You’ve probably spent hours on your resume over the past few years.  Now is the time to stop. Make it a New Year’s resolution if you like.  Resumes are going the way of the dinosaur for the modern professional. Not because the information on the resume isn’t valuable, but because the information should be gleaned much easier via LinkedIn.

Personal aside: when I review candidates, I take the name from the resume and copy/paste it into LinkedIn and review the candidates there, discarding or possibly never even reviewing the resume.  I’ve spoken to a number of recruiting professionals who are doing the exact same thing.

Why?  Many reasons, but let’s start with these three:

1. The LinkedIn format is generally consistent across all candidates, regardless of position, background, and education.  I can quickly and easily glean the information I want and need related to background, tenure, and role. And compare that against other candidates.
2. In this day and age, most recruiters don’t care if candidates have an updated formal resume document – the people they want to hire, particularly for key positions, likely don’t keep up an up to date resume because they know that you are looking for them, vs. them looking for you.  It’s simply not a priority in their day-to-day.
3. Particularly for sales professionals, if your LinkedIn presence stands out it’s validating evidence that you are embracing modern selling, as prospects will research the seller and his/her company.  Mediums like LinkedIn are more and more involved in sales processes via engagement with prospects, research, etc.

If this is news to you, it’s probably time to go update your LinkedIn profile, and if there is something that would be important enough to put on your resume, put it on LinkedIn, but don’t feel the need to get into every detail.

Remember, LinkedIn, just like the resume before it, will not get you the job.  It’s simply a path to get your foot in the door of the interview process.

It’s on you from there!