Can You Rely on a Resume?
Is the Classic Resume Losing Its Footing in the Modern Job Market?
In the business world, your team is your greatest asset, and hiring the right people is paramount to success. You need more than just a warm body to fill a role too. You need the right person – someone whose skills, experience, and even personality align with your company’s needs and culture.
But how do you find that perfect fit? The key is to have the most choices among qualified candidates that enable you to make that important decision. However, by what measure do you get a true picture of a candidate’s work experience, skill set, soft skills, and other important details that drive a hiring decision?
For years, the resume has been the cornerstone of candidate evaluation. This tidy summary of a person’s professional life is a seemingly comprehensive snapshot of their qualifications. But is it really telling you the whole story? According to recent surveys and studies, we dare to say no. Going even further, we dare to say that resumes are becoming less relevant over time in the hiring process.
Why can’t employers rely on a resume anymore?
The former gold standard document to show off one’s work history and credentials is quickly becoming a thing of the past; it has swiftly become cannon fodder for AI-driven scanners that reject three-quarters of resumes off the bat based off keyword scanning. In addition to this, there is a high chance that a majority of these documents contain white lies or even tall tales, since an 70% of applicants have confessed to stretching the truth on their resume.
While a little over half (52%) of these lies are mere stretches of the truth like embellishing responsibilities or a job role, a sobering 24% made up a job role altogether, while 31% invented working for a company.
So, after ignoring 75% of incoming resumes immediately, how valuable are the remaining 25% of traditional resumes? The key is to take these carefully crafted bullet points and impressive-sounding titles cum grano salis – with a grain of salt – and actually get to know the person behind the paper.
Long story short, if you’re still relying on just resumes for generating a list of people to interview for role, you’re missing crucial information that could make or break your next hire.
Let’s dive deeper into the limitations of relying solely on resumes and explore the critical questions you should be asking to ensure you’re making the best hiring decisions for your business.
5 Reasons Why You Can’t Rely on Resumes Alone
It’s undeniable that you can get a decent first glance at a job seeker through a resume and cover letter, and perhaps a quick glance at their LinkedIn profile. But there are many other factors that you need to know as a potential employer that an over-reliance on resumes can cause you to miss.
AI Keyword Bias
If you use an ATS to sort resumes, there is likely to be an implicit bias in the programming which can cause you to miss out on some truly relevant candidates.
While the volume of resumes coming your way may be overwhelming, it’s not a bad idea to have a human eye on the entire process so you don’t inherently miss a hidden gem. Also, ATS resume screening can also not scan more “fancy” formatted resumes correctly, missing keywords that are relevant to hiring managers.
Keyword Stuffing Heroes
Did you know that a single job post can get as many as 250 applicants? However, with the rise of keyword stuffing in resumes in order to check all an ATS’s boxes, the majority of these can be considered cannon fodder. In other words, these job applications may be crafted to pass AI screening criteria, but the applicant may not truly be able to fulfill the job description.
There is More Than Enough Fluff
According to CultivatedCulture, 51% of resumes contain “irrelevant buzzwords, clichés, and fluff,” to try to give the applicant a job search advantage. With more applicants aware on how to use ai enhancements to their resumes while automatically inserting keywords, the rate of fluff is only projected to grow.
Even People Aren’t Reading Them Fully
According to recent HR studies, a typical resume or CV gets an average 7.4 seconds of consideration. If both humans and AI are sifting through them so quickly, have they become a mere formality?
Are there more reliable alternatives to resumes?
While resumes aren’t completely out the door and are still a box to check in the application process, companies have been exploring more tangible ways to assess an applicant’s qualifications.
For instance, companies can conduct skill or pre-employment assessments. This shift evaluates an applicant’s actual skills and potential rather than solely focusing on past experience, which can create a more diverse workforce and improved employee retention.
These assessments delve into a range of skills, from problem-solving and critical thinking to emotional intelligence, providing recruiters with richer, more relevant data than a simple list of previous roles ever could.
Portfolio websites can give employers a vibrant picture of one’s true work. This option is great for creative professionals, writers, and anyone whose work is project-based. Showing one’s work on these platforms allow candidates to show their capabilities through tangible examples of their work, rather than just telling potential employers about them.
Job simulations offer a real-world preview of their future role, allowing candidates to tackle tasks they will undergo if actually hired. This provides direct insight into a candidate’s potential performance in a real-world setting, offering a powerful alternative to relying solely on past job titles or educational background.
Can You Rely on a Resume?
After gathering data on this question, we’d lean toward saying that a resume can only give you a partial view into a candidate’s history and profile. To get a more complete picture of a job applicant, you need to dive deeper.
Companies have innovated to implement assessments, job simulations, or to accept other forms of information like portfolio websites. While these are all excellent ideas, getting a leg up with Candidate Sourcing can make your search significantly easier. With this service, we identify qualified candidates then call them on your behalf to discover information no AI can uncover.
Since 52% of recruiters think that screening applicants is the most challenging and time-consuming part of the job, why not leave this step to Corporate Navigators? We can assist existing HR teams or take care of the entire sourcing and development process on your behalf. Give us a call today to discover how we go beyond the resume to identify candidates who met all your important criteria.
