Resumes are useless – Change my mind

Resumes are Inefficient, ineffective, and biased.

Why?
If you have hundreds of applicants to shift through, can you say you screen everyone? Do you open each resume one by one? Do you have time to do everything else you need to do or do you turn into a professional resume reader?

When you read through, are you just looking for keywords? “Proficient in Excel”, what does that mean? What is the context? How do they compare with others who are “proficient”? What about those folks who are great at their jobs, not so great at writing resumes, shouldn’t they be considered if they have the right skills? How would you know who you’ve missed?

Resumes are FULL of sources of bias (age, education, assumed gender and ethnicity). Training and experience can help you with conscious bias, sure, but unconscious bias? It’s, you know… unconscious. It creeps in to your process right from the start. It shouldn’t.

Only using resumes because you don’t know what else you’d use?

Check out SmartRank. Resume-free screening is the future.

We’d love to debate about it, objections are very welcome.