Why Requiring a Resume is now a Roadblock to Hiring Referrals

This is a new twist. I have been saying for several years now that recruiters and hiring managers are looking in Linkedin first for potential hires and then Google searches. They bypass resume searches out of their own website databases in favor of prowling through online profiles. 

Now some HR experts, notably the esteemed Dr. John Sullivan,  have realized to require an employee to submit someone's resume to make an employee referral is a really dumb idea. And he tells you in this article all the good reasons why. 

Time to just burn that resume and build a professional website instead? I think so.

Why “Name-only” Employee Referrals Produce Dramatic Results
by Dr. John Sullivan Oct 29, 2012, 5:42 am ET

Employee referrals provide the highest quality and the highest volume of hires, but you won’t receive as high a level of results if you don’t minimize roadblocks to referrals. Requiring a current resume for employee referrals is a major “under-the-radar” detriment to reaching the goal of having referrals exceed 50% of all hires.

 Requiring a resume to start a referral process might not seem like a big deal (because the resume is “the currency” of recruiting) but it can be. Although “active candidates” all have current resumes, employed people who are not actively looking (some people call thempassives) don’t have an updated resume available and they may have little interest in creating one.

Requiring an updated resume in order to move forward slows down and occasionally stops employee referral efforts. Consider an alternative approach, which is offering an option to employees, so that all they must submit is a prospect’s name and contact information in order to begin the referral process. This approach is known as a “name-only” referral.
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Interesting testimonial as part of the article on the problems of hiring the hard to find candidate.