The future of work will not contain resumes

Resumes, and the entire "fire a resume and pray" job search model, are for people who suck at sales and/or are ignorant about how hiring works. Have one, sure, but the main use is after you have gotten preferential consideration or an offer. (You get these by introductions by people trusted by the decision maker, being identifiably the best at the problem, etc.)

Networking, a portfolio, and a sales page on your website are much, much better plays for most of the people here.

When reading resumes I always look for supplemental information first. I saw a post here recently that explained how to read patents. There should be a similar article explaining to candidates how technical managers/recruiters read resumes & CVs. Put simply, college/resume/coursework/memberships/keywords will get you past HR but the hiring manager or team will skip all that and look for project details. I'm only bothering to post this because you are saying exactly the same thing but using the context of the modern web. I just want applicants to know that they don't have to use the web to get interviews as long as their resume contains the same kind of information.

I wish university career counselors would teach students this....

Resumes are sales tools.

The author is basically saying that since we have Angie's List, plumbers no longer need Yellow Pages ads.

Certainly hiring is becoming more complex, but saying the resume will disappear as a sales tool seems more than a bit extreme. It will evolve like everything else.

Count me as skeptical. Ratings of past jobs only work for people who do one project per month, otherwise a single dispute distorts the rating. It's prone to extortion and manipulation. You do that feature for free or I'm going to ruin your score. People will spend lots of time massaging their online profile instead of getting work done. Lots of useless blogs, tactical contributions to open source projects, etc.

The only way to find out whether someone is good is to see first hand what he/she has done before or work with them on something small and then build on that.

Author is the CEO of a "labor on demand" company; prefers elance-style ratings by past employers to the resume.

It's not as if replacing resumes with some online tool like LinkedIn is a significant difference. Both are advertising tools, and both can be very misleading.

While resumes are becoming obsolete, the actual cover letter can tell a lot about a person. One person might write the same stock cover letter for most of their job applications while someone else might personalize their cover letters for the particular company and job they are applying for. Which one do you think cares more about getting the job? Overall I agree that resumes are not a tell-tale sign of one's qualifications and personality, but if you are "Google-able", then at least you have something to supplement your resume (hopefully in a positive light).

As a current college student sending out a lot of cover letters and resumes at present, I have to say I sure wish that the resume was obsolete.

I definitely try to supplant it personally with my online branding / presence, but right now people still use resumes a lot for some positions. I have enough good, sexy things to put on a resume that I don't mind, per se, but...

What I have 150% observed from my painful process at the moment is just how very, very ripe for disruption this whole horrible 'job application' process is. So many terrible software solution providers out there, with so little innovation or competition apparently going on to make their products more usable, less painful, etc. I can't imagine that they are doing so much to help make things simple for HR on the back-end, either.

If this was a subject that I was really passionate about, I'd definitely be trying to start a start-up there... would probably help if I could code half decently, too, but the point remains valid. I don't find it sexy, but it's a big opportunity. Happy to vent in more detail and help someone who is inspired though.

I have a an unstarted startup idea that basically looks at the hiring process as a series of steps in a value chain, then works out how to bust that up to break up the job-agent market. Anyone who has done freelance contracting has a grab-bag full of 'bad agent' stories. There's massive scope for connecting potential employees and employers together and eliminating the agent in the middle. But someone has to weed out the bad hires and process all the information, so the solution is crowdsourcing the bits and pieces that go into hiring-having a trusted resume sorter, an effective job-ad writer, etc. I think the existing hiring model is extremely outmoded given the technology available, but the right 'new' business model hasn't emerged yet. We're pretty much still at the point of putting newspaper ads online.

If anything, LinkedIn profiles will replace resume's.