Communicating and collecting work histories, qualifications and achievements is a critical component to hiring efficiency. The delivery method for those details – a paper printout handed to an interviewer or a static electronic file emailed to a human resources department – went virtually unchanged for decades. Recently, however, a new mechanism has emerged.
The resume is dead. Long live the resume.
The concept of the employee CV isn’t going anywhere, of course. But in order to keep up with modernization, and with the aim of improving hiring efficiency and organization on both sides of the worker-employer relationship, it has had to change. Digitization has supercharged the ability of hiring departments to identify, vet and bring aboard new employees, while providing candidates with a dynamic platform to communicate their value to employers.
Consider the limitations of the traditional resume. Its shelf life is short and its flexibility nil, diminishing its usefulness. Particularly in the contractor economy, it’s an enormous hassle for employees to update a paper copy of their work history every time they work with a new client or add a competency to their skill set. The old ways also assured employers that they’d wind up spending inordinate amounts of time filing away and later combing through reams of outdated CVs. Digitization allows for changes to be made easily and instantly, and shared universally.
Resumes of the past, frankly, were also easy to fudge. Candidates would occasionally embellish and, every so often, outright falsify information. The burden of proof lay on hiring managers, who would be stuck verifying which details of a candidate’s resume were true, false or possibly just outdated – all with the clock ticking.
LinkedIn, for one, attempted to address some of these problems. A web platform that allowed users to quickly update their profile, and which linked to the pages of previous employers and affiliated organizations, offered more flexibility and a format that could help employers improve hiring efficiency. But even this model was open to misrepresentations and, for the most part, provided only the nuts and bolts of users’ work experiences and qualifications.
The next step in the evolution of the resume has been a quantum leap: PeopleCaddie. Company-focused and built on a dynamic closed-loop model that incentivizes both employee and employer to operate within its network, PeopleCaddie acts as a comparative and verifiable database of contractor candidates, removing the hiring guesswork for employers. As a third-party talent cloud that helps connect contractors with new gigs and rewards them for good work, while directing employers to the right workers for their projects, everyone is motivated to work together. That closed loop allows PeopleCaddie to confirm and maintain accurate employee records, while leveraging feedback from previous employers to help other network clients make their own smart hiring decisions.
Think of how other companies have used digitization to dust off and soup up an old model: Uber made standing in the rain to wait and hail a cab a thing of the past. Amazon allows you to shop from your bathtub and enjoy direct-to-door delivery. Recent shelter-at-home restrictions opened the door – or in this case a window – for Zoom to reimagine the traditional office meeting.
By harnessing the powers of digitization, it’s already been proven possible to bring similar innovation to the hiring process. With an elegant platform featuring a deep pool of contractors with updated and accurate work histories, comprehensive ratings and detailed reviews, a talent cloud like PeopleCaddie saves time, instills confidence and puts the right candidates at the fingertips of hiring managers.
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