The Death of the Resume?
Recently, I looked at my resume and decided the design I had chosen was stale and border-line cheesy. So yesterday, while at lunch with a co-worker, I came up with a new design for my resume. After putting together a first pass, I was showing it to my co-worker when someone else said this:
Why are putting so much effort into your resume? You know almost everyone who looks at it won’t care, right?
Now, on the surface that sounds cold and cynical, but he has a point. Most companies look at hundreds of resumes a day, potentially more. To expedite their screening process, these companies want submitted resumes to be in a specific format (no doubt one that’s easy to skim and ‘get the gist’).
So how does this quantity-over-quality policy affect me? The more I think about it, the more I realize that it doesn’t, or shouldn’t. A company that treats applicants like a burden is not a company that appeals to me; applicants aren’t cattle to be given the once-over and rated based on the number of keywords they can shove into a single page of pre-formatted 10pt Arial.
A resume can give you an insight into the applicant you may not get otherwise, and I would hate to see a company overlook someone who put great effort into their resume (and would likely put similar effort into their work) simply because the company couldn’t skim the resume.
