How LinkedIn is Putting Resumes on the Endangered List

Oh the fickle world of HR and recruiting practices, processes and tools. With tools and technology, you’re in one day and out the next. No sooner had we embraced professional resume writers and eye scanning technology to better the art of the resume, than came along LinkedIn and their fancy application technology.

LinkedIn is quickly killing the resume. They have a new feature enables candidates to apply for jobs using their Linkedin profile rather than uploading a resume. All of the latest and greatest recruiting software platforms are using this efficient new tool. By making this feature available to users and job applicants, this feature is setting the bar for what we can expect from our applicant tracking systems.

Have you seen or used this “Apply with LinkedIn” button? It’s fantastic, and here’s why:

Candidate Experience

Being able to simply click a button makes for a quicker, easier candidate experience, and who doesn’t want that?! Instead of tailoring each resume to each job description, the entire package is right there. The skills that candidates might not think to promote in a resume for a specific position will still be visible to recruiters and hiring mangers. Simply clicking a button is a whole lot easier than traditional resume prep work. And oh the mobile possibilities!

No More “Good Resume Hires”

All too often we will go with the flashy resume and good interview. This is great if you’re hiring for a position that requires resume writing and interviewing skills. The fact that professionally written resumes are favored, among recruiters and hiring managers proves that resumes can make or break the hire.

Say that you get two candidates of an equal caliber, the one with the better resume will more than likely get the interview. This technology will make for a more consistent hiring process.

Connections and Endorsements

Although ease of use and all things HR technology rev our engines, we are most excited about the connections and endorsements aspect of this new tool. You can see whom candidates are connected with and who is endorsing them for what.

Say there is a person in the space, whom you regard as an industry leader, and they happened to have endorsed the candidate for one or several of the areas for which this job requires. This is a quick and easy way to vet candidates in a more rounded capacity.

Humanizing the Hiring Experience

Anyone would agree that viewing a LinkedIn profile is a much more personal and complete experience than reading a resume. When candidates share their LinkedIn profile in place of a resume, it personalizes the experience and gives recruiters and hiring mangers a better view of the candidate.

Although the way applicant tracking systems use this information isn’t exactly like viewing a LinkedIn profile, it can be better. The other end of this technology represents how the information is viewed and processed by the recruiter. Long story short, all of those little boxes and fields are filled out with more up to date and accurate information than any resume could lend.

Does your software offer this new and innovative LinkedIn tool?

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Comment by Matt Charney on October 17, 2013 at 1:35pm: Hi Sean: I appreciate your sharing your insights with the community, and applaud you on a well researched, rational argument for LI. But I fundamentally disagree that it will replace the resume for a couple of reasons. The first is compliance - LI profiles do not meet OFCCP/EOE/AA audit criteria unless that's the only way you allow all candidates to apply, and therefore, while it's an effective way to generate candidates, for most larger organizations who are federal contractors (most of the Fortune 500), it's still required that they apply online, through an ATS, and with a resume - even if the process with them was conducted completely out of their system. The second is those systems themselves - all use resumes as the basic framework for workflows for point solutions and process (e.g. background check providers will largely not vet against a profile because it's not legally mandated to be accurate, unlike a resume). The third is that by using Apply with LinkedIn, you're basically giving your application analytics to a third party, and the major trend seems to be trying to build proprietary talent networks for CRM & job broadcasts within an owned system, instead of releasing any rights to that data via API. I think once employers understand the data governance implications of this functionality, there's going to be a pretty major pushback against this feature. That said, the onus is really on ATS providers to make the application process easier on their own systems since that's an obviously broken feature that's not going away, because like it or not, the resume is here to stay.

Comment by Maren Hogan on October 29, 2013 at 1:22pm: rubs hands together>> Truthfully, you're right from one standpoint, that resumes are the backbone of Linkedin and systems like it. And while the rules and standards you lay out here may apply today, I believe they will become a minority. Applying NEEDS to be easier and more accessible via mobile. While eventually everyone may have to dust off a resume, it seems like, I don't know...corsages or something else that is rarely trotted out anymore! I think Sean and other software providers who DON'T necessarily cater to the F500 probably (rightly) care far less about them and MORE about the SMB recruiting team who is looking for talent that doesn't suck. Don't mind me, I get my horns in a twist when people tell me that's the way something HAS to be.

Comment by Keith D. Halperin on October 29, 2013 at 2:07pm: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. ...."

-The Resume

Comment by Sean Pomeroy on October 30, 2013 at 3:01pm: Matt: My point is LinkedIn profiles can and seem to be replacing the resume and I agree it will not replace ATS nor the application process (for the reasons you pointed out). We are finding Applicants are keeping their LinkedIn profile up to date more than their resume Word doc. I was proposing that the application process start with the Profile instead of the resume but the other steps are very import and need to be easy, making the process more Applicant friendly.

One of the challenges of any ATS is the extraction of information from a resume and mapping that to database items, with the LinkedIn profile it has already been separated and "cleaned up" by the Profile owner and will save time cleaning up the ATS extraction results.

I guess time will tell....

Cheers-Sean