Dealing with Resumes in the Age of Digital Job Seeking
Legend has it, that in those long lost, pre-internet days, companies couldn’t hire enough people. In fact, during the industrial revolution, rail-road tycoons had so many job openings and so many people trying to get those jobs that they didn’t know what to do. So they devised a way of boiling a worker down into a single page of paper. From that paper, they could quickly discern who would fill what position. This paper, you might have guessed, was called a resume.
This legend of the origins of the resume implies that the document we rely so heavily on to show off our skills, is really a dinosaur from the industrial age. In a way, your resume is a necessary evil. Or, what I like to tell audiences for a rise, your resume is your obituary. It tells employers what you did, not what you can do for them.
So when a potential employer asks to see your resume, what they may actually mean is, “provide me with some kind of documentation which I can pass on and validate my opinion about you.” They want an opportunity to get to know you better. And just sending them worn out resume could be a mistake.
Here are the functional purposes of a resume in today’s white collar workplace.
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- Occupy a place-marker, a paper voodoo doll of you, on a person’s desk
- Fulfill some kind of process requirement with a company’s HR software
- Allow a hiring manager to quickly assess your skills and abilities
- Provide an easy way to differentiate you among a stack of other candidates
- Allow a corporate recruiter to find a reason NOT to hire you
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So what do you do to make the whole resume thing work in your favor?
The trick is to pay careful attention to the real reason why you are being asked for a resume and then respond according to the actual need. At the end of the day, “Send me your resume” doesn’t always mean you should send them your resume.
Consider sending the following documents instead.
- Craft a gorgeously designed version of your resume with EnhanceCV
- A link to your public LinkedIn Profile, make sure you edit the link first
- An infographic version of that same LinkedIn profile with Visualize.me
- Your blog, if you have one (if you don’t start one!)
Joshua Waldman wrote Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies after being laid off twice in six months (2008–2009). He’s changed careers five times and learned firsthand that technology is the job seeker’s biggest advantage. At CareerEnlightenment he shares what actually works.
Joshua, I think you’re an optimist. I fear that often, those who ask for a resume don’t have any plans for using it . They’re trying to wrap up the conversation as quickly as possible.
Diana
http://StartFreelancingAndConsulting.com
Diana, actually, I don’t really consider myself an optimist. I think I’m practical. It is impossible to generalize that “every time you are asked for a resume you are being blown off” I’m sure this happens, but so does, “Send me your resume so that I can show it to some other people”. You just never know.
So what belief is going to sustain you. The one where you think you are a loser? Or the one where you believe, where you KNOW you are rocken’ it?!
What ever the future of the resume is, job seeker’s can’t go around thinking they are being blown off all the time. This is defiantly not the case. And defaulting to that negative position really doesn’t help anyone.