By David Rodriguez, President of GrouperEye.com
Ok don’t get me wrong, I understand the value of a resume. However, there is no magical formula that will make a resume better and better. Why?
For one thing, recruiters will always want to see a short summary of your experiences. Even though resumes hardly tell the whole story, they can at least give some idea of one’s experiences.
The bottom line: changing the format of a resume, whether it is a fancy online one with a more “genuine” feel or not, it is what it is. Instead of focusing so much on the resume itself, people should be focusing on the recruitment process as a whole. The question should be, “why are students so unhappy with the process?” Sure, the current state of the economy doesn’t help but this student sentiment is hardly new.
In my opinion, the resume itself is a large part of the problem. It is nearly impossible to differentiate yourself amongst a pile of 100s of resumes. Cover letters may help some, but the same problem exists.
From a recruitment side, a resume can hardly be trusted. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you want to hire an intern or entry-level employee to work in business development at a event marketing firm. On a daily basis, this person will spend a lot of time creating powerpoint pitch decks. You get some great resumes (all of which have powerpoint as a proficiency). You eventually hire this person after interviewing him/her and liking him/her. Then you find out his/her powerpoint skills are basic and realize it will take quite some time for him/her to learn properly, potentially costing your firm time and money. Wouldn’t this entire process have been more logical if you could have tested all of those candidates ahead of time by asking them all to do a pitch deck for you?
Of course it would have! And this is the essense of what GrouperEye is all about. The likelihood of getting a lemon decreases significantly – think of it as a warranty.
