An Aleatoric Harangue

Resume Writing 101

I look at anywhere between 50 and 100 resumes on a daily basis for a variety of positions. About 99% of these are for IT positions ranging from low-level help desk positions to CIOs and CTOs of companies. They vary in size, length, content, and format and there is no real standard out there on how to make one. One thing remains constant, however; if I look at 10 resumes and 3 are formatted in a meaningful manner, it is a good day. That means that 70% of the resumes that I view on the job boards, through referrals, through applications, or any other sources have done an ineffective job of marketing themselves. Seventy Percent! That’s astonishing to me that it is a good day for me if only 70% are failing at self-promotion.

The sad thing to me is that it is really not the difficult to create at least a decent resume. Now I don’t claim to be the authority on this subject, just someone who has seen enough to offer some suggestions that people may or may not find helpful. I just can no longer idly stand by and watch people hurt their own chances at their dream jobs and I decided it was time to try and get out there and help. That being said, I’ve decided to use my daily experiences as a staffing specialist to try and create a series on resume creation. If you choose to take any advice I give, please let me know if it helps you at all or if you have any ways that I can refine my advice. Again, I don’t claim to be the expert and I know that there are still things I need to learn.

Let’s start things off by discussing what a resume is and why we need one if we hope to acquire a new position. This is especially important in an economy such as this one where employers generally have the upper hand. A resume is a piece of marketing material. It is the first thing that a potential employer looks at to become acquainted with potential new hires. The point of it is to give a high level overview of a person’s professional accomplishments in hopes of enticing a hiring manager to want to know more. The why should be fairly obvious to most people. We each have a resume because we are trying to market ourselves and the skills that we can bring to a company.

A lot of people will tell me that they have been using the same resume for a number of years and that they have always eventually found a position with it. That’s awesome and I don’t doubt it. My question to them is, “which opportunities did you miss out on?” You never know who passed on you solely because of your resume. If it’s hard to read or the content is not meaningful or there is just too much on there to manage, you don’t know who skipped you and felt that way and you may have missed the perfect job. That $1 million salary position working as a roller coaster tester in Disneyland could have slipped right through your resume’s fingers! Okay, so there is no million dollar roller coaster tester at Disneyland, but you get my point.

Someone once explained resume to me by comparing the individual to a company. Any company out there trying to sell anything has some sort of mechanism to convey to its consumers precisely what it offers. Now that sales person may be able to convince you that their laptop or watch or whatever is the best one that you can buy once you are in front of them. However, if you are trying to narrow your search based on the information they have on their website, are you going to go for the one sentence description or the detailed description with pictures and an interactive tour? I go for the details and pictures because I want to know my product before I even step in the store. A resume is the same thing. You may be the best interviewee on the face of the planet and you can land any position you interview for. But if your resume is that one-pager that gives no detail of your work history and doesn’t paint a picture of your skills, why should I call you over someone else?

Now we at least know what a resume is and why we need one. I feel that this is true across industry, whether you work with IT folks like myself or with lawyers, nurses, teachers, or ditch diggers, I feel this is an appropriate and accurate definition of what a resume is. The next post will be about the common myths I hear and see with resumes that are just not true any more.