Abandon The Resume

Show, Don’t Tell

You just landed a new position as CEO of a company.

Congratulations! You earned it!

In your new role, you must hire people who can help you reach your goals. And like most people in your position, you have little time to waste.

You must be efficient. You must be focused. You must be clear.

You have to hire a bunch of software engineers and a ton of designers. It just so happens that your background is that of a software engineer who transitioned to being a designer. You have enough exposure in both realms to have real conversations about what it takes to be a great software engineer or a great designer.

The resumes fly in!

Everyone wants to work for you!

The first one is from a designer. Here it is…

So, what do you think? Want to talk to this designer?

Impressed by the number of logos created?

Of course not. This resume shows you nothing about the designer’s skill set. It merely tells you what the designer did. There is nothing in this resume that is useful beyond knowing how many logos a designer can produce over a period of time.

We don’t hire this way.

When hiring a designer, we look at the candidate’s portfolio. Why? It is an edited collection of their best artwork intended to showcase an artist’s style or method of work. A portfolio is an artist’s way of showing you what they can do for you.

I don’t know one designer who sends resumes like the one I posted above. But, I have seen many software engineering resumes that look strikingly similar in intent.

Does this look familiar?

But why?

In 2015, why do we consent to the old ideas of what a resume should look like?

Do we still subscribe to old ideas because enterprise HR systems don’t know what to do with images or urls or videos? Probably a bit. But, why let that stop us?

Instead of a list of accomplishments, why isn’t the “resume” a list of links, urls, or videos?

If the designer’s portfolio is a curated list of images, the software engineer’s resume could be a curated list of links to code. Why can’t GitHub and BitBucket and Codepen and StackOverflow etc. be the new resume for software engineers?

Why can’t a software engineer’s resume look something like this:

I kept all of these examples as plaintext to emphasis the content. And even though this is generic and wordy and perhaps a little too vague, it’s possible to see how providing a little context and showing the work removes the obfuscation found in the commonly accepted format.

The difference between “wrote a library in Scala” versus “wrote a library in Scala that you can see here” is important. It is showing rather than telling.

When evaluating a candidate, we want to know what a candidate can do for us. When seeking a job, we want to show the employer what we can do. Why don’t we evaluate candidates based on the work they’ve already done? Won’t their previous work give us an idea of what their future work might be?

This may not be applicable to all industries — some aspects of healthcare and government and any company that doesn’t let you talk about what you do immediately come to mind — but I think there is an opportunity where it’s possible to share one’s work.

We should think about the resume as a means of expressing our curated self rather than a format that we’ve accepted as a standard.

So, forget the HR enterprise systems. Go out there and show your portfolio!

And shameless plug: I’m hiring so send me your links :)