Resumes... what are they good for?
17 March 2008
Seth Godin has a remarkable post up today. Remarkable because he manages to express an extremely salient point in a space so small I wouldn’t have thought it possible.
The crux of his post is this:
Here’s why: A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, “oh, they’re missing this or they’re missing that,” and boom, you’re out.
Having a resume begs for you to go into that big machine that looks for relevant keywords, and begs for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine. Just more fodder for the corporate behemoth. That might be fine for average folks looking for an average job, but is that what you deserve?
If you don’t have a resume, what do you have?
If you’ve been to university (or perhaps they do this in high schools these days): do you remember that class you took in your senior year where they try to prepare you for your upcoming/ongoing job hunt? You know that class. The one where they beat into your head how not to make a horrible résumé?
They spend so much time focusing on how not to make yourself look like a blathering idiot on a piece of paper that they neglect to tell you what Seth explains so succinctly in his short post. Read that post and think about if your résumé is doing you any favors.
At this point in my life, I feel I could toss the thing and not be any worse. I get and turn down a lot of job offers these days at some really cool places! I’m almost certainly it isn’t because of what I’ve catalogued about my past activities; more likely it’s how I’ve demonstrated my ability to work with others, to express myself in the written word, and to build some cool shit!
1 Comment
#1. wynk posted this 5 months, 1 week ago.
It’s a great idea in theory, but a lot of jobs just don’t lend themselves to that kind of thing. Letters of recommendation, sure. But a sophisticated project they can see or touch? What if what you do doesn’t involve projects? Or what if the project was something in-house that revolutionized the business but isn’t something you can show other people outside of the company? What if you don’t post about work on your blog because you’ve seen too many people get bitten in the ass for it?
I guess my beef with his article is that he assumes that ANY remarkable person that makes a remarkable employee will never work in a job where none of those things he lists are likely or even possible, work for a small, unheard of company, or do something that doesn’t really lend itself to blogging (or at least blogging without actually talking about the company itself). That’s not just reality.