I’ve been asked many times why, in this day and age of LinkedIn, I insist on job applicants sending me conventional résumés in DOC or PDF formats. Well, that’s not strictly true. I’ve been asked only twice, most recently by a man in Pune, Maharashtra*.
In my experience of helping a couple of customers with sourcing candidates for various sales, marketing and account management positions in their companies, I can cite at least three reasons why DOC / PDF résumés still haven’t gone out of fashion.
Travel Travails
People don’t always review job applications while sitting down in their offices. Many honchos tend to attend to this chore when they’re traveling. Even in this day and age of 3G and 4G, there’s no guarantee that they’d have uninterrupted Internet access when they’re on the road. Under the circumstance, having to go online to look up a LinkedIn Profile is a non starter.
Email Rules
Hiring goes through profile screening, candidate rating, interviews, sending offers, receiving acceptances, and many more steps. Excel, Outlook and other office automation tools are used extensively during the process. This is true even in a company that has implemented a fully fledged HRMS system, since such systems are typically used only to store information about employees, not job candidates. (The ratio of applicants to employees can be as high as 50:1, which makes HRMS unwieldy for tracking recruitment activities.) While email is admittedly inefficient for exchanging status updates, evaluation reports, question banks and a plethora of other material involved in recruitment, it is extremely popular. Just as how 70% of Fortune 500 companies have ERPs but over 90% of them use Excel to generate board reports! A DOC / PDF résumé fits this workflow better than LinkedIn.
Data Mess
Some companies have started using ATS (Applicant Tracking System) for recruitment. You might think LinkedIn should work fine with that. But, no. According to this TEC article, there are many inconsistencies in formats and data taxonomy between such systems and LinkedIn Profiles. As a result, LinkedIn hasn’t been able to replace conventional DOC / PDF résumés even when hiring is automated.
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As things stand, DOC / PDF résumés are here to stay.
LinkedIn gets this message, going by the fact that it allows candidates to attach DOC / PDF résumés even when they’re submitting their applications directly inside LinkedIn itself.
So should job applicants. A missing résumé could make all the difference between getting that interview call and losing that job opportunity to the cyberabyss.
* If Joseph Heller fans find a striking resemblance between the above passage and the opening lines of “Good As Gold”, they’re not alone! I hope the estate of my favorite novelist will excuse me for taking the liberty to paraphrase what is one of the most captivating starts of any novel I’ve read.