What’s more important, a paper resume – or a personal brand?

If you are looking for a job right now and wondering why it’s taking so long to hear back from an employer, then I urge you to think about this.

Your Google resume may be just as important to your future employer, as anything they can read on paper about you.

Sonia Kokkalos seems to think we are seeing the end of the paper based resume.

Sonia is the CEO of Recruitment Pool, an organisation she set up to help organisations and job-seekers find each other via social media.

Here’s her take on where the resume is heading, and some advice on what you should be doing right now to help you find your next role.

Have you ever wondered what happens to your resume after you apply for a role?

Yes, the resume you spent hours perfecting, spell checking, formatting to make sure it wasn’t too long and making sure it didn’t read like a position description so you could at least stand out somehow?

Well I can tell you.

From someone who has been in the Human Resources profession for well over 15 years, your labour of love resume initially becomes just another number.

It may also get lost in an abyss of the recruitment process best practice that the organisation you are applying to espouses at the time. Sometimes I think a GPS tracking device on a resume would certainly tell an interesting story as to whether you get a look in or not!

However, regardless of the way in which your resume is matched to a job advertisement it generally comes down to either a computer telling the recruiting manager who is the best fit based on key word matching, or from a pure human judgement call that is made based on the information submitted in your resume.

Your resume may also be benchmarked against your career competitors (those other applicants, whether external or internal) and what the ideal candidate profile is for the job you had applied to.

And all of this is determined, without one single discussion with you, the applicant.

Now, consider today’s online social networking and social media world, where online career information is easily available and accessible real time.

A hiring manager only has to do a Google search on someone’s name nowadays to find out what an applicant has been up to or is currently doing.

Discussions take place all the time in online forums.

The array of information on the internet is mind blowing.

My question to both hiring managers and job seekers is this.

Why, when we have all this at our fingertips, and our general way of working is changing, do we still revert to traditional recruiting practices that served a purpose pre our online world?

Why do hiring managers still require resumes to be submitted as if it was the only way to collate career information?

Today Google is the new resume.

As a job seeker your online history is your personal brand.

The information people access, paints a living career picture of you much more powerfully than a static resume of your historical career events and achievements.

Employers now want to know more about your uniqueness, your point of difference, and what you can offer in the here and now.

Think of yourself as YOU Pty Ltd – this is your Personal Brand. You are more than just the written word or an online presence resume!

So ask yourself, what do you stand for?  What is it that you do and want to be known for that a future employer can benefit from? What is the impact you can make towards their future performance?

The key question here is “Can you see this being articulated in a resume which you hope and pray you have prepared well enough to stand out?”

Or can you see this being articulated better through job discussion and interaction with an employer where you didn’t feel like you had wasted your time in preparing a resume and the employer didn’t have to sift through a pile of resumes?

Taking into account the above, has the humble resume we have all become to rely on, served its purpose?

Will it become a thing of the past for future generations looking for work?

Is the death of the resume near?

In attracting talent today and in the future, I put this challenge to hiring managers.

How much better would it be, if you had a genuine discussion with someone over social media about what it’s like to work for your organisation? What would that say about your organisation’s brand? From my experience, that’s what job seekers are crying out for.

And if you are looking for a job I say this.

Imagine what it would be like to really understand what it took to be successful in a particular role or organisation? And if this job wasn’t for you, how good would it be to be given realistic feedback about your suitability for a job?

Old school recruitment is dead. Now is the time for everyone to step up to the social challenge, before it takes over you. For more information of how you can do this, please give me a call on: +61 0423 474 400.

Sonia Kokkalos, CEO, Recruitment Pool Pty Ltd