John recently applied for the role of Project Manager, SEO and Growth with a fast-growing automation platform that connects different apps to one another. He was surprised that the application didn’t have a place for him to paste or import his resume. Instead, John was immediately tasked with an assignment. After the usual icebreakers, he was asked to analyze a website and explain what opportunities he’ll explore if he owned the website’s SEO/Growth Strategy.
Assignments like these are not unusual these days. Many companies want to separate the wheat from the chaff right from the start of the recruitment process. Because applying for a job is much easier these days, it has led to a major increase in the number of applicants. Resumes don’t reflect personality, communication skills or fit and tech employers understand that the employee is one of the most important assets for their business as picking the right person can either enhance or quash their growth. They want result driven individuals and are beginning to care less about what school(s) the candidates attended or what organizations they belong to. They don’t have the time to go through and verify the claims of countless resumes which are often filled with irrelevant and sometimes false claims, recruiter want to know your personal brand, and they want to know straight up that you can deliver.
Instead of a resume, some companies request that you record a short video (usually between 40 seconds to 5 minutes), talking about a chosen subject (related to the applied role). Others are bold enough to go the extra mile and include in the process hours of real work (sometimes paid), to see how well the candidate can handle required tasks and fit into the culture of the company. And one thing many tech recruiters do these days is check your social media profile(s), especially LinkedIn, not just looking for an abridged resume but looking at your network, your posts, your publications.
Even when companies collect resumes for tech hires, they use these resumes more as a data collection exercise and not a decision-making exercise. Resumes especially work against those that are self-taught, a sizeable chunk of today’s software developers. Some tech recruiters even go as far as predicting resumes would be discontinued for tech positions in the very near future.