Practice XYZ Blog Farewell to Resumes

Is the resume becoming a thing of the past? Tufts Medical Center certainly thinks so. Instead of focusing solely on work experience, Tufts has recently started offering skills assessment tests to job applicants. The test, called “Core Score” and developed in partnership with Innovate+Educate, involves patient and workplace scenarios and “shows how well a person thinks and how well [they] can react to certain situations,” which helps the hospital “understand where people’s strengths might be.” Tufts is not alone in offering skills assessments: other employers are also broadening “their pools of job candidates by paying more attention to skills.” By focusing on skills, the pool of candidates widens to include the unemployed or those who have been out of work for some time. Tufts VP of Human Resources, Sean T. Sullivan, said “college degrees have not been a good proxy for gauging if a person is likely to have good customer service skills, or can readily adapt as situations change.” By prioritizing skills over experience, says Innovate+Educate founder and CEO Jamai Blivin, businesses have a “big potential payoff”: “if they hire people well suited to a particular job, they will retain more employees and spend less time and money on hiring in the long run.”