Folks who are successful in their current roles (read: busy) do not have the time to spend hours updating their resume.  And why would they?  Assuming they are worth hiring, their company history and tenure speak for themselves.  They aren’t in dire need of a new job, and they’re busy doing whatever they do well.  They may even be interviewing based off their personal networks and the attractiveness of their LinkedIn profiles.   

When I have a new client and they’re hot to hire and I have friends who are a strong fit for the role, I’ll shoot over their LinkedIn profile to my client in lieu of their resume.  I don’t understand why this isn’t happening all the time.  Really, do any of us want to download an additional file to our already slow-running computers?  A lot of people don’t even have Microsoft Word anymore.  (I know, it’s weird, but they don’t.) 

In agency recruiting, time kills deals, and the last thing I want is for a candidate to miss out on a small window of opportunity because they’re frustrated with formatting issues or spend two days debating whether they should put their job titles in bold or italics, or both! 

What we should all already have is a built out LinkedIn profile.  I’m still baffled when I look up a client or candidates and all they have is their current job with no accolades or metrics of success.  If we’re going to move away from the resume, we’ve got to build these things out to count for something.

Another major problem we run into as sales recruiters is that our candidates probably weren’t English majors, and even if they were they’ve long ago sacrificed grammar concerns with the more pressing issue of closing deals.  As a brand new recruiter, I would often pass on candidates who had structurally unsound resumes, I would wait weeks for them to fix their resumes, or – when desperate - I would waste countless hours reformatting them myself.

Why, in the day and age where every Tom, Dick, and Jane have detailed and updated LinkedIn profiles, should we waste any time or effort on a resume?  As a recruiter for tech start-ups in San Francisco, I’ve tried to do away with the resume.  I’ve put a link to their LinkedIn profile with contact info attached in place, and have received pushback from our hiring managers.  I believe this is the way of the future and would encourage all candidates and recruiters to move away from the resume and get everyone used to utilizing the LinkedIn profile.  As Emily Mattos, one of our top producers, said recently (with a wink): “We’ve got to be the change we want to see in the industry.”  Very true. 

If the future is going to move even faster than the present (God help us) then we’re going to have to adapt to the change in how people network and find jobs.  In November of 2001, TechCrunch released a survey stating that one in six job seekers found their latest job on a social network.  If recruiters – both agency and in-house – want to continue to provide a value, we’re going to have to adapt, not just in the sense of utilizing those networks to source new talent, but also by encouraging those tools throughout the candidates’ job search.  It could make everything faster and easier.  Would that be so bad?

 By Katie Hughes, Director of Client Services at Betts Recruiting