Chris Rickborn (COO and co-founder of Unrabble) wrote ‘The Cloud Will Kill The Resume, And That’s a Good Thing’:

“I was recently going through an old banker’s box that I packed up years ago while I was cleaning out my office. (…) Every gadget I found in that box had evolved or been replaced by some new innovation. (…) Only the folder of resumes stood out as the unchanged medium.”

It baffles him how resumes are still typed out in the same format it was 30 years ago and then printed, emailed or uploaded.

“As more and more of us place our trust in cloud-based services to manage our lives or interact via social media, that information will ultimately be cultivated and harnessed to replace your resume.”

Rickborn names Sites like LinkedIn, BeKnown and BranchOut, and About.me as the new cover letter. He sees great potential in Vizualize.me and Re.vu as more visual (‘infographic-style’) representations of your career biography. After stating the obvious…

“(…) presents a huge opportunity for improving the hiring process for both the candidate and employer. Candidates can provide a much more comprehensive view of their skills, potential and accomplishments while employers can avoid getting swayed by clever resume writing or overlook qualified candidates in a haze of sameness. Profiles represent a massive gain in connecting the right candidates to employers in ways that could have never happened with a traditional resume.”

… Rickborn admits that the online services out there lack some very important features. Like the possibility to customize your resume for each job opportunity. Plus, candidates might be reluctant to put all of their career details in a (public!) profile, afraid to lose control.

Yet, an online resume, in the so-called cloud, has it’s many upsides. Ratings and reviews on candidates gathered through online tools (like Peerz ofcourse ) can give employers a much better consensus of how strong or weak each applicant is. Then, ‘a stack of paper resumes on your office desk with notes scribbled on them to indicate the best candidates’ isn’t going to help much when you’re, well, not at your desk. Furthermore the cost and time-saving benefits of a cloud computing solution ‘far outweighs the current hiring process that has one hand tied behind its back because of the paper resume’.

There you go.