How To Land A Job Without A Resume

The most powerful recommendation is always a personal one—a trusted source tells an employer to meet you. See? No resume involved! And no headhunter. You can be your own headhunter, and that’s how to pull it off.

Question: You’re a headhunter who advocates not using a resume to get a job. In fact, you say that the best resume is no resume. Can you tell me how you’re able to present candidates to your clients without the use of resumes?

Nick Corcodilos: It goes like this: A client hires me to fill a certain position. I go find great people, and I present usually between one and four as candidates. These are people who meet the client’s criteria and who get past interviews with me.

I discuss the candidate with the client, and we decide whether to proceed with an interview on the basis of information I’ve gathered and interpreted for the client. If I provide a resume, it’s usually after the interview has already been scheduled. Clients pay me to select the candidates and to explain why they’d be good hires, so why should they waste their time reading resumes?

There’s one thing I do that clients love: I discuss the client’s business with the candidate, and I ask the candidate for his or her thoughts and comments. I then write a report about the discussion and provide it to the client (with the candidate’s permission, of course). That way, the client gets to see what the candidate has to say about issues that are relevant to the client even before the interview. But it’s nothing like a resume. It’s more like a working discussion.

By the way, I don’t solicit resumes while I’m searching for candidates. Instead, I talk with people who know opinion makers in the field. I base my initial candidate selections primarily on the recommendations of these contacts. I rarely see a resume before I talk to the candidate. I call this a preemptive reference check.

After I talk with the candidate, I talk with more people who know them. Then, I might ask for a resume to “fill in the blanks” for information I might not have requested in our discussions. By then, I’ve vetted the candidate, and we’re ready to roll. The client trusts my judgment and interviews the candidate on my opinion. That’s what the client is paying me for. If I don’t get it right, I don’t get any more assignments.

Almost everything happens via person-to-person discussions, not through resumes or other documents. Most of it is by phone, though some is by e-mail. I’ve placed a lot of people without ever seeing their resumes or providing a resume to the employer. Once you get used to this approach, you realize how inaccurate and incomplete even good resumes really are. They’re distracting because they lead you to focus on a person’s history at other companies, when what you should be primarily focused on are the client’s needs. (You can actually write a resume that focuses on the employer rather than on yourself. See “Resume Blasphemy.”)

You might object that you can’t do this for yourself, but that’s wrong. The reason the Ask The Headhunter approach seems daunting to many people is that it requires a lot of work—all the work I’ve described. Instead of a headhunter doing the vetting, however, you would arrange for an “insider” (someone the company trusts) to vet you and introduce you without a resume. That shouldn’t be surprising. It’s called a referral.

The most powerful recommendation is always a personal one—a trusted source tells an employer to meet you. See? No resume involved! And no headhunter. You can be your own headhunter, and that’s how to pull it off.

This is my last column for CMO.com. Thanks for letting me be part of your marketing community! If you’d like to keep reading Ask The Headhunter, sign up for my free weekly newsletter —now at 660 editions and counting—and please stop by www.asktheheadhunter.com .