George J. Ziogas ·Jun 8, 2025 Medium
Sending off a resume and tailoring a cover letter to a specific employer used to be the gold standard when applying to jobs.
This is no longer the case. While many companies and employers still ask for them, traditional resumes are increasingly seen as too static, too one-dimensional, to provide any actionable information for recruiters and hiring managers.
There are solid reasons employers are turning away from resumes, and there are all sorts of new things they are looking for instead.
Resumes simply don’t provide the necessary information
Resumes used to be a fast, simple way for employers to find employees with the qualifications they wanted. When humans had to read all the job applications themselves, it helped to have one page of information that highlighted a person’s degree and job titles in handy, bullet-pointed lists.
Because employers now tend to receive so many applications for so many positions, they typically employ applicant tracking systems (ATS) to sift through them and discard those that don’t include keywords or formatting required by the recruiter or hiring manager.
This means that recruiters and HR departments will increasingly square off against job seekers in AI battles that will be detrimental to both. Employers will double down on what they think are the most pertinent keywords their applicants need to use, and applicants will use tools like ChatGPT to employ those keywords.
Luckily, both employers and applicants are turning to new (maybe even more effective?) ways to find one another.
Rise of the video
There’s a reason people spend a lot of time on YouTube and TikTok. Videos are a powerful medium, and applicants are beginning to submit them — in the form of “video resumes” — to potential employers.
Although experts warn that video resumes are becoming more popular, that doesn’t mean they’re right for everyone — or for every role.
When done well, however, video resumes can highlight applicant strengths that might never have shown up on traditional resumes. Video resumes allow people to showcase their personality and communication styles, helping employers visualize how applicants might fit into their workplace culture.
The video format is also helping employers get right to interviewing, faster. Rather than taking a chance on offering just a few qualified applicants in-person interviews, which can be costly and time-consuming, recruiters and other hiring professionals are more frequently offering candidates “asynchronous” interview questions.
This means that employers can ask more candidates the same predetermined interview questions, and allow applicants to record videos of themselves answering those questions.
Asynchronous interviews can be beneficial for both hiring professionals (resulting in travel cost savings and a wider pool of applicants) and those hoping to be hired (who can take more time to prepare their answers, and showcase their interpersonal communication skills).
The power of your online presence
Employers frequently state that they are moving away from resumes because they are more interested in people’s demonstrable skills than in the job titles they’ve had.
One way in which job applicants can show (not tell) their skill set, is to optimize their online presence to highlight those skills.
J.T. O’Donnell, the founder and CEO of Work It DAILY, says that companies and employers are now Googling prospective employees after checking out their resume, but before scheduling interviews, because they are looking for evidence that you’re knowledgeable, credible, and capable of solving their problems.
O’Donnell also lists the components of a strong online presence that can wow prospective employers. Items employers might be particularly interested in include applicants’ LinkedIn profile (including the “about” section, posts about recent achievements, and a job-seeker’s connections) and their “thought leadership content” (content produced to provide tangible resources to other colleagues).
Other online products applicants have created can also entice recruiters and hiring managers, including websites, coding repositories, and online work samples.
A prospective employee’s online presence also includes their social media footprint. Many companies are now performing “social media background checks” on applicants they are considering — meaning that they are looking not only at professional attributes, but at personal values and behaviors as well.
It’s a brave new world of hiring — and being hired
Resumes used to be a tried-and-true method for employers and prospective employees to find one another in an efficient, consistent way.
But job candidates can now present more personal, immediate, and specific pictures of their skills and their interpersonal and online “personalities” to recruiters and hiring managers. Likewise, those doing the hiring can learn so much more about candidates than they were once able to from a short, text-only document.
New times call for new tools, and even if the resume becomes obsolete, those on both sides of the hiring equation should take heart that there are so many exciting new ways to meet one another.