I can see why the demise of CV/Resume is discussed a lot but I don’t see it going anywhere because it is so easy to automate the reading as an initial screening.
Sadly most hiring practices are about minimising the chance of making a bad hire rather than maximising the chance of a great hire and the resume provides a lot of good initial signals to that end without a human needing to be involved.
I would love the CV to go away but I don’t see it, LinkedIn does a good job of providing an alternative but it’s really just a CV with social signals so not a whole lot different.
Remember the dark pattern of "To which of these Google contacts would you like us to send an invite?" Then they would show a list of what was apparently about 10 people, prechecked, and you would uncheck the ones you did not want to include. But hidden below the fold, this list was actually all of your Google contacts. Selecting send would blast your entire contact list. Including exes, their exes, people with whom one might be in a legal dispute, mistaken emails, people you had to fire, or got fired by. A goddamned disaster, that was.
To this day I open LinkedIn only in its own sandboxed browser.
And if you had been on the receiving end: It would prompt you dozens of times, every month if necessary, if you didn’t open a LinkedIn account with the same email address as your high school janitor used when she invited you.
To this day I still have the automated rule that classifies LinkedIn email as spam. Their spam score must be the highest of the world.
I once applied for a job at a well known company that's mentioned at the very bottom of my CV as a hobby. I spoke with 4 different people none of whom ever got to the bottom to see that I'm actually a big fan of their product. Which was expected but also kind of disappointing.
That aside, part of the problem with CV's is that it almost never reveals a person's level of competence or the ability to learn, both of which are critical when recruiting. You can be good at describing your formal responsibilities and bad at, say, coding, or vice versa.
A few things that you can add at the top of your CV that I think can make it a little more meaningful:
- List your skills with years of experience in each. This one is easy to do and is quite effective.
- Ask for honest references from your colleagues and managers and quote them in your CV. This is a bit unusual outside of social networks like LinkedIn and AngelList, but might work.
- Include a paragraph that describes your philosophy, the people or views you admire. This may potentially have a stronger positive or a stronger negative effect on the reader, but you probably want to be hired by someone whose views and philosophy are better aligned with your own ones.
- A short (even 30 sec!) video can best represent your personality and make your CV stand out among dozens and even hundreds of other candidates.
I think going through CV's with the above at the top would make the hiring process more fun and much more efficient too.
More standard: have a simple two or three line summary of your experience and what you're looking for at the top that often gets tweaked for specific job applications. If you're applying to a company whose product you use as a hobby, that can definitely be worked in there.
That said, don't be surprised if interviewers haven't read the CV at all, never mind down to the bottom and remembered everything in it...
Also don't forget employers do basic eligibility screening as well as "this candidate sounds great" screening. If you suspect that something about your name or work/education history might make screeners suspect you need a visa, make sure you put "right to work" or "citizen" on there somewhere
Something that we're trialling is first asking several questions similar to what we would ask in an interview[1], and only if the answers make sense then asking for a candidates CV. This means that by the time we see the CV we're already interested in the candidate, and have a high probability of moving forward with an actual interview.
[1] For example:
You need to implement a new feature you’ve never done before. How do you go about it?
When authoring a new endpoint (for example, a REST endpoint or a GraphQL object), what do you pay attention to? Feel free to go into as much or as little details as you wish.
If a candidate can’t give a good-quality written answer to a job-related question when given several hours or days, would you really want to rely on them to provide usable bug/feature descriptions or documentation later, when they have other time pressures?
And lose out on (potentially) excellent coders who can’t (or won’t) put their thoughts about a requested technical topic in writing, in favor of decent (or better) coders who can explain and defend their decisions.
Wonderful! Saves us all time, money and frustration!
Agreed, if a hiring page asks me to upload my resume and then asks me to manually enter all the info along with answering extra questions I will close the application. It's not worth my time, especially if they can't be bothered to pull the info from my resume and auto populate the resume section.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 31.1 ms ] threadSadly most hiring practices are about minimising the chance of making a bad hire rather than maximising the chance of a great hire and the resume provides a lot of good initial signals to that end without a human needing to be involved.
I would love the CV to go away but I don’t see it, LinkedIn does a good job of providing an alternative but it’s really just a CV with social signals so not a whole lot different.
No!
Vendor lock-in
Horrible privacy track record
"Dark-patterns"/manipulation before it was even popular
Absolutely not.
Remember the dark pattern of "To which of these Google contacts would you like us to send an invite?" Then they would show a list of what was apparently about 10 people, prechecked, and you would uncheck the ones you did not want to include. But hidden below the fold, this list was actually all of your Google contacts. Selecting send would blast your entire contact list. Including exes, their exes, people with whom one might be in a legal dispute, mistaken emails, people you had to fire, or got fired by. A goddamned disaster, that was.
To this day I open LinkedIn only in its own sandboxed browser.
To this day I still have the automated rule that classifies LinkedIn email as spam. Their spam score must be the highest of the world.
That aside, part of the problem with CV's is that it almost never reveals a person's level of competence or the ability to learn, both of which are critical when recruiting. You can be good at describing your formal responsibilities and bad at, say, coding, or vice versa.
A few things that you can add at the top of your CV that I think can make it a little more meaningful:
- List your skills with years of experience in each. This one is easy to do and is quite effective.
- Ask for honest references from your colleagues and managers and quote them in your CV. This is a bit unusual outside of social networks like LinkedIn and AngelList, but might work.
- Include a paragraph that describes your philosophy, the people or views you admire. This may potentially have a stronger positive or a stronger negative effect on the reader, but you probably want to be hired by someone whose views and philosophy are better aligned with your own ones.
- A short (even 30 sec!) video can best represent your personality and make your CV stand out among dozens and even hundreds of other candidates.
I think going through CV's with the above at the top would make the hiring process more fun and much more efficient too.
That said, don't be surprised if interviewers haven't read the CV at all, never mind down to the bottom and remembered everything in it...
Also don't forget employers do basic eligibility screening as well as "this candidate sounds great" screening. If you suspect that something about your name or work/education history might make screeners suspect you need a visa, make sure you put "right to work" or "citizen" on there somewhere
[1] For example:
I wont interview/apply at some notorious companies because I know I can get an equal offer without jumping through hoops.
So you lose out on the highest demand candidates and get the most desperate candidates.
Wonderful! Saves us all time, money and frustration!