The CEO of Glassdoor and Indeed's parent company says hiring via resumes is outdated for many industries — and that the labor shortage is a great chance to replace them

• The CEO of Recruit, the owner of Glassdoor and Indeed, said hiring via resumes is outdated for many industries.
• Hisayuki Idekoba said practical assessments would work better for many industries.

Resumes are outdated and should be replaced in many industries, the CEO of the world's largest recruitment group has said.

Hisayuki Idekoba, the CEO of Recruit Holdings Co, the Japanese owner of Glassdoor and Indeed, told Bloomberg that despite struggling to find staff, many small and medium businesses were still trying to recruit workers the way they did a decade ago — by asking them to submit resumes.

He said the labor shortage was a chance to move away from a "resume-profile culture." Resumes could be replaced with questions and assessments to see how a job seeker would handle specific tasks required by the role, he said.

Businesses in the US and beyond complain they're struggling to find staff because of a labor shortage, and some have gone as far as blaming a lack of desire to work. Workers, meanwhile, say they're no longer willing to put up with low-paying jobs — others have retired or are simply rethinking their career.

Idekoba highlighted trucking and hospitality, both industries in which employers say they're struggling to recruit staff.

He told Bloomberg that he'd found one restaurant that hadn't updated its job description for 10 years, and still asked for a college degree.

He also said many truckers don't have a laptop because they're always on the road — so Recruit had started offering what he calls a "chat-based" hiring process in the industry.

Recruit is also working on better training and using tech to identify transferable skills, he said, because "there are a huge amount of people who can't write resumes."

"This is a great opportunity for us to move forward from old-school, incumbent resume-profile culture to asking: what can you do?" he told Bloomberg.

Some companies are getting creative to widen their net and appeal to newer staff, such as accepting TikTok resumes.

Research by Harvard Business School published earlier this year suggested that flaws in automated resume-screening tech is causing millions of workers to be overlooked during the hiring process. The software focused on specific skills listed in the job description, instead of what a person could bring to the role, the research found.

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