CNN: The Paper Resume is Dead

[Brown_Eyed_Girl]

@Enderw24

Are social media making the resume obsolete?

This is the defining question of the day. Well that and “Is your kids learning?”

Media is plural for medium and encompasses Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as examples of social media.

But yeah, I’m not a fan of that particular construction either.

[lance_strongarm]

@Brown_Eyed_Girl

Media is plural for medium and encompasses Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as examples of social media.

But yeah, I’m not a fan of that particular construction either.

I think he was referring to the famous Bush quote “Is our children learning?” and comparing it to the general stupidity that social media encourages, not the plural of medium. I hope.

[Onomatopoeia]

@Onomatopoeia

What kills me is almost no one does cover letters anymore. When did that cease? Yes, you should send a cover letter with your resume, even when submitting online.

@Voyager

My daughter Germany is looking for a job, and she is working long and hard on cover letters. However, I’ve gotten plenty, and none of them have been any good, in the sense that my decision to interview was unaffected by them.

@friedo

I still do cover letters and expect at least a token attempt by applicants who I am considering. Any jackass can spam a resume to a thousand addresses; it takes a modicum of effort to introduce yourself and explain why you are qualified for a particular job.

@lance_strongarm

Wow. That’s the real story here.

I suspect that this is a complete failure except in certain fields.

For a while there, I was rejecting resumes that weren’t submitted with cover letters, but eventually had to abandon the practice as I became concerned that I may have been eliminating potentially viable candidates…even though we explicitly and boldly state that cover letters are required in our ads.

As an employer, I find the cover letter as important as the resume in determining whether or not to schedule the applicant for an interview. Without a cover letter, I feel I don’t have enough information to make a proper assessment, and become frustrated when, as happens, five minutes into an interview, it becomes evident that the applicant is not a good fit and that I may not have had to waste my time with this person had a cover letter been submitted.

[Voyager]

@Onomatopoeia

For a while there, I was rejecting resumes that weren’t submitted with cover letters, but eventually had to abandon the practice as I became concerned that I may have been eliminating potentially viable candidates…even though we explicitly and boldly state that cover letters are required in our ads.

I don’t blame you for that - applicants should read the damn ad.

As an employer, I find the cover letter as important as the resume in determining whether or not to schedule the applicant for an interview. Without a cover letter, I feel I don’t have enough information to make a proper assessment, and become frustrated when, as happens, five minutes into an interview, it becomes evident that the applicant is not a good fit and that I may not have had to waste my time with this person had a cover letter been submitted.

Since we often bring candidates in from across the country, we never interview without a phone screen. That has been very effective in filtering out people who have very shallow knowledge of the areas we are looking for. We do that even for local candidates, since we are too busy to interview pointlessly. We’ve had a pretty good hit rate for those we do bring in.

I’m in engineering, and skills on the resume, and expressed in a phone interview, count for a lot more than ability to write a cover letter. But I can certainly imagine jobs where this wouldn’t be true.

[Mighty_Mouse]

@Onomatopoeia

For a while there, I was rejecting resumes that weren’t submitted with cover letters, but eventually had to abandon the practice as I became concerned that I may have been eliminating potentially viable candidates…even though we explicitly and boldly state that cover letters are required in our ads.

As an employer, I find the cover letter as important as the resume in determining whether or not to schedule the applicant for an interview. Without a cover letter, I feel I don’t have enough information to make a proper assessment, and become frustrated when, as happens, five minutes into an interview, it becomes evident that the applicant is not a good fit and that I may not have had to waste my time with this person had a cover letter been submitted.

Strangely, I have gone through thousands of resumes, and probably hundreds of cover letters. I have never seen a cover letter that helped much.

The worst cover letter was from someone who turned out to be one of the best hires I ever made, though she left in about 18 months to make much more money than we were willing to pay in our rigid pay scale system. She had obviously been using some kind of form letter generating system for mailing out resumes. Even though she had two years experience, allof which was in our industry, her offer letter said “Even though I have no experience in the XYZ industry, I am a quick learner, have a solid track record in financial analysis in XYZ industry, which I am sure I will tranfer well to XYZ industry.”

Of course the HR droid who selected her resume for me to look at, never noticed this. At this time our recuriting function was so broken, I used to post ads on Craigslist myself (shelling out $25 of my own money) and redirect any applicants I found interesting to our website and then follow up with the recruiters to make sure their resumes got through. I don’t think there was a single case where the resumes of people who I thought were qualified made it through HR without my intervention.