If you search for this question on the Internet, chances are you’ll land on a carefully-crafted, SEO-driven and keyword-stuffed page extolling the virtues of eccentric résumé designs, video CVs or other similar, unhelpful, oddities.
The truth is there aren’t many ways to first communicate your value to a potential employer that doesn’t involve the old fashioned written résumé (the medium dates back to 1482 and Leonardo da Vinci) as a means communicating your talents and experiences (other than face-to-face networking). But what if we changed the focus of a résumé from words to numbers?
Numbers are important. They drive our economies, our space flights, political action and reaction, and just about everything else you can imagine. But when it comes to applying for a role, our jobseekers are still subjected to an arbitrary initial appraisal of worth from a single individual reviewing a couple of sheets of paper. That’s not right.
How could you use a CV of numbers instead of words?
More often as not, employers have an exact applicant profile in mind when they put out a job advertisement. They require a certain amount of education, time in employment, specific skills and — when they get to the interview stage–fit with the company culture.
The jobseeker has all of this information already within them. The sticking point of the entire hiring process lies not in the lack of information but rather, in the lack of standardisation. If the salient points of verbose paragraphs about what one studied and where one worked can be translated into numerical equivalents, dozens, even hundreds, of applicants could be reviewed and ranked against each other simultaneously.
That’s the solution we’re working on at BASEPL8. Using our bespoke baseplate templates, companies can fill out the requirements they need for their next hire, and applicants can quickly and seamlessly input all the necessary data without ever typing more than a few characters at a time–they certainly don’t have to faff around with cover letters.
Doing so allows hiring managers to shortlist applicants quicker and more efficiently, while the right job applicants have a greater chance of being seen and properly considered for the role. It’s still early days, but we’re really excited to see where such an approach could lead.
If you’d like to be a part of this movement, please email james@basepl8.com.
Let’s ditch the résumé.
