People make it happen, not the resume

By Kevin W. Grossman

So, if you’re a vendor or consultant and you make this pitch, “Make sure your resume is ATS ready today,” I’m going to tell all the job seekers to run away, and fast.

Because making sure their resume is ATS ready today means you’re making sure it’s black hole ready. Today. And everyday like it always is when applying to jobs solely via career sites that go directly into applicant tracking systems.

That comment may get some calls, but hear me out. We’ve had this conversation before. Although I want the resume to die a horrible death, I understand that there’s still a huge part of the career management industry keeping them alive, making it better and making it work for you, the job seeker. To all my friends in this industry, please forgive me, as well as those in the talent acquisition space, as I also understand it’s probably not going anywhere for years to come.

But I still want the painfully ubiquitous resume to die a horrible death.

Why? Because it’s a self-serving piece of inconsistently formatted and fudged professional drivel that really doesn’t help me hire true quality of fit; it doesn’t help me make an emotional connection with my potential employees.

Knowing folks that already work here, and/or meeting and getting to know other applicants, employees, hiring managers, recruiters, HR pros and management in an online and/or offline setting – these are what make for stronger connections when looking for employment.

Resumes – or better yet, online profiles – are necessary when it comes to getting your skills and experience noticed, but as I wrote in my last article, it takes a community to retain an employee and it takes talent circles to create relationship-based hiring. And it does.

According to recent social media recruiting research from my friends at The A-List (which you can download here), employees hired via personal referral connections that include friends, family and across all social networks, have a much lower turnover rate than those who are hired through other sources. And social networking hires trend to higher job satisfaction and feel better informed about the opportunity prior to accepting a job.

Last week I was at the HRO Today Forum, and during the opening keynote panel, Where do Jobs Come From: The Birds & Bees of Labor Flows & Job Creation, one of the panelists – Scott Case of Startup America Partnership – enlightened the crowd with this bit of wisdom:

"It's people making this sh$t happen."

What he was primarily referring to was startups driving job growth, but I’ll take it a step further and say it’s people in talent networks and circles that make it happen for job seekers, not the resumes.

It takes a community and relationship-based hiring indeed.