As you log into the LinkedIn world, you would witness a hoard of updates of people in your network. They would be on changing a job, getting promoted, or achieving a new degree, diploma, or certification. LinkedIn has changed the way professionals from different sectors connect. Moreover, it has become an essential tool for recruiters to find the most suitable employees from convenience of the office. With an online profile telling your career story, is an on-paper resume on the way to become extinct? Will hiring managers now just use this tool to filter candidates? Well, if you are having all such thoughts, the answer is ‘not exactly’.
Why replacing resume with a LinkedIn profile not a good choice?
This networking site was introduced with the intention of simplifying interacting, collaborating and connecting with different professionals. While it offers a good platform to be visible in the industry circle, a LinkedIn template comes with its own limitations. Despite the privacy settings applied by an individual regarding what should be displayed on a profile, the tug of war between whether to write an achievement or not is going to be always high as you do not want to get on the wrong side of managers you have previously worked for. Therefore, you would definitely think twice before including phrases like ‘Transformed the team’s performance by X%’ or ‘Implementing Y technique to avoid missing deadlines and improving tumbling profits’. Reason? This is a public platform, and including such statements on the profile might be seen as offensive, and you never know who is connected to whom in the network.
The companies are even using this tool to display their spectacular profits and yearly turnovers. But, again the question is, how explicitly they are mentioning it. No one would want to disclose the true figures on a public platform where the competition is evidently visible, and every brand is focusing on building a marketplace for their own product and services. Besides, if ever the recruiters decide to hire employees based on a LinkedIn profile, they would definitely have a saturation point at some point of the day. A recruiter just can’t go scrolling hundreds of profiles to understand every individual’s candidacy.
Why resumes are important for an interview?
If you closely scrutinize the LinkedIn template, it offers a special place to upload resume. Well, if this employee-oriented social networking service has a spot for resume in its template, what other reasons you need to get the significance of this marketing tool? To create an online professional profile, an individual would probably copy and paste bullets from the Microsoft Word document into the different sections of the available template. But, the limited constraints in this profile compel an individual to put a restrain on the number of characters. As a result, including every highlight becomes difficult.
In addition to this, it follows a simple layout for every job profile. For instance, even though the new interface looks like Facebook and is much simpler to navigate with add ons like Career Advice, LinkedIn Video and Active Status in messaging coming to the front, it scores low on giving a creative touch to the profile. You cannot paint summary in blue or orange, or include graphical enhancements which can be added easily on a paper resume. Also, the programmed template does not provide an option of including your own subtitles or twisting the existing ones to make a bigger impact.
As of now, even if there is no solid competitor to LinkedIn, it might happen that this site would be replaced by some other professional networking site as the technology advances rapidly. With entrants like Jobr and Workplace by Facebook entering the stiff competition, Facebook does have the brand power to overthrow LinkedIn sooner or later. Finally, if the hiring managers just rely on online profiles, it would force the recruiter to call every individual whose profile they have checked on site. This is again impossible as the recruiter might just discard profiles that do not contain mandatory keywords, and you may never receive the call.
At the end, companies still ask for a resume. It acts as a tool that could open a conversation between an employer and a job seeker. While the LinkedIn profile plays the role of a teaser of your professional persona, a resume puts light on your overall personality and also gives a chance to talk about things that would not be disclosed publicly.
