3 Resume Trends For 2017 That Will Shake The Business World

The resume is changing. It’s joining the 21^st century and going from a static piece of paper to something that is interactive, multi-faceted and far deeper than what we’re used to. This is because the resume is changing to suit the business world. The question that many people are wondering at is, ‘is this a two ways street?’ Is the resume not only being changed by the business world but in turn changing the business world?

I think the answer to this question is ‘yes’. You might instinctively disagree with me. After all, it’s just a piece of paper, right? How can something as basic as how we summarize what we’ve done affect something as deep and varied as the business world?

Well, let read on and I’ll tell you.

Just like our attention span our resume is getting shorter. It was inevitable. As the number of jobs each of us was doing kept growing, so did the resume. That didn’t gel with the direction businesses were going, however.

After all, most HR personnel do not have time to search a ten-page document for everything that might be related to the business they’re in. In fact, most HR people don’t take more than 6 seconds (!) to decide whether your resume is worthwhile. Since that’s the case, a shorter resume is obviously to everybody’s advantage. You can make sure that the HR people see what’s important, while the HR person can get the gist of who you are more quickly.

Well, the less you need to include, the more selective you can be about what does and doesn’t go into your resume. And that, in turn, affects the picture that you’re broadcasting to the firm you’re applying to.

In other words, suddenly there is room to edit your history to remove warts and better suit the job position you’re applying to. And when you can edit something like that, there are more options to market, advertise and steer the business.

And that, in turn, will make the resume less valuable to companies as they become an advert rather than an honest display of your skills and capabilities.

The result? You’ll see an acceleration towards alternative methods to assess your skill set, including assignments, tests and other such strategies.

Another thing that this editing allows for is the growth of professional services that will hone your resume for you to better suit the business you’re applying for. And this is exactly what we’re seeing. For example, more and more resume writing services, like Resumescentre - help with your resume, are expanding into the resume writing gig.

How does this change the business world?

It will mean much the same as what I mentioned above, except that it will further accelerate the process. The more professional businesses get involved, the less dependable resumes becomes. After all, these services are going to focus on putting their client in the best light. Obviously, they’ll do so without lying, but that doesn’t change that the truth will be twisted even if it’s short of the breaking point.

The result? Organizations will have to look ever more in other directions to evaluate their future employees.

More and more people are putting links to their social media into their resumes. In fact, in many ways this is becoming the norm now. And with good reason, as companies can use these social media platforms to further explore the candidates they’re most interested in.

In fact, there is now a trend for people to use social media to connect with past employers of candidates and explore their work history, to see what was true, what was exaggerated and where candidates might have turned away from the truth.

How does this change the business world?

When people start searching through your social media networks as well as Googling your name, something interesting happens – suddenly all of your digital footprints can be scrutinized.

For those of us who are a little bit more careful about how our social media presence, this can be highly advantageous. For those of us, however, who might have a few blemishes in our past this can be quite a problem.

What does that mean? It means that those people who can show online restraint will be rewarded, while those who were less capable of controlling their online exuberance might well find their actions coming back to haunt them as actions from long ago come back to play a role in whether they’ll get their job today.

So yes, make sure you start working on your personal branding.

What is really happening is that the snapshot that people used to need of your experiences and your skill set is changing. Now, it’s no longer a snapshot. Instead, it’s a rolling image that encompasses most of your life.

And that’s not really that surprising. After all, more and more if what we’re doing is being recorded and stored, whether we want it to or not. Businesses can, therefore, explore whole facets of your life.

This is something that is being accelerated with the shrinking and modification of the resume into something that used to serve to tell people about your life, into a document that serves to only give them the footnotes.

And so, the processes that I discussed herein will only continue and will probably accelerate.