Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

These arguments that the only worthy developers have tons of public facing open source projects are tiresome.<p>Probably less than 1% of developers have GitHub repos and there's no correlation between skill level and having a GitHub repo.<p>If you have extensive and current open source contributions, for most people it means you're unemployed, or you're violating your employer's contract terms.<p>Evaluating a GitHub repo for a summary of skills in not a trivial task, as scanning a resume is.<p>When all of your work is online, it suggests you are not spending much time contributing value to whoever is employing you.<p>Companies that can't find developers often have bizarre and useless criteria such as "must have GitHub repository" or "must have LinkedIn" or "must have FaceBook", none of which is correlated with ability.<p>We hire lots of capable people without GitHub repositories.

All my work is on code I don't own and isn't public facing. I can't take our proprietary code, wrap it up, and put it on GitHub. I also can't provide logins to our proprietary systems for employers to look at.<p>I certainly hope a resume remains relevant for people in my position, because it's really all I have.

A resume is a listing of what you have done in your life that could be relevant to the job you are applying for. If that is an online course and a couple of open source projects, then this can be just as helpful to your future employer as a list of companies you have worked for.<p>To resume means to summarize. Your GitHub profile is not a summary, it is a raw dump of everything that you have done without weighting.<p>So, of course a resume is still relevant today. And it is still up to the applicant to present himself to the employer, because most of the time the applicant is looking for a specific job when the company is not looking for a specific employee.

For what its worth, one of the last hardware devs we hired happened exclusively online. We were adding some biometric hardware to our current software stack and came across a small project online of someone who wrote a java library for the hardware in question.<p>After a series of emails, we proposed that we should pay him a few months consulting fee - to help us integrate. As a bonus of course, he could take the improvements and fold them back into his his open-source project.<p>Things continued like this and eventually he proved useful in other ways, so he is permanent hire now.<p>In this day and age, there really is no excuse for having "no experience" (in the software world at least). Moreover, who really cares about what university you went to if you can prove your immediate usefulness in other ways?

Some of the most interesting developers can't talk about what they've done.<p>You'll never see the flight computer system of an F-16, but it's probably a much cooler project to work on than an iPhone app. Or nuclear reactor engineering.<p>Is a resume relevant in this day and age? As a device to portray the best of what you've accomplished yes. For a few people, the answer will be no, that's best done through portfolios like github and open source projects.<p>In the end, everything old will be new again but with a twist.

Employers will not retire resumes because they know better than anyone else that online activity is classified as marketing rather than individual achievement. If you generate this kind of online activity, good for you, it makes it <i>easier</i> to find a job or to sell a product. It may even replace a traditional job. But having a degree from a top university, having a position in a well know company, receiving a prize recognized in the industry, these are things that really count as achievement. Unless you're talking about internet marketing positions, these are the things that really matter to an employer.

I work for a company that makes recruiting products to fortune 500 companies. They don't offer online courses to cashiers working for big retailers, or to truck drivers working for transportation companies.<p>Jobs at technology companies might be what ArsTechnica and Hacker News readers go for, but those jobs are such a small percentage of the jobs filled every day in the US.

I am actually a fan of well written resumes. The problem is that a resume is not a CV or even a listing of all skills/qualifications of an applicant. A resume should be a highlight reel of the skills/experience/qualifications of the applicant THAT PERTAIN TO THE JOB BEING APPLIED FOR. The cover letter then explains how those skills go together and what the applicant is looking for. Github, open source projects, web sites, examples, etc. are supporting evidence once they've gone from an unqualified lead to a qualified lead. But that's the difference that people seem to forget, a large majority of job positions are filled from unqualified leads and spending 20 minutes per applicant with nothing indicating they even have the minimal skills necessary.

<i>"The problem is that I have no idea how to tell employers that those (SO, GH, etc) are the places to look if they want an accurate description of what I can do."</i><p>So you are looking for a concise and centralized resource for listing your qualifications for a job. And you are asking if a resume is still relevant? It seems like the way to tell employers about your github, SO, udacity, etc, profiles is to list them on your resume.

As someone who screens a lot of resumes; it's a good short overview and it's relevant. Github/open source projects/online qualifications don't show all there is to experience. Sure if someone started a bunch of projects to try to right the wrongs in the software world then this is a good sign. But if that person doesn't have or believes he/she doesn't need a resume then that's not a good sign. A resume is often a first line of defense; there will be a stack of them and those are screened pretty quickly at most companies. Something needs to attract enough attention to even <i>check out</i> your github and online qualifications. Your github account right there in your list mobile/email/skype/github is a pre, even if it's empty though :)

GitHub et al only provide a very small part of what I'm looking for on a CV/Resume. It's an vital small part - but a small part nevertheless.<p>The biggest unanswered questions I'm trying to figure out are:<p>* what value are you going to bring to the organisation (from the value you demonstrate bringing to your previous positions)<p>* how well you're going to fit into the team (from how you talk about your previous roles)<p>* how well you understand the position and the organisation (from how you target the information you present)<p>GitHub et al don't really help with these much.<p>What GitHub et al do is make fact checking / reference chasing easier. You include some links to github and lanyrd and your background looks more credible - but by themselves they're not going to get you the job.

As one data point: a resume has never been relevant to my career. I've never gotten a job or a contract through a resume.<p>Completed live projects instantly visible on any browser or smartphone with a quick technical explanation have always been far more valuable for me.<p>You don't need to ask anyone's permission to build amazing software.<p>(Unfortunately, you continue to need permission to build many other things.)

A London-based start-up is working on future-facing CVs. The premise is you say what you're going to do, and then do it. Over time you build up something stronger, with social proof. It's called WikiCV: <a href="http://WikiCV.me" rel="nofollow">http://WikiCV.me</a>

How many people can look at a github project and tell how good a coder you are, how well you work with others, what sort of team you mesh well with, what industries you've worked in and so on?<p>And how many of those people are the ones making hiring choices?

This is exactly why we started Entelo. We felt that online sources are quickly becoming the "new resume" and that if you draw the trend lines on the data, if it's not obvious now, it will be very soon. Remember, none of the sites referenced in the post (Github, Stack, Coursera, etc.) existed five years ago. What will exist five years from now?<p>Also, an emerging trend is "Github for X". You have sites like Grabcad (Github for Mechanical Engineers), Dribbble and Behance (Github for Designers), Benchling (Github for Biology), Proformative (Github for Accountants), etc. As these professional communities grow they'll increasingly be looking at by employers.<p>It's early for this trend but we believe deeply in it.