Running a growing business, I read tons of resumes daily. It’s impossible to tell what a candidate is really like from a resume, so we probably overvalue the signals that we can actually pull out — fancy college, good GPA, sound-bite accomplishments at previous jobs. We also over-select for resume-writing ability — a single typo or ugly formatting is often enough to make us pass — but resume writing is not really part of the job for most of my hires. And the lack of relevant information that resumes give about a candidate means lots of time spent on phone screens and in-person interviews.
Technology is making the resume obsolete faster than we think. Now, some candidates send LinkedIn profiles in lieu of resumes. They’re better than resumes in that they give extra pieces of information: recommendations, which can be misleading but often give some insight into the candidate’s personality, as well as the people we know in common professionally. The website Unvarnished takes LinkedIn recommendations to another level by making the reviewer anonymous, and therefore more candid.
But sites like oDesk and eLance more closely reflect the future of resumes and how companies hire. When you hire someone on those sites (or similar 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 fudge than any resume.
Other sites pull reputation scores out of passive indicators. RailsRankings.com checks things like contributions to popular open-source projects to determine the best Rails programmers. At CrowdFlower, we assign work in the smallest possible increments, and we’ve learned that past performance on work is essential in predicting future performance.
Read more at gigaom.com
No comments:
Post a Comment