Your #Career: Why A #Resume Should Be A Job Seeker’s Last Resort…If You’re Betting on a Resume to Get you #Hired, You’re Hobbling your #Job #Search Efforts

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“I haven’t used a resume to get a job in at least a decade,” a mid-career executive told me last week. He wasn’t bragging, but noting a fact. At his level, those seeking to recruit him weren’t interested in a stapled piece of paper listing bullet points with action verbs. They wanted to hear him talk about how he’s managed teams, they wanted contact info of people who could vouch for his abilities and they wanted to be wowed with the big name brands he’d helped to elevate. A resume wasn’t the most efficient way to assess his fit. And it isn’t the most effective way to communicate yours. You don’t have to be C-suite bound to understand that relying on your resume as your job hunting tool of choice is profoundly flawed .

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Popular wisdom suggests that with a resume, you’re pinning your hopes on making a winning impression in six seconds or less. You’ve been agonizing over this document for days and all you can hope for is that someone with power will spend less time than it takes to cross a busy intersection evaluating your competency and determining the trajectory of your career. Does that seem reasonable? Of course, this assumes you even get to the stage where an actual human is looking at your credentials. If the company you applied to is using an applicant tracking system, you may well have wasted all that energy customizing your resume only to be rejected by a computer program.

At first glance, structuring the hiring process around a call for resumes makes sense. Resumes function as a gate keeping mechanism for hiring managers. Personally vetting each applicant doesn’t scale when you have hundreds of resumes pouring in for a single job ad, so the best they can do is ask job seekers to submit a standardized document, get a computer to disqualify the majority of those candidates and then manually review the remaining batch in six seconds or less for each. They know they likely aren’t getting objectively the “best” fit for the role (that might be someone who forgot a crucial keyword on their resume and never made it past the computer round), but they are getting a group from which they can choose the most suitable applicant and be reasonably confident that the person will do well. This is how the process works without disruptions or interventions. It’s not ideal for the hiring manager and it’s certainly not ideal for the candidate, but it does eventually deliver the desired result — a new hire.

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The catch is that the recruitment process described above is actually a last resort. If there is a way for hiring managers and internal recruiters to avoid it, they happily will, but job hunters who follow the rules never figure that out because they’re too busy stuffing their resumes with keywords to trick a computer into validating them. Referrals from current and past employees, recommendations from their own professional networks, connections on LinkedIn, conversations with Twitter followers and cold-call introductions from savvy job hunters are all alternate methods that don’t rely on resumes by which hiring managers staff open positions.

I know the head of editorial content for a startup who has an open call for applications from freelance writers on one of the company’s sites, but acknowledged the bulk of his recruits come from connecting with people who have written interesting pieces on their personal Medium accounts that he happened to stumble across. A friend of mine went to a workshop on how part-time instructors of a particular college could maximize their professional development. Instead of following the party line he heard there and all the red tape it involved, he reached out to a faculty member he admired and invited him for coffee. That led to a meeting with another faculty member and then, a couple of weeks later, a meeting with the dean and an offer from her for him to teach three more classes.

At no point did he offer anyone his resume, nor was he asked for it. Instead of having to run a competition for these jobs or sort through resumes from an on-call pool, the dean could just look across her desk at someone who had the confidence of her well-regarded employees, had performed well in a similar role in the past and showed enthusiasm and tenacity by coming directly to her to ask for what he wanted. Her decision was easy.

If you’re betting on a resume to get you hired, you’re hobbling your job search efforts.  A piece of paper can’t convey enthusiasm, energy, leadership, or problem-solving in a compelling way and even if it could, your piece of paper is being compared to a hundred other almost identical pieces of paper. If you win this fight, it’s much more about luck or happenstance than a recognition of your talents shining forth in Times New Roman 12-point type.

Today’s jobs don’t go to the person with the best resume (an award on par with having the best mullet), they go to the people who understand the limitations of a paper-based presentation of self and are bold and ingenious enough to work around it to their advantage.

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Forbes.com | May 27, 2015  | J. Maureen Henderson