Earlier this year, Tyler Sorenson took an old-school approach to landing a job. He walked into a brick-and-mortar tech repair company, handed them an unsolicited paper resume, and hoped for the best.
"I literally just had to walk into that store and hand them an actual résumé for them to even take a look at me,” he told Business Insider. “I got a call a week later where they were asking me to formally apply.”
Prior to the paper resume debacle, Sorenson, like many job seekers, had become frustrated with the state of hiring. He was hearing about understaffed businesses and seeing plenty of companies post job openings online, but he couldn't get anyone to look at his resume or initiate an interview.
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As hiring has slowed and AI has become a staple in the process, job hunting has become increasingly frustrating. As a result, people on both sides of the process have begun to resort to retro methods for finding that perfect candidate or position.
Hatim Rahman, an associate professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University, told Business Insider that AI has made hiring "a cat and mouse game." With candidates using bots to mass-apply for roles and employers using AI to screen and even interview potential hires, it can be hard to gauge who the quality candidates may be.
As a result, Rahman says he's seen a push from both candidates and employers toward finding "more human signals in both the process of searching and applying.”
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Cindy Meis, director of undergraduate career services at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business, says that for many companies, this looks like showing preference to candidates who have had "multiple touchpoints" with their business.
“You have to keep going to the career fair, you have to go to that tabling event in order to stand out and reintroduce yourself to those recruiters and have those connections within the organization,” Meis told the website. “You used to be able to do that with a cover letter.”
Victoria Thomas, chief business officer of Kellymoss, a Porsche customization and racing company, has also taken a more retro approach to hiring. She told Business Insider that she regularly flies candidates out to the company's Wisconsin office to ensure they actually have the skills and work style required for the role.
"We also very much rely on referrals,” Thomas said. “When you have somebody that has a willingness to put their personal name behind someone, so a technician referring a friend, there’s a larger success rate.”
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Of course, these old-school applying and hiring methods are still very much in the minority. However, as companies continue to deal with a veritable firehose of applications, and applicants struggle to make it past the AI guards, they could become more commonplace.
Nastashia Wali, director of the front office at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, says that she now prefers receiving paper resumes to online applications, as it shows "eagerness and extra effort."
“When the team gives me a résumé, the first thing I ask is what stood out about the candidate and how their demeanor was,” she told Business Insider. “If the team notices something, I usually pick up on it too — whether they seemed off, friendly and talkative, or made any other distinct impression.”
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