Are Resumes Dead?

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I talk about the future of the resume. Let's hop into. 

Even da Vinci had a resume

Let me take you back to 1482: A young Leonardo da Vinci wrote a letter to the duke of Milan seeking employment. And in this letter, he talked about his ability to build instruments of war. Leo said, “Where the operation of bombardment might fail, I would contrive catapults, mangonels”—no idea what that is—“trabocchi, and other machines of marvelous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means offence and defense.” What I just read is credited as the first resume ever written. Now fast-forward more than 500 years and we still have the resume. Sure, it's changed in some ways. It's no longer written as a letter in fancy Leonardo DaVinci-style prose. It's no longer called a data sheet or a personal profile, and now we have these fancy things called ATSs that ingest resumes and spit out a list of resumes that should go in the yes pile versus the no pile. But for the most part, resumes are the same. 

They're still a document, they're standardized, they list someone's experience and accomplishments, and they're often the first step in the application process. I cannot get over how wild this is. With technology, what it means to work has changed entirely in the last 20 years, let alone in the last 500 years. Yet the most important document in the hiring process has barely changed. It is time to dig into that and answer a very simple question: Are resumes dead? Or said differently, should resumes die? 

I took a poll about resumes… 

Now before sharing my thoughts, I want to share the predictions of others. I put a poll on Twitter and got some really interesting responses. Let me share them. 

Alex Lowell believes content is the new resume and the information you publish online, whether it's on Twitter or a blog or on YouTube, shows proof of qualification. Magdalena believes that proof of experience, qualifications, and accomplishments will all be kept on-chain as an application of crypto. Brian Flynn thinks a similar thing and he thinks in order to understand the question of the future of the resume, we need to first understand what the future of work looks like. Finally, my co-founder Austin believes that proof of experience via nontraditional means will become more and more important for startups and high-growth companies, but the resume will maintain its importance for large companies that need process and standardization. Now, these are all compelling arguments, all of which have some merit, but let me take a stab. And in order to do that, we need to answer two very important questions.

First, what is the goal of a hiring process? Why do you put in so much time with reading resumes, interviewing candidates, going through assignments, to pick a person? And that answer is simple. Your goal is to find the most effective, efficient path to learn if someone will do the job well, and if they will elevate the culture of your company, full stop. And that leads to the second question: What purpose does a resume serve in that bigger goal? Traditionally, it has been one single thing: Speed. A resume has been the fastest, most standardized way to take a huge pool of applicants and narrow them down to a smaller pool that is manageable. And typically that's been done by a recruiter or a robot to see if a candidate has the right experience in terms of years type and relevant skills and if a candidate has any red flags. When I was talking to one of the recruiters at my company, the biggest red flag that's been looked for is constant job switching. 

The real issue with resumes

But here lies the issue with resumes. There is a very real trade-off of speed and that's context and personality. What if someone switched jobs a lot of times, because they were taking care of a sick family member who no longer is sick? What if someone doesn't necessarily have the perfect experience, but they're an absolute hustler with deep curiosity and a chip on their shoulder, so they will rise to the challenge in whatever they do? What if someone wasn't a great fit in their last job, so little got done, but they could be a great fit in this job? Resumes leave little room for nuance and hiring the right person is all about nuance. So the question becomes, how do you maintain speed while getting the most valuable information you need to decide if someone can do the job well, or at the very least should get an interview? And maybe an unsatisfying answer, but I think the answer is: It depends. It depends on the role you're hiring for, and it depends the type of company you're hiring for. In a big company, I don't think the resume is going anywhere. While the former head of HR at Google, whose team received 50,000 resumes a week, personally said resumes are terrible, I think the combination of the need for process in a company that large and the inability for large companies to change quickly, means that the corporate environment will use the eight-and-a-half by 11 one-page resume to filter for the foreseeable future. In smaller companies, I think we're already seeing a disruption of the resume. 

Alternatives to the resume

While they're still used, I think alternative mediums are becoming as important in informing the process. For engineers startups are looking at GitHub, for designers, startups are looking at portfolios or personal websites. And in the intermediate term, I think we could see this type of vertical, specific disruption where specific roles will have their standard alternative to the resume that will suck up oxygen away from the 500-year-old document. For salespeople, could we see a format that chronicles the candidates’ past quotas, how they did against their sales quota, and who their current Rolodex of relationships is? For managers, could we see a Glassdoor-meets-Cameo, where past people that worked for the manager can leave verified video or text reviews of how it was to work with that person? For growth marketers, could we see a medium that highlights past campaigns the marketer worked on and what the specific ROI was for those campaigns? 

Two long-term predictions

Now I want to leave you with two long-term predictions. First is the acceleration of trial periods or tests. Very simply the gig economy is here to stay. I am talking jobs like Uber, DoorDash, Fiverr, Task Rabbit, Upwork. In 2017, as many as 55 million people in the US were gig workers. That is 34% of the workforce. In 2020, the projected total was 43%. As more workers, literally almost half of workers, look more like consultants and freelancers and less look like nine-to-five workers, I believe testing for hire will become a really attractive thing. Rather than guess at if a candidate is good, why not submit a test for many candidates to complete and hire the person who does the best job? Pay everyone for their work, but it will inevitably cost way less than hiring the wrong person. 

Second prediction: The reversal of the recruiting process with software, eating the world, the acceleration of crypto and the proliferation of data, I can see a world where every worker in the US has this digital file, and in that file is a history of accomplishments, measurable results, portfolio of projects, past experiences, and co-worker reviews. And instead of the workers scouring the internet for roles on LinkedIn or on different recruiting sites, I could see the opposite happening: Once a company posts a job, software scours the digital files for every US worker, filtering for desired accomplishments, desired experience, project deliverables, measurable results, and inviting the best employees to apply for the job. And then employees will then have the opportunity to opt in or opt out of the application process. I kind of think of it as a Tinder-meets-recruiting enabled by data and software. 

Recap

So to recap: The resume isn't going away anytime soon, but it could very well undergo a major transformation. We could see the verticalization of the resume and alternatives like social media profiles, online portfolios, and video could play a bigger role in the hiring process. Who knows, our resume could very well start to resemble the dating process in the future. Now I'd love to hear what you think. Do you think that the resume is broken or it’s just fine and even necessary to make the recruiting process possible? Shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com with all of your thoughts. And while you do that, please, please, please subscribe to Founder's Journal and leave a review on the podcast player of your choice: Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

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