There will always be a number of people who won’t have web presences, but that number will tend to diminish over time and then hit a plateau. I can easily imagine a time when employers will say something like:
“Individuals with Public Digital Dossiers of under 20kbyte are normally ineligible for employment. We thank you for your interest in….”
If anybody here is old enough to remember “*Max Headroom” from 1987-88, then they may recall that people who had wiped away their public identities were called “blanks,” and were implicitly considered criminals. (This was calculated to be around 2004-2005). Well, we’re not there yet….

Cheers,

Keith “C-c-c-c-atch the Wave” Halperin

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)

Robert – according to a recent survey commissioned by Microsoft, companies are actually requiring their recruiters to research their candidates on FB, etc. You can download a pdf of the survey report at the link below. I also recently blogged about this at the Workforce Institute website.

http://www.microsoft.com/privacy/dpd/research.aspx

http://www.workforceinstitute.org/blog/whats-your-online-reputation/

Assessments, interviews, etc are all pieces of information that are useful for helping experts make informed decisions. They are tools for helping to screen in candidates who appear to have the best match to the job’s requirements.

Resumes and screening tools serve to help screen out those that do not have basic qualifications and as such are more amenable to automation. Such automation is not necessarily important in every scenario (i.e., few applicants for an opening) but can have tremendous value in others (i.e., high volume hiring).

I should have qualified my statement a bit in the article. However, this does not change the fact that the basic info now found on resumes will eventually be presented in a different way. Perhaps a rose by any other name….

Issues I see:

A) The overwhelming majority of professionals don’t have profiles, don’t want them and don’t have the time or inclination to put them “out there”.
B) Resumes and on-line profiles are still “fabricated” by the individual and are not always factual.
C) The “best” potential candidates don’t have a resume or profile out there but must be sought out and enticed.
D) An outstanding resume or profile does not always equal a good employee.

So the resume, or any other form of information about a candidate, will never go away as we all need some type of information in order to make any decisions. Computers can parse it, break it into tiny pieces, use artificial intelligence to sort it, group it or compile it but it can’t make hiring decisions.

New technology, whatever it is, I hope will not ever replace human interaction in the hiring process.

There is little question that with almost a billion people with profile data on the ten biggest social web platforms, that if a recruiter is using a resume to decide whether to bring someone in – they’re doing themselves and their company a disservice (should I say laziness?). The amount of information that is available in the Social Web for the far majority of candidates is breathtaking.

I have no question whatsoever that the resume will go the way of the TV antenna, VCR or the Sunday Newspaper Help Wanted section – its happening already… Anyone lamenting the accuracy or legitimacy of any online data is not using it for the better. As a test, try using Linked In, Facebook or Clean Journey profiles as a guide to attract your interest in a candidate (seem familiar to you “stuck on resume” folks). Then merely Google the people you’re interested in and read their blog or Twitter postings, review a portfolio, read a forum response from their Assn., discover actual club activities, watch a video they made, read an answer to an ERE posting – or whatever…all of which provide a dynamic, well rounded, snap shot of each – something no resume was ever designed to be able to provide…(how could it – it was invented almost 100 years ago with virtually no changes since!!!)

To Geoff and Bryan’s point, if you can find a service where there is Interactive candidate and company data with functional assessments, twitter feeds, digital conversations between employers and passive job seekers that gets shared back and forth – NOW THAT would be game changing…(Unvarnished may be cool – but they are leaving the employer out of the game).

What we all need I think is a service that promotes all of this in the form of a company dedicated Talent Community that links interested people with those at the company to each tell their stories…and vice versa!

I happen to know of just such a place… (Google my name to find out -:)

I cant wait to see what the future holds and I believe that profiles, in one format or another, will definitely be a huge part of the solution.

Your article is well done and thought provoking. I have some thoughts:

a) The problem with inaccurate or simply fabricated information exists independent of the format, since the source of the error is the candidate and not the document or where the data lives or how it is viewed.

b) Saying that online profiles have community-validating features is probably a rose-colored glasses view. People choose their friends and choose what feedback to display. I HEAVILY discount LinkedIn recommendations.

c) Overall, I think you confuse the location of the resume with the resume. There will ALWAYS be a need for a career and talent synopsis. It may live in an online profile, or in a separate resume, which may be auto-created from the online profile. Paper resumes are dead, but is is difficult to understand how an online profile is handier than a Word resume.

d) Scraping data from profiles still involves parsing, so online profiles do not solve that.

e) To say that an interactive question/answer format to get profile/CV data is more accurate is simply not true in my experience. What such systems actually do is to provide a way for candidates to grossly exaggerate their skills and experience levels in ways that are less detectable than by reading their resume. For instance, in an interactive process, a candidate may say that they have 5 years of skill XYZ and are expert level in it. Without the context of the resume, where we can see and follow skills in context, it is impossible to make any estimate of the validity of such statements.

This self-over-reporting syndrome is not a trivial problem. As users of DICE, we are continually frustrated by running searches for C#.NET gurus and finding that the overwhelming majority of “matches” are actually not C#.NET programmers but Java and PHP people who have simply reported (apparently falsely from what we can read in the resume) that they are experts in C#, when in fact they report no paid experience with such in their actual resume.

f) To say that parsing and semantic matching have little uptake is an overstatement when you look at the fact that Monster and CareerBuilder are using both technologies very successfully. There must be a reason they are by far #1 and #2.

-Yes, everyone who reads this article likely has a LinkedIn profile. That does not mean that everyone in our industry does or will. Or has one that is presentable

-What about those who have little or no access to the Internet? Are they at a competitive disadvantage?

-People can lie on profiles as much as they do with resumes

-What happens if LinkedIn or Facebook are taken over by people who do evil things? What happens if they go out of business? Or there is a next big thing we flock to?

-Not everyone wants to be online

-Not everyone wants their work information for the world to see

-What about those doing secret job searches?

-Will the Recruiter/HR world be able to adapt? Surely it struggles with a somewhat standard document, what about a non standard format?

I strongly support an alternative to the current system but until I see one that is fair to all and can be handled on the company side of things I am stuck supporting the status quo.

With LinkedIn you do not get email addresses for free unless you pay LinkedIn. With tens of millions of resumes in Craigslist, Google resume groups and thousands of other sites it is a resume tsunamai.

I agree with many of your points but it will take a while to ween Europe and America away from resume (CV). The trend you will see is using top of the funnel (profile & resume)matches that automatically drive them to an assessment. Now recruiters will be able to spend time on the “best of the best”.

Unfortunately Unvarnished may be the closest we come in the near future. But the lack of control over comments limits its usefulness.

FYI, Koda website is http://koda.us

I agree that there is a need for some sort of standardized assessment tool, or a series of them specific to industry or skill sets. If employers had the ability to see what a potential employee can DO rather than what that person has DONE (i.e the resume) then we would be moving forward.

What services are there for job seekers, active or passive, to build that assessment data into their online profile? What tools are available for employers to view the assessment data of a wide range of potential employees in their target space and where they can sort for the top 5%-10%?

That would be a service desirable for both employers and employees… completing the online profile not just “virtualizing” the resume.

Geoff