The Resume Is Dying, and This Is What’s Next

The Resume Is Dying, and This Is What’s Next

Our online identities have gotten more sophisticated, but the conventions of a job search haven’t kept pace.

What are viable alternatives to resumes? originally appeared on Quora – the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Sarah Nahm, CEO of Lever and passionate advocate for diversity in tech, on Quora:

I’ve definitely noticed a lot more grumbling about resumes in the past few years as our online identities have gotten more sophisticated (and interesting!) but the conventions of a job search haven’t kept pace. Some companies are taking action. Here are some interesting experiments or popular alternatives I’ve seen come out of Lever’s customer base:

Keepsafe, a mobile privacy company, declares that it forgoes resumes completely in their application process, asking instead for you to describe something you’ve recently built. They first got the idea after reading Aline Lerner’s shocking post on the low efficacy of resumes.
Speaking of Aline Lerner, she’s recently formed a company to offer an alternative to resumes, Interviewing.io, which offers a fully anonymized technical interview platform as a way to initially screen candidates on their chops alone.
And obviously, platforms like AngelList and LinkedIn offer the ability to apply with your profile, which increasingly includes content you wouldn’t normally find on a resume, like Projects, Posts, and social references. Other, more niche professional communities let you highlight all sorts of industry-specific experience. Behance allows designers to feature their work in rich multimedia as opposed to bullet points. A Coderwall profile lets a developer link their GitHub to feature repos and demonstrate how they’ve unlocked achievements. More and more of these kinds of online professional networks pop up all the time and the best recruiters I know are quite savvy about representing their own companies’ employees on the sites.

This question originally appeared on Quora – the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.