Do you remember resumes before the internet? I do. For those of you not old enough to understand this process, we used to have to print all of our resumes. Sometimes they even had to be mailed *gasp*. Plus, we had to use special paper. I found a stack of resume paper when I was unpacking recently.

Ever since I found that paper, I keep finding myself talking to people about it. “Do you remember?” I ask with a laugh. They all remember - the weight, their favorite color, and all the other things we used to do to stand out. Know what else they all remember? How biased we were when it came to that paper.

The old school HR folks remember the stack of resumes. When there were a lot, the first sort was simply: “on nice paper, not on nice paper.” The folks with their resume printed on standard printer paper were instantly disqualified. Mortifying when you think about it, especially in the context of removing bias.

AI Evaluating Resumes

AI is essentially creating this same sub-standard selection process as “fancy paper” or “no fancy paper” judgements. Many recruiters are doing that same first step now. If the resume looks the same as everyone else aka it’s AI-generated? You’re disqualified.  While it is destroying career aspirations, it’s also doing something very important: helping some of us take a step back to ask if resumes are the best way to evaluate skills in the first place.

The practice of evaluating a resume is inherently biased. That’s why so many companies try to create tech around “blind resumes” and other variations on the topic. It’s all biased - the obvious and more subtle. As much as sorting by paper weight is an obvious bias, the part we talk about less is how people learn to write a resume. If you were taught or could afford to have someone write it for you? You're privileged.

Those simple techniques you learned or paid someone to include are exactly what help people get in the door - not necessarily your ability to do the job. Just a better piece of paper. That wouldn’t matter as much if we selected some candidates without resumes. But the reality is that most application processes still start with some version of “submit your resume.” But should they?

If The Resume Is Dead, Let's Not Bring It Back

Personally, I think not. LinkedIn was supposed to kill the resume. I even worked at a company with that tagline - killing the resume! Neither worked, as you know. Back then when I would suggest we get rid of the resume, the follow up was something along the lines of: "with what?"

This might sound old school of me, but I think the answer is an application. You heard me. An old-school application. No, this is not “upload your resume then fill out a questionnaire where you copy and paste all the answers in your resume into fields.” I want an application that actually asks questions to understand if a person is qualified beyond listing out work experience. That’s the benefit of the application to me: you get the answers to the questions you actually need, not what they think you want to hear.

I’d love to see a question and answer format where you explicitly ask people to tell you the experience they have that will help them do certain tasks. Keep it short. Keep it simple. Create clear pass/fail criteria to remove bias. Voila. All your problems solved. (Note sarcasm.)

Removing Bias While Using AI

This isn’t a one size fits all answer (most aren’t in recruiting), but for those of you struggling with a high volume of unqualified applicants because of AI bots? This might be it. I love this option because it gives people a chance to explain more. Plus, it lets your hiring manager compare candidates one to one on the same factors vs comparing two resumes that have completely different origin stories (and implied, privileges).

So if you’re looking for a way to remove bias and use AI to hire, maybe it’s time to automate the old school application. Keep it simple and keep it consistent. Let’s (finally) kill the biased resume review process.