a legitimate human being who took the trouble to write a few words in favor of a candidate.Interviews Need to Go, TooOnce youve gone past the screening phase, theres another part of the hiring process Id like to phase out The interview. Like resumes, interviews favor candidates who are good at telling their own stories. If you ask candidates to describe a challenge they faced and how they solved the problem, youll probably wind up hiring those who tell the best tales. In my experience, that doesnt always correlate with doing good work.Instead, give the most promising people an actual assignment and see how they do when theyre performing real work for an hour, a day, a week, or a month. You can pay them for the test project, especially if it requires any significant amount of time. Theres no better way to find out if someone is a good fit for your organization than by putting them to work and asking them to contribute.In short, its time to stop hiring people based on what they say they can do. You should be hiring doers, not tellers. Moving beyond the resume is a critical first step in doing so.Master the art of closing deals and making placements. Take our Recruiter Certification Program today. Were SHRM certified. Learn at your own pace during this 12-week program. Access over 20 courses. Great for thos e who want to break into recruiting, or recruiters who want to further their career. Like this article? We also offer tons of free eBooks on career and recruiting topics - check out Get a Better Job the Right Way and Why It Matters Who Does Your Recruiting. document.write(Read more ) in Resume