Creative Hiring: Going Beyond the Resume

Using Pinterest to Teach an Old Dog a New Trick

In today’s new content-heavy landscape, the old-fashioned resume seems to be falling short.  Recruiters love their applicant tracking systems (trust me!) and if your resume doesn’t shoehorn nicely into it, they likely will just dump it.  But recruiter fetishes aside, does the traditional 2-pager tell us anything important about potential employees other than where they used to work?

When we are hiring for more creative roles in Marketing and UI/UX, we want to see what a person can do creatively beyond their resume.  And the tech teams run their applicants thru a bevy of coding exercises usually before ever meeting them in person. These days, we usually ask to see published works (think GitHub) or portfolios (think Behance), which helps provide a glimpse into what they have contributed to, but doesn’t guarantee they were the sole creator of it.  Nor does it tell you much about the whole person.

What does today’s resume tell you about the whole person

So while I continue to preach holistic screening (i.e. looking beyond the day-to-day tactical aspects of the job into all traits needed to make an applicant successful in that role), it is hard to get managers to assess more broadly, and even harder to get interview teams to do so.  Studies have shown that more broadly assessing candidate fit will lead to higher retention rates and better culture fit.

So what if we asked EVERYONE we interviewed to show us something that was truly a more creative reflection of who they were?  Could we more quickly assess team and culture fit? Could we find out more about a person in a shorter period of time? Or would this introduce a new level of bias?

Putting my money where my mouth is

Here is my "resume" on Pinterest.  It could use some tweaks if I really intended to share with a potential employer, but not a bad first pass, I think.  What do you think? Would this be interesting, distracting, pointless??  Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.