The resume is a recurring conversation topic, and lately it has not been to say pleasant things: it’s dead, it’s obsolete, it’s pointless and useless!

In the end it’s been years (decades?) that the death of the resume has been predicted, and it’s still here alive and kicking.

So, it’s been a good surprise to read a more balanced perspective today on ERE. With a title like "The Devalued Currency of Hiring: The Resume", I was expecting another article on the same theme.

However Sue Danbom’s perspective (she’s the author) is more about criticizing how recruiters and managers use resumes than about how resumes are dead, obsolete, pointless, useless, ….

As she points out:

We do need a starting point. As imperfect as resumes are, they can let us know if the candidate has basic, required qualifications (assuming the candidate is truthful).

This is the point: a resume is one source of data, typically the initial one. But it would be a mistake to consider it as the sole source of information about a candidate. A resume is not a behavioural assessment, nor a background check, nor a competency test, nor an interview. This would be the same as building a house using only a hammer! Good luck!

What’s interesting is that there are still companies who think this is a valuable concept … and business. VisualCV for instance just raised $5 million. (initial description on TechCrunch here) Their idea is to replace the current resume with an online, more complete version of it. By the way, this is also what LinkedIn does.

And here is another doomsayer (at least from a resume perspective), Erick Schonfeld (the author of the TechCrunch post). He believes that

The single-spaced, typed resume is already an artifact of another age. I don’t think I’ve updated mine since 1993. But I am not sure that what will replace it is a sanitized profile page. Any smart manager will at least Google an applicant before calling him or her in for an interview. Increasingly, our professional and personal lives are becoming transparent for all to see online. Whether or not you decide to link to your blog or Flickr photos or Facebook page, the person you present on your VisualCV better not be too different from the person you really are on the easily searchable Web.

That is probably true for himself. He’s brilliant. He’s well-known in the community he’s working in. Headhunters are calling him. His posts are his resume because he is known-enough not to have to apply on jobs.

However for the rest of us, modest and unknown bloggers (or even worse non-bloggers), recruiters do not search directly on our names. They search for skills or job titles or companies or… all these things that appear on a resume.

So will, VisualCV work? I don’t know. The competition is fierce out there. But one thing is sure: the old resume is still alive and kicking.

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