Is the traditional resume dead?

It’s a changing world out there for a staffing professional. It used to be common for job candidates to snail mail a paper copy of their resume to a recruiter, now everything has gone digital. You receive digital copies of candidates’ resumes, cover letters, portfolio pieces – you even store all these details and more in your mobile-accessible recruiting software that combines the information from digital and traditional resumes into one efficient portal.

However, could the job placement process be changing more than we think? Are resumes the next Dodo? Some experts think so. Jeanne Meister recently wrote for Forbes on the potential extinction of traditional resumes. She claims that companies are choosing to rely on other means than the standard skills, experience, education formulaic outline of a resume to determine what potential job candidate has the chops and innovation to really succeed.

Now, Meister doesn’t present any hard data, but she does have a few interesting examples to highlight her point. For example, Shawn McTigue posted a fun video resume to Youtube in an effort to gain Mastercard’s attention as a video resume. According to the news source, Mastercard asked all intern applicants to develop a “creative” approach to the benefits of living in a cashless society – a new campaign the company was working on.

The rest of the application process required candidates to engage with the company’s Facebook and Twitter page and submit resumes via LinkedIn.

That’s the real change – instead of filing paper, the resumes you are seeing are coming from LinkedIn and your staffing software is being populated with information from this digital resume. Candidates aren’t hampered by the one-page resume format so you’re able to get a more complete idea of who a person is and his or her work experience.

Your clients are looking for candidates who can demonstrate their expertise, and social media, blogs and other forms that show a digital presence are the way to do that. So yes, the traditional resume may not be extinct yet, but without the right digital footprint, a potential candidate’s career might be – or, at least limping.