The Modern Resume: The Digital Age

The birth of the internet in the 1990s and the death of the fax machine acted as a catalyst for the evolution of the resume, once again, for job seekers and career switchers. The dot com boom and the birth of electronic mail made way for sites like Career Builder and Monster and gained extreme popularity in the general public. Job seekers now had an easier way to publicize their resume without taking out an ad in the local paper. C-Suite executives and skilled professionals who were in high demand, now had the luxury of posting their resumes online for recruiters and headhunters to find. All they had to do was sit back and wait. The idea of “passive candidates” and the term “purple squirrel”, which describes an individual with the right amount of education and experience along with any licenses or certifications recognized in their field, developed from resumes that had been uploaded to the ether and never removed. Often times these candidates are already employed, yet open to new opportunities. Hiring managers would contact these employed individuals enticing them with more pay and better benefits from the pool of circulated resumes that continues to grow daily on the internet. Job seekers also could now email their resumes to hiring managers and organizations that were looking to “go green” and save on paper as an overhead expense or an operating cost. To this day, email remains the most common way to give your resume to a potential employer.

At the start of the 21st century, resumes saw further evolution and development on the internet. Social media became a unique way to network with people and circulate resumes differently. In 2003, LinkedIn, a professional social media platform, was born and revolutionized job seeking and career switching. Starting with only 100,000 users its’ first year, LinkedIn grew at an astounding rate of 960% in the first five years to over 17 million users. In the beginning of 2020, LinkedIn recorded user numbers breaking the 650 million mark. That’s roughly 25% of Facebook’s 2.7 billion users, twice the population of the United States and right around 8% of the total world population. However, there are only about 250 million active monthly users. Still significant enough to be considered a valuable tool for the hiring and professional market. LinkedIn allows users to post their resume and skills online without needing to travel to companies to hand out their resumes. They can connect and network directly with decision makers and other prominent users who are actively contributing to their field.  Without a doubt, LinkedIn has become a vital tool for professionals all over the world to network with and gain employment faster. As websites grew in popularity and demand in the 90s and early 2000s, resume building websites started popping up and assisting job seekers in designing beautifully crafted resumes that were professional and impactful. These resume building sites not only helped create a standard, but also gave job candidates a much higher chance of being selected for hire. By 2010, virtual portfolios were used in combination with resumes.

Resumes have certainly evolved over the years and today they circulate in digital form. They are definitely a crucial part of the hiring process and now, more than ever, they are used to help organize potential employees, typically when a large number of candidates have applied at the same time. They are screened by applicant tracking systems for relevant keywords and precise information and are given a more intense look at a later time based on the department’s sense of urgency to fill the role.

With the invention of paper, it became a lot simpler for someone to advertise their skills and accomplishments. With the invention of the internet, resume submissions were now just a click away. Throughout history, people have sought out innovative ways to gain employment. Although the resumes have evolved quite a bit over the last few decades, they hold firm as the standard for differentiating skills and work experience in hopes of getting a job.