Tired of the Resume Do’s and Don’t articles and lists and GTD crap?

When you first start working you merely need to fill out an
application with your scarce job history in order to land a job. As you gain more experience, education and
start working your way up the work ladder hierarchy (see pic below from BrainStuck
)you start using the resume
to land a job. You use the resume to get
the interview and then usually the company still wants you to fill out the job
application form. They want all of your
information in the same format so they can easily compare attributes. If they could automate the entire process
they would. As you progress up the work
ladder hierarchy along with the resume and application form you are requested to provide three
references along with a cover letter.

With more progression comes more tweaking. Those references, now they have to be
industry specific or they want specifically someone you worked for or someone
who worked for you. The more progress up
the ladder the more complex the process becomes. If you are starting to wonder how relevant it
is to job you are applying for; it is probably not. Mostly it begins to answer their questions of
if we hire this person will they follow directions and jump through hoops and
give us what we expect.

I have read many a “Do s and Don’t s “ list regarding resume
writing and how to land that job. The majority
of them I have found to be vague and non specific in their advice. I understand what they are writing about in a
general sort of way. I realize that they
are writing from the perspective and person who receives hundreds of resumes
and these are all of the things that stand out to them. But as they are writing to an audience of
people who prepare their own resume and probably only compare it to 5 friends
if they are lucky, it becomes hard to decipher their vague advice. How do you know what “stands out” or what is
an appropriate risk to take in order to “stand out in a good way”.

While it is not all a crap shoot in the dark the best advice
is to cater your resume to the job you are applying for. Basically this means you need to do a lot of
background research on the company and the job you are going after. The resume you can then probably pull
together in about an hour but all of the networking and investigative research
that you need to do before you prepare that resume, cover letter and prep
references can take a long time.

It is not really about the resume at all.

This post was inspired by Chris Guillebeau’s recent post on
The Art of Nonconformity: 15 Resume Mistakes That Will Cost You a Job. His was one of the more insightful articles regarding
resume advice.