Resume Resumed

I absolutely hate working on my resume. I’m more of a cover page kind of person. In my lifetime, the resume has become so overly complicated that I just didn’t know where to start. So I talked to a friend who knows all about how to write “good” resumes and she let me know that mine was horrible. It’s been a long time since I had seen that many red marks on something I had written.

However, the more she explained all of the places where I had gone wrong the more I started to understand this Matrix level puzzle. My mistake was that I was just listing all of my roles and responsibilities instead of stating why an organization should want to hire me. I wasn’t telling the story of me, I was just rifling off my accomplishments. Imagine going to a storytelling show and the person on stage just starts saying words that seem to be grouped by category. You would leave that venue as fast as possible.

As someone who at times hires new employees you’d think I would have figured this out on my own but I didn’t. The resumes that I tend to gravitate toward are the ones that read more like a story rather than a roll-call. This also makes sense why I enjoy writing cover letters more than resumes. I still don’t have the art of resume writing down completely but my entire perspective has shifted on the process of writing them. From now on I will approach writing them like I approach preparing a short story. I have a limited amount of time to grab and keep the attention of the audience and I hope they are still with me at the end.

All that said, what do resumes actually do? That’s a real question. Why have we not evolved past them yet?