That may seem like an obvious beginning, but as it turned out, such a study had never been reported before. Such inquiries had been made previously of personnel men, employment managers, and placement agencies, most of whom were concerned with filling jobs in the lower income brackets. Worse, for my purpose, was the fact that these men were rarely in a position to follow the progress, or the lack thereof, of the men they placed. They knew where the men had come from, but seldom where they were going.
The 18 executives working with me were united in taking an opposite view. Their concern was with what a man could do; not with what he had done. To a man they agreed that they could not get that information from the standard application form. Most of them complained of their inability to get good men through their own personnel offices or through agencies.
And then I got the lead I was looking for. Said one executive, "I can't blame the applicants coming to see me. We've put the emphasis on experience for so long that that's what they've been trained to talk about. I want people with drive and ambition who know where they're going. What I get are people who know where they've been. We need something to shake them up and start them thinking about the future. That's all they've got left to sell, and sure as shooting, that's all we want to buy."
Right then I set out to develop a form of presentation that would show where a man was going, and support it with proof of his ability to get there. It began with the procedures already described in the chapters on Dynamic Success Factors and Functional Self-Analysis and followed through with development of what has since come to be called the Directed Resume, designed to supplant the obituary-type resume. In manual form, this work was recommended by the Federal Government for use by returning military officers throughout the country. Its success led in turn to an invitation from the Harvard
Business School for me to serve as a consultant there and add further refinements to the work. Since then, with only such modifications as are needed to meet special requirements, the Directed Resume has proved its value many thousand times.
Now to get down to cases. The only reason for writing a resume is to further your progress through moving to another company that offers greater opportunity. That means you have to know where you are going, and have confidence in your ability to get there. Remember the old saw, "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."
Possibly you can arrange your move through contacts and job interviews, but even under these circumstances your interviewer is apt to ask for a resume, "to pass around to the others who will need to know who you are." That means that your resume will have to serve as your salesman when you aren't present to talk for yourself. You want your personality in it; not your professional obituary.
By tradition the, standard resume is little more than an elaboration of the standard application form. The unoriginal thinking behind this is based on the supposition that because most companies have come to accept the obituary-type application form, most executives must favor that type of resume. But as I have already evidenced, most executives are thinking about the future. That is what you must plan to sell.
