It seems to be a rite of passage for those who graduate: putting together your resume to showcase why you’re the right candidate for your first ‘real’ job. Student jobs and side gigs will be rewritten to make it sound like you were managing CEO-level responsibilities. Adding a free online workshop to the Education section as if your knowledge could challenge anyone with a PhD in that department. Sounds familiar?
We’ve all been there. Why? Because most companies will look at that skillfully designed 2-page summary first before even considering to invite you for an interview. And without an impressive resume you’re not getting that invite.
Playing the keyword game to fool the system
It’s interesting that with so many aspects of how and why we work changing, we still heavily rely on that traditional resume to decide if a candidate is qualified or not. What is changing is that companies are now often outsourcing the first selection of candidates to software tools like an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) that scan these resumes for desired keywords. I’m not sure what’s worse. Being rejected because someone wasn’t impressed with what you’ve done so far, or knowing that the job didn’t go to the best candidate but to the candidate that knew how to convince the ATS with keywords …
Does your resume look familiar?
Another challenge you’re facing, even though it’s outside your control, is bias. You’d hope that anyone reading your resume is only focusing on what you know and are capable of doing. Unfortunately, reality shows that people prefer things that are familiar to them. From the country they were born in, the universities they went to (and their student associations), to the language they speak and the way they look. In their (which is anyone’s) defense: this happens unconsciously, but it happens. Which means you better hope that your resume looks like theirs if you want that interview.
Kill the resume
So the question is: if we want to give graduates a fair chance on the job market, should we kill the resume? And if so, how can we then decide if someone is right for the job?
At Tasker we say ‘Yes’ to that first question. It’s time we remove all bias from the selection process and relying on a document that’s filled with bias variables (age, gender, nationality, etc) is not working.
Plus, we know that engineers are capable of doing amazing things. Also when they’ve just graduated. It’s a matter of matching the right people with the right job, based on their skills, knowledge and expertise. The rest of what you’d normally add to a resume doesn’t matter.
Get a match with your Skills Passport
Sometimes a project simply requires a lot of experience. Other times, what you’ve studied and practiced to earn that degree makes you more than qualified to help out high-tech companies who wouldn’t know where to start.
This is why we’ve replaced the resume with a Skills Passport that tells us what domains you’d like to work in and what your skills, knowledge and experience in that domain are. And when it comes to the companies that are looking for help, we carefully analyze their request to determine the specific skill-set needed to succeed. If that matches with your Skills Passport, we’ll add you to the shortlist and introduce you to the client. And then you can make sure that the client is just as impressed with you as we are!
