The resume has long been the cornerstone of recruiting processes. Nevertheless, in an age where personal branding fuels talent across social networks and digital platforms, reliance solely on resumes causes critical capability gaps in hiring. Forward-thinking organizations are now harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analytics to align recruiting with the digital lifestyles of today’s candidates.
The Drawbacks of Dependence on Resumes
Resumes have traditionally been used to showcase credentials, skills, and work history of potential candidates. However, there are several downsides of over relying on resumes during recruitment:
- Inability to authenticate claims: Details on resumes are self-reported by candidates and often embellished with exaggerated or outright false claims that are difficult for recruiters to verify.
- Focus only on past performance: Information on resumes focuses largely on previous academic and work achievements. This provides little visibility into candidates’ evolving skills, adaptability and cultural fit with the organization’s work environment.
- Lack of future viability signals: While resumes look backwards at credentials accumulated over time, they cannot provide insights into candidates’ ability and motivation to continue gaining fresh skills that keep them viable.
- No context behind accomplishments: Brief descriptions of skills and responsibilities on resumes make it hard for recruiters to understand the exact context and quantify the business impact of candidates’ accomplishments.
In essence, while resumes have been a recruiting staple thus far, excessive reliance on them results in incomplete and sometimes even misleading signals about candidates in today’s era of smart personal branding.
Leveraging Digital Signals with AI Sourcing Tools
The people at ISG say that to address the pitfalls of over-dependence on resumes, forward-looking organizations are complementing them with emerging AI sourcing tools that provide deeper and more authentic views into a candidates’ competencies and workplace viability. Some ways they do this include:
- Profiling professional branding on social media using natural language processing algorithms to quantify candidates’ areas of expertise.
- Administering remote skills assessment questionnaires mapped to the targeted roles to gauge problem-solving abilities.
- Building custom AI chatbot interviewers that interact with candidates through messaging to evaluate communication proficiency.
- Using voice analytics on recorded video interview responses to analyze aspects like listening skills, conciseness, and confidence.
- Applying emotional intelligence machine learning models on video interviews to predict cultural fit within teams.
- Testing candidates through immersive online simulations of real-world role situations to benchmark task execution effectiveness.
- Scoring candidates across diverse metrics based on AI assessment to reduce recruitment bias.
Such AI-powered asynchronous recruiting techniques provide data-driven insights into candidates that resumes fail to highlight. This enables hiring teams to base decisions on holistic performance-, skill- and culture-indicators beyond just credentials and work history summarized on resumes.
Reinventing Recruitment for Digital Natives
The influx of digitally savvy millennial and Gen Z talent into the workforce has brought special focus onto the need for recruiting practices to align better with modern worker preferences. Younger talent building their professional brands on social media profiles expect that recruiting processes will also evaluate their capabilities reflected across digital channels by using smarter tools instead of just resumes. AI and automation further let recruiting teams rapidly assess and shortlist qualified candidates at scale to reduce time-to-hire.
Conclusion
While resumes have traditionally been indispensable for recruitment, the accelerated digitization of personal branding along with younger digital native workforces, demands better leverage of technology to reinvent hiring practices. Using AI-powered skills assessments, digital interviews, cognitive ability tests and predictive compatibility scoring can help uncover deeper candidate insights that boost recruiting beyond just resumes. Instead of the static and limited snapshot that resumes provide, configurable AI sourcing tools create dynamic candidate profiles that can match ever-evolving role needs in volatile times.
