What is next for the resume?

Is there going to be a new form of resume? Is it going to be the same for all eternity?  Something in between.  Here is the reason I ask this question.

As skills in a workforce goes up, it is going to be harder to quantify all of the skills required to complete in the global economy as an employee.  When you consider a mature employee with 20 years of experience in all sorts of areas, do we simply live with the prospect of leaving this guy out of consideration or do we get a resume that is 20 pages long or is it … something else.

In our interconnected world, someone who is far more brilliant is going to come up with a way to better quantify our experience and to give reliability and meaning to that. Here are my guesses as to what it is not going to be:

1. A resume or any permutation of such as we know it
2. Blogs
3. LinkedIn or other social networking sites
4. CD/Web based powerpoint or flash presentations

I can be convinced otherwise though.  Feel free to link to this, comment here or post this question elsewhere but it is something I am truly curious about and am interested in.

If you feel the need to explain yourself, now is the time to polish your cover letter and stop making it the generic necessity that it always ends up being.  Some recruiters don’t read cover letters anymore.  I do. I love a well written one so much, I am willing to sacrifice myself to the cover letter idiots who write.

Dear Sir or Maddam,

Please accept my resume for the position of [enter title here] advertised in the [enter newspaper name here].  As you’ll see in my resume, I have a wide variety of skills that fits perfectly with this position.

I look forward to speaking to you further on this matter.

Joe Applicant

If that’s what you want to do with your cover letter, just leave it off. The people that do care won’t like you and for the people that don’t care, it will just get in the way. My suggestion is to stick your objective in your cover letter though and customize it for each job you apply for.

Speaking of resumes, those people that have submitted their resumes to me but haven’t heard back from me, I am working through them. I’ve seen some real promise shown.

1.) Keyword spam for applicant tracking systems. If you have a marketing background and you start inserting keywords about administration, operations, finance and human resources, you lose. Keywords should be applicable to your experience.

2.) Ignoring the rules regarding application submission. If you send a fax when I say to e-mail, if you come in when I say to call or if you mail when I say to submit it online, it does make you stick out. Not in a good way though. If you can’t follow instructions, you lose. Note that this does not apply to networking because that has been done well in advance of a position opening up.

3.) Using cheesy attempts to stand out. We’ve seen them all. Yes, all of them. And if you have a new way of surprising me, I doubt it is going to be a good one. Standing out is about putting together a solid resume and networking the hell out of your preferred industry.

And CareerHub emphasizes a point I made in number two: network, network, network. Before you need the job. Before they have the job available. If you don’t do this, you are selling yourself short. It used to be hype or a trend that would die. It isn’t. And it is the key to continuing to move your career in the upward direction.

Search for jobs in London at Canary Wharf Jobs.com.

So here is my grand idea: job seekers can submit their resumes to me and I can take a look at it as an HR guy and offer some uncensored advice to improve it. No charge of course and your privacy and confidentiality are guaranteed (I won’t use it for my business, for personal use, or put you into some brilliant resume database that I could sell to third party recruiters). It is purely for sharpening up your resume and getting a second opinion (or third or fourth). If you are nervous about submitting your information, feel free to censor the identifiable information and let me help you with formatting and wording to sell yourself.
Just to sweeten the pot, I am going to offer the prize of a fantastic book (Get Out of Your Own Way by Robert Cooper) to one lucky resume submission chosen at random.

More details on this can be found on my resume page along with submission instructions.

Please feel free to pass the word to any and all who you think might benefit.

The stack is simply where every resume goes that is not exceptional, that does not catch your interest and does not deserve special attention. It is where EVERY resume goes unless you (the applicant) take time to make it stand out from other applicants.

Simply put, the stack is exactly your least adventageous place to be as a person applying for a job.  It makes you ordinary and boring. How do you get out of the stack? First of all, how not to get into the stack:

• Fancy paper (nobody cares)
• TYPING IN ALL CAPS OR USING BOLD EVERY OTHER WORD
• Telling me how much of a mistake it would be not to hire you
• Horrendous, unavoidable spelling and grammar mistakes
• Filling your resume and cover letter with fluff and convoluted terms
• Long cover letters telling me word for word about your resume
• Long resumes that go into detail from the first time you babysat a kid in 3rd grade
• Super large or small fonts sizes, strange, hard to read fonts
• Cover page, portfolio, folders, graphics, photos, etc…

Those don’t work.  This works though:

• A one paragraph cover letter written specifically for the position telling me precisely what from your background makes you the best candidate for the position
• A one to two page resume written with the intent of conveying the most relevant positions you’ve had in the past
• A cleanly organized, neatly formatted resume that allows me to scan your experience in less than 20 seconds so that I can make a determination that I should read the rest
• The rest is neatly written in a fashion that allows me to get your major job duties after two minutes of reading through it
• Font size between 10 and 12 point, name no larger than 16 point and a standard font (arial and times new roman are the best)

It isn’t easy but getting out of the stack gives you way more opportunties than being stuck in the stack with the other generic cover letters, Microsoft Word default format resume. Take the extra effort and make yourself stick out (in a good way)!

Your resume is in here somewhere. Do you know if it will come out?

More on this later.