Demise of the HTML resume

Online job hunting is changing for information technology professionals, and the traditional resume may fall victim to that change. Recruiters who work for career-related Web sites say the trend is to have applicants fill out profiles, which are more useful than resumes.
"The profile is really where the industry is headed," says John Elliott, director of customer fulfillment systems at Alternative Resources Corp., a Barrington, Ill.-based company that places IT contractors.
"The profile results in a resumelike data source that is much more detailed in specific skills and competencies and gives the recruiter a consistent format that matches tightly with the requirements of customer companies," he says.
That's not to say that the e-mail resume is dead. Profiles are just catching on, and most online IT job-seekers still post resumes on Web sites or e-mail them to recruiters. But recruiters say the new cousin of the traditional e-mail resume, the HTML resume, which comes complete with links and graphics, is a step in the wrong direction for IT job applicants.
Recruiters say they don't like resumes created with the Internet programming language HTML because the format takes too long to read. Also, the use of links requires that a recruiter go to the trouble of visiting a Web site to see information that should have been included in the resume.
"When you are a recruiter, your life is filled with resumes," says Michael Forrest, president of Indianapolis-based JobOptions LLC, which runs the resume-posting site www.joboptions.com. "A lot of it becomes homework, and recruiters sit at home, having a beer while paging through resumes, trying to screen people out," Forrest says.
"What they want to be able to do is jump quickly to the applicant's most recent position, then jump over to the educational information," he adds. "The more variance there is from a standard resume, the more difficult it is to compare apples to apples."
Others agree. "The HTML resume is often no better than a resume presented in Word or regular ASCII text. It doesn't benefit us as recruiters," says Pam Parker, a human resources consultant at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Career Central Corp., which operates the site www.careercentral.com.
"The reality is that most recruiters aren't there yet for HTML," says Joel Wilkinson, chief career-development specialist at New York-based Career Experience Corp., which offers career advice to IT job applicants. Parker and Wilkinson say no more than 10% of the resumes they see are written in HTML.
Technical Difficulties
Recruiters say job applicants gain nothing by demonstrating their prowess with