By Carmen Lapham, Director of Recruiting and Operations, Q4B

If you are a parent with small children starting out on a road trip of any length you have heard this question numerous times, even if the trip is just across town. Depending on how old you are you may even remember asking the question yourself when you took trips with your parents, perhaps even last week. It’s as though kids have the idea that we live in a Jetson's age where everything happens at hyper speed, especially going from one place to another.

On a recent road trip one of my kids asked this question (not two minutes out of the driveway) and after responding nicely I began to think about the question from a business perspective. I asked myself, as a recruiter, are we there yet? Do we use the technology that is available, everything from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blogging, etc., to make ourselves better at what we do? Do we use this technology to provide a better service for our clients and our candidates? Are we better recruiters today than those who were recruiting 25 years ago?

As you might guess this was going to be a long road trip and the kids were still asking that question every 50 miles but I was too deep into my own thoughts to be discouraged.

I began to explore this question in thinking about resumes. Over the past couple of weeks there have been some interesting blogs and comments regarding resumes, and whether the whole idea of resumes was in fact Dead. One blog in particular by John Kreiss addressed this quite well. That no resumes are not Dead, that they are still necessary for sourcing, screening and interviewing candidates for both recruiters and hiring managers and that although the way resumes are delivered, viewed and used may be different (hard copy vs. online) they are still very much a part of the whole hiring process.

But resumes have always been a part of the hiring process. Twenty five years ago resumes were sent to recruiters or hiring managers through the mail (Snail) or were faxed. Today they are sent, viewed, stored online, in a database to be used immediately or hopefully later when a new assignment is posted.

So, are we there yet? Is there something more that recruiters can do better with the technology available that would change the resume’s purpose and value from what it has always been but in a new format, to become a source of easy to access information on potential job leads, company information, contacts within those companies, market information, potential recruits, industry trends and so much more?

There is a perception that most recruiters spend no more than 2 minutes quickly reviewing a resume. Whether that is true or not or if it only applies to in-house recruiters and not 3^rd party recruiters it doesn’t matter. We can argue over how much time is spent but suffice it to say, recruiters do not spend nearly enough time on resumes that they should. And, yet the technology is there for us to gather tons of great information that would in turn make it possible for recruiters to be more knowledgeable, more productive, more valuable and more successful than their counterparts of 25 years ago.

I have begun to put these thoughts into an action plan for my company, Q4B. We will begin tracking all of the information from company leads, contacts, market intelligence, recruits that we gather from each resume that we receive. I hope that we can demonstrate the value of every resume beyond its initial purpose (candidate info) and very quickly be able to say, We Are There!

Now, I need to make a quick stop before I press on with the road trip. The kids are now asleep so I know that they have gotten the answer to their question, Are We There Yet?

What about you, are you there yet?