The hiring process is tedious for everyone involved. It is lengthy and expensive for many companies, as companies spend on average around $4,000 and take 52 days to fill an open position. Worse yet, more than a third of new hires don’t make it past the first six months in a new job and nearly one half of them are gone by 18 months. According to PWC, these combined turnover-related costs represent more than 12% of pre-tax income for the average company! Mismatched skill set is one of the primary reasons cited for this lack of retention according to a Robert Half survey of CFOs.

Potential candidates fret over every detail of their resume trying to ensure they stand out and come across as the right person for the job, and then they lose sleep when they don’t hear back after submitting their resume.

In the end no one is happy. The right person wasn’t even chosen for an interview because their resume didn’t stand out to a recruiter who doesn’t know anything about the position beyond the job spec (even though they had the perfect qualifications, skills, and experience). And the wrong person is hired, costing the company even more money when they leave after a short period of time.

The problem is that everyone involved is still relying on the ubiquitous resume. That’s why it is time to retire the resume.  

Resumes are bad for your company.

When a company announces an open position they are typically inundated with resumes. So much so that many companies now invest in applicant tracking systems (ATSs) to help them sort through all those resumes. And out of all those resumes, more than half are screened out by the software and the applicants are automatically rejected.

The idea is to weed out applicants that don’t meet the position’s criteria and give hiring managers a chance to review more legitimate candidates. But due to the limitations of the software it’s likely that many quality candidates are being kicked out of the process early on because they didn’t include the correct combination and volume of keywords in their resume.

There’s a better way.

Instead of relying on resumes, what if companies could see in, detail and with consistent measures, what skills applicants have – and don’t have? What if job applicants could see what the benchmarks were for their desired position in advance, so they could understand where their skills match up? What if recruiters could use the information on both sides to find a great fit for every person and company?

 There is a new class of Expertise Management platforms that allow for fast, simple self and manager-based competency assessment. These allow hiring managers and recruiters to quickly create objective role descriptions and, faster and more accurately than ever before, vet massive numbers of internal and external applicants, scoring them for fit to a particular job. The process is far faster than reading piles of resumes and provides data on far more points of knowledge, providing both broader and deeper perspective on any candidate. So. Much. Better.

It’s time to retire the resume for good.