You can ask this simple question many times and will receive many different answers. As it turns out, a simple document outlining your career history and skills means very different things to different people in different stages of their lives. We at Resumeble can roughly divide them into three categories: Skeptics, Dreamers, and Realists.
Skeptics:
Let’s start with the Skeptics. I am sure most of the readers have at least one or two people in their network or among their friends whose reaction to “I need to upgrade my resume” would be something like “No-one reads resumes any more” or “It’s an outdated concept”, or even “Connections decide everything. My friend John got this great job at (insert any Fortune 500 company) because his dad knew the Vice President”, and so on. Skeptics don’t see the value of a well-written resume, or any resume for that matter. In their opinion, it’s the connections, networking, and the LinkedIn profile that decide the ultimate outcome. For now, they constitute the smallest number of the employee force but are growing. The more Gen Z kids graduate college and enter the workforce (especially, in the developed Western countries), the more their views on the use of technology permeate the public opinion. You don’t need a boring black & white mundane resume, they say. If you absolutely must, make it creative, make it stand out, make yourself noticeable. Honest to God's advice: Don’t! Don’t record a song or a video, or upload a presentation. Do not read all those stories about “How I got hired with a creative resume” and think that it’s so commonplace. Put yourself into the recruiter’s shoes. You are sitting day in and out at your desk scrolling through thousands of resumes. You have only 10–15 seconds to form an opinion, you want to see crisp, well-formatted, brief documents that tell you about who the applicant is in those precious ten seconds. If you open a file and suddenly see flashing graphs, embedded images, or colorful font, it’s amusement and irritation that will become the prevailing emotions. You don’t want that.
The second group within Skeptics would be the baby-boomers, who are simply not used to a frequent job change or to marketing themselves. They’ve been told that bragging is bad, and that showing off brings nothing but embarrassment. I’ve recently had a fascinating conversation with a lady who for many years worked at the same company, airline to be more specific. She had her resume done by a professional resume writer, and once it was ready, she didn’t recognize herself in those pages! She didn’t realize that her skills could be presented as they had been. She didn’t even know what she was worth on the job market, or what value she could add to her future employer. It’s actually one of the most common kinds of feedback we receive from our baby-boomer clients “I didn’t know I can do all of that!”.
In short: don’t be afraid to market yourself, and don’t think that a resume is an outdated notion. There have been many attempts to disrupt the recruitment process including online job market places, LinkedIn, templated resume samples, and so on. However, until now, recruiters still prefer a simple black & white well-written customized resume to learn more about a candidate.
Dreamers:
If dealing with skeptics requires a great deal of convincing and setting examples, dealing with dreamers is infinitely more exhausting. Who are they? Dreamers are the category of people who think of a resume as a magic wand, a super-pill, an answer to all their questions, a Genie to their career troubles. Dreamers will demand impossible things from their resume and will get mad if it doesn’t get them where they want to be. They often lack the ability to set realistic expectations and make several crucial mistakes:
- They aim too high. If you have only a few years of experience in a particular niche or industry, don’t apply for a manager or c-level role in companies like Google or Facebook and then get disappointed that you were not hired.
- They over-research what a resume should be, and often throw around phrases like ATS-optimization or CAR-formatted resume (Challenge — Action — Result) without understanding the final outcome.
- They don’t value networking at all. They think that meeting people face-to-face, attending networking events (and wearing name badges? Oh no!), approaching recruiters directly is all part of the old-school hiring process.
- They value quantity over quality. Why customizing a resume or a cover letter for different companies and positions if you can spam recruiters with the same file at a much faster rate? Not customizing your resume doesn’t work. Sending out cookie cutter cover letter with overused buzzwords only pisses recruiters off. Job search is always quality over quantity.
A few words of advice: set realistic expectations, keep dreaming but make sure your goals are achievable, actively network, and never spam recruiters.
Realists:
This is what you should strive to become when it comes to deciding where your resume stands. Realists don’t put all of their eggs (career goals) in one basket (their resume). They know that networking is important, especially if you are looking to join a Fortune 500 company, change countries or industries, look for a C-level position, or want to apply for a competitive internship. They customize their resumes, send out a maximum of 2–3 applications a day, and know what an ATS-optimized resume looks like or who to ask if they need this information. These are our favorite clients. They hire our writers not because they want to outsource the mundane, dull, or difficult task of writing their resume. They come to us because they are busy with their careers and don’t have time to spend several days or weeks crafting a resume. Or because they have so much experience they need help sorting it out. Sometimes, these are professionals who are moving countries and need little help fitting their resume to the new country’s job market. And finally, they understand the value of an independent third-party evaluation of their resume.
Whatever category you fall under, remember one thing: your resume is a marketing document whose goal is to market yourself as a professional in today’s competitive recruitment environment. It’s neither a magic wand nor a useless piece of paper. So, be brief, clear, and honest, and you will do just fine!
