Why Skills Shouldn’t Be Just a P.S. on a Resume
ENTREPRENEUR | KELLY PALMER
“When I was creating the learning organization at LinkedIn, I needed to hire someone who would excel at coding and web development. After we posted the job, countless resumes came pouring in. Many candidates had engineering degrees from impressive universities and job titles similar to what I was hiring for.
The guy I ended up hiring, however, had neither of those things. He studied neuroscience in college. He then went into sales and worked his way up to become a coach. In that position, he spotted some limitations in Google Sheets which, if fixed, could help sales teams do better. So, he set about learning to code on his own, and applied those skills by creating a new calculator app to help the teams.
If I had been following traditional protocol for how to hire, I likely would never have even seen this candidate’s resume. For decades, businesses have often insisted that candidates have degrees in certain fields and years of experience with certain keywords in their titles, to whittle down resumes. If you didn’t have these, you’d find it much tougher to even be considered for a position.
It’s time for those days to end.”
beyond mairs 