How much is an Old Resume Worth?
How many candidate resumes do you have on file? Probably a lot. How old are they though? Ah ha, therein lies the problem. Many recruiters don’t even bother checking their internal ATS for candidates because the data they have on candidates is often 3,5 or even 10 years old. Most people will have significantly progressed their career and skill sets in that timeframe so that old resume on file will certainly not tell the whole story of that person today. Would you want someone evaluating you for a current position based on your resume from 5 years ago, or 10? Me neither.
While at SHRM 2011, I spoke to a seasoned recruiter who specialized in a particular niche field. We were discussing sourcing strategies and mentioned he had over 10,000 resumes on file. “That’s a fairly large candidate pool” I said. He responded, “yeah, but 8-9,000 of those are so old, the contact information often isn’t even valid, let alone their skills sets.” So in reality, he only had about 1-2,000. He realized long ago that old out-of-date resumes aren’t worth much.
I disagree. Sort of!
While I agree that a stale resume doesn’t provide much value for a recruiter, given the right technology, it does contain enough information to easily find more. A tool like our extended profile builder reads information such as name, location, some previous employers, schools attended etc. (things that will be found on even an old resume) and goes out and automatically finds all other relevant and current information. It will search the open web, LinkedIn, blogs, Twitter, etc. and create a fully up-to-date profile of that candidate.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an up-to-date profile for everyone in your ATS?