The Future of the Resume: Towards a Simpler Application

The trend has been the same since the late 20th century: a company posts a job in a newspaper or online, you apply for it by sending your detailed resume – occasionally alongside a cover letter – and you hope to be selected for an interview and eventually accepted for the job. Sounds easy, right?

But actually resumes are absolutely despised by both parties: applicants have to try every trick in the book to beat their deadly competition – often resulting in more than a little exaggeration – while recruiters have to study hundreds of such documents and decide the quality of people without even meeting them face to face. This is why many believe that the age of the paper resume should come to an end, or at least it has to undergo radical changes.

And the future promises exactly that.

A truly resume-less future?

The future of paper resumes

Although modern changes can already be used on recent resumes (such as links and QR codes, photo-less CVs and the like) researchers think that sooner or later we have to learn to express ourselves in a Twitter-like fashion, meaning that future applicants will have to explain everything about themselves in under a single page. And due to such limits, applicants must also convey the message in a simple yet straightforward manner, sticking only to the most relevant information and the bare minimum.

Another aspect of these shortened resumes is that complementary profiles will be of more importance than ever. This means that creating a portfolio, a separate site, a blog or even a LinkedIn page will be almost obligatory in order to be able to properly showcase what you have accomplished. In this way resumes of the future will revolve around your personal achievements, all of which will need to be proven some way – and a page with all your projects and so on is more than enough.

Video: The next step in resume revolution

The shortening of the regular paper resume is a good start, but it still doesn’t eliminate the biggest disadvantage of a CV: soullessness. Although a resume can be written in a convincing manner, recruiters and employers still have no idea about who you really are until they meet you in person. This is why creative applicants are already submitting their resumes in video format where they are able to properly present themselves and while also satisfying the requirements of a CV. So it’s more than logical for both parties to shift their focus to shorter video resumes instead of digging through sheets of paper, perhaps even uploading to a future ‘business YouTube’ in much the same way that LinkedIn is the ‘Facebook for businesses’.

Video CV example by Mark Leruste