Communications of the ACM
The Future of Work Won't Contain Resumes
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Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower, weighs in on how to find the perfect job candidate for a growing technology business. As Biewald points out, the resume places too much emphasis on a good GPA, a great degree and sound-bite accomplishments at previous jobs, but not enough emphasis on relevant information that tells you how a candidate will really perform on the job. New social networking sites are quickly making the traditional resume obsolete. For example, LinkedIn profiles are sometimes better than resumes in that they give extra pieces of information: recommendations, as well as the people that are known professionally.
Websites like oDesk and eLance, which provide rankings and insights about recent projects, more closely reflect the future of resumes and how companies hire. When you hire someone on these contractor marketplaces, you don't see things like what college they attended, you see past jobs and employer ratings. This simple reputation score is much more reliable, fair, and is harder to gloss over than any resume. Past performance on work is essential in predicting future performance. As companies feel pressure to hire faster and hire more specialists on a part-time basis, reputation scores in online marketplaces will start to replace resumes as the main initial hiring criteria.
The resume is just one part of a hiring process, and there's lots of crucial effort and process that goes into assessing someone's skill once you've contacted them. But there's a high cost of time associated with every candidate you contact. Improving the initial part of the hiring pipeline makes businesses hire better and run more efficiently. Increasingly, the ethical and legal issues around who owns workers' reputation data will grow in importance as that data becomes crucial in shaping careers. There are also questions about how to merge reputation scores across several sites, whether or not social networking sites should become a one-stop shop for evaluating a potential hire; and how to turn online reputation into quantifiable data that has meaning for employers across many industries.
From GigaOm
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