Good old Resumes are passé. This is a better way

It has been a year of fake news. We, as consumers, are increasingly discovering that many of the stuff that we love and read about, are turning out to be fake. Like the 400,000$ GoFundMe heart-warming story raising money for a homeless veteran who had given his last 20$ bill to a stranded motorist. Or the news about the 122-year old woman who held the record for the oldest person. Turns out, it was the daughter impersonating her mother instead.

Companies are not shielded by this ever-inflating deluge of fake facts. Every day, recruiters and hiring managers come across resumes that are increasingly turning out to be phony. This has led to companies devising ever tighter means to scrutinize applications.

Interviews increasingly are becoming multi-step and complex. PC: rawpixel

Consequently, employers are glossing over the good old Resume, which has been the cornerstone of hiring for many centuries now. They are turning to other methods of hiring, such as online coding exams, personality quizzes etc.

The skeptical Hiring Manager has now become a big hurdle one needs to cross to improve one’s chances of success. The earlier method of having a keyword-filled, jargon-packed resume does not wash anymore.

What can one do to Stand out?

One proven method to get past the skeptical employer is a good referral. Referrals have been increasingly shown by studies to be more than 60% effective for hiring success. Companies tend to trust those resumes that come via referrals, either by their own employees or through their known networks.

So let me codify the new ‘Trusted Resume’ which have a higher chance of success as below:

Trusted Resume = Resume + Validation (via References & Endorsements)

So what can we do to create a Trusted Resume that would help get past the gatekeepers at hiring departments?

I would suggest four steps:

1. Get References - often and frequently. Use a referencing platform like ReferSense (www.refersense.com) to ask and get references whenever you can get them and link with your resume
2. Build your Reputation Profile. The days of keywords within a resume being good enough to see you through hiring is long gone. It is now important that you build your own reputation profile and get noticed by employers
3. Validate sections of your resume. Get Endorsements from your colleagues etc on key milestones like awards, project completion etc. It gives employers more assurance that what they are seeing on a resume has been validated and endorsed by others.
4. Make it ‘visual’ . Blame it on the information overload or reading too many emails. But there is a certain fatigue involved with reading ‘texty’ resumes. They might be good for computers and those language-parsing AI engines that companies employ. But they are not easy on managers with 3-second attention spans. Adding visuals in terms of certificates, award-photos, achievements etc adds credibility to your resume.

Learning from my experience

After being involved with large amounts of Tech hiring over two decades, where me and my team used to spend atleast 10 hours every week on interviews, I felt there has to be a better way. We were spending too much time on sorting and selection and less on the individual themselves (there was too little time left after the exhausting selection process)

And after a couple of years of development, consultation and customer engagements, we setup ReferSense (www.refersense.com). At ReferSense, our mission has been to reinvent the Resume.

How are we changing the good old text-based Resume? We do it by:

• Bringing in AI/ML technologies around discovering candidate strengths and projecting them back to the resume-parser engines that companies and recruiters use
• Bring the Resume to life by incorporating more visual elements than just plain-text
• Putting ‘word-of-mouth’ and references at the heart of the resume. Just like a strong Review engine is one of the core strengths of Amazon, a strong review engine will help employers identify individual strengths and weaknesses
• Reputation model — People, particularly developers and freelancers, build their reputation across several sites such as Github, Behance, StackExchange, Dribbble etc. At ReferSense, we help in bringing together those reputation elements into a consolidated view into your ‘Trusted Resume’ that you build at ReferSense

Reputation Model @ ReferSense

Did you like the approach? Feel free to send your suggestions, advice, encouragement etc. my way. Also, hey, dont forget to clap!