Why We’re Building Entelo (Part 1): You Are More than Your Resume

September 4, 2012 at 9:02 AM by Jon Bischke

This is the first blog post in a series where I'll be sharing more about why we're building Entelo. We'll be launching soon and we thought it was time to share a little bit more about our motivations. We feel that the world of employment and hiring is changing and many tools of the past are not adequate for the future.

To kick the series off, there's something that we feel pretty strongly about at Entelo: you are more than your resume.

Let's start with the history of the resume. This awesome infographic does a better job of showing the history than I could in this post and I'd recommend that you check it out. Some noteworthy items are included within. For example, did you know that back in the 40s, resumes included things like weight, age, height, marital status and religion? Or that well before YouTube, VHS resumes were created back in the 80s? Indeed, the resume has a long and interesting history.

But to be honest, the resume hasn't changed that much in the last few decades, which is strange because the nature of the work we do has changed dramatically. Yet we're still listing our past employers and job titles, some bullet points about what we've done and a few interests outside of work to make us look like semi-balanced individuals.

However, at the same time that we're shuffling another carbon-copy resume into an employer's hands, we're off tweeting up a storm, participating in online communities and publicly announcing our attendance at different places on Foursquare, Lanyrd and Meetup. While much of what we're doing online relates to our personal interests, an increasing amount relates to our professional interests as well. Let's take a look at a few examples:

Github and Stack Overflow - For engineers and other tech professionals, Github and Stack Overflow are well on their way to becoming the new resume. OK, maybe not for everybody, but increasingly you can find out more about an engineer by looking at their Github or Stack Overflow profile than you can by looking at their resume. Hiring managers are leading off conversations with their recruiters by saying stuff like "Do they have a Github profile?" and not having one can raise suspicions, at least if the engineer in question is an open source developer.

Behance, Carbonmade, deviantART and Dribbble - Want to hire a designer or artist? Good luck assessing them on their resume. While a resume can be a clue to important projects they may have worked on or give you details about some of their skills, what you really want is to look at work they've done. Their shots on Dribbble will tell you way more than what they say about themselves. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Avvo, HealthTap and Quora - OK, this is the part in the blog post where you might be saying "Sure, I get that the resume might be dead for engineers and designers...but what about the rest of us?" And we'd respond by pointing you to Q & A sites like Avvo (for legal issues), HealthTap (for health issues) and Quora (for really just about anything) as examples of people who aren't techies sharing professional expertise.

And this is just the start. Almost none of the sites listed above existed in 2005 (the lone exception being deviantART which was started way back in 2000) and most of them are only a few years old. These sites are only a representative sample as well as there are hundreds of similar professional communities that we've come across.

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Furthermore,the growth rates of these sites are astounding. Github has over 2 million members who have created over 3.5 million code repositories (or "repos"). Stack Overflow has picked up 1.3 million members in the four short years that it has existed. And Quora is a community of over half a million strong, including luminaries like Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and actor/tech investor Ashton Kutcher.

The rise of these sites has allowed for a new resume of sorts, which is composed of your scattered professional data on various social profiles. Recruiters (at least the good ones) are using this information to cobble together impressions of who an individual is and whether or not they'll be a good fit for a req they're trying to fill. Part of why we're building Entelo is to give people involved in the hiring process a more powerful way to assess someone on the basis of their online, professional footprint.

Interviewing is an expensive process, both for the company and for the candidate. We feel that there's a better way to learn about who might be a good fit for an open position in your company. And we believe that by better understanding who a candidate is before they set foot in your office or hop on the phone, you will be able to reduce the likelihood of going too far down a path with a candidate before realizing that they aren't right for the role (something that stings at least as bad for the candidate as for the company).

Of course, the resume isn't dead yet. It still serves an important purpose in the hiring process for most positions. However, the almighty power of the resume is starting to be usurped by something else. Something fresher, more comprehensive and - in our minds - more humanizing. If we're successful at Entelo, our hope is that hiring becomes more meritocratic and that first impressions of candidates will be based more on the work they've actually done than on their ability to cleverly craft a one-page document of themselves.

A long ways to go and a lot of work to be done, no doubt, but we're excited to see what this future might hold.

(Note: If you're in the Bay Area, I'll be speaking on this topic tomorrow night at an event entitled Beyond The Resume which is part of SmartRecruiters' thought-provoking SmartUp series. I'll join the founders of Venturocket and Virtrue for what I'm sure will be a lively discussion. You can register here.)

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