Not by a long shot. Hear me out. No matter how outrageous it sounds, the disquieting truth is resumes no longer work for most job hunters. And they're especially bad for fiftyish job searchers who've had several jobs.
I even wrote an entire myth-busting book surrounding the resume called Resumes Don't Get Jobs: The Realities and Myths of Job Getting. If you still don't believe me, read Robert Hochheiser's Throw Away Your Resume. In 183 pages, Hochheiser says resumes don't work and they're the "worst way to sell your services."
Resumes produce immediate results for maybe 5 percent of job hunters-and that's being generous. But those fortunate job hunters either have perfect backgrounds (they held fast-track jobs in high-demand industries) or simply happen to be in the right place at the right time. Most of us aren't that lucky, because our work histories consist of an odd assortment of related jobs. In Funny Business, humorist Gene Perret summed up the resume this way: "About all one can tell from a resume is that the author either owns a type writer (or computer) or knows someone who does."
So why do we persist in writing resumes? Simply, it's a tradition and such old habits are hard to break. The resume has been elevated to an unquestioned part of the job-hunting routine. It goes part and parcel with getting a spiffy new suit and haircut and boasting a positive attitude. The thinking is; unless your mom or dad runs the company, no employer will talk to you unless you have a resume.
Blame it on human nature, but the fact is change doesn't come easy History is full of incredible examples. Before Columbus set the record straight with his round-world theory, nobody questioned the flat-world paradigm. Sail too far the wrong way and you'll fall right off the face of the earth. A lot of intelligent folks actually believed that. Or what about the classic Ptolemaic versus Copernican models of the universe? For over 13 centuries, astronomer Claudius Ptolemy's theory reigned: The sun revolved around the earth. Then Copernicus proved him wrong in 1600. "Get a grip on reality," he may have snapped. "That's not the way the universe works. The earth actually revolves around the sun." A revolutionary concept for sure.
The same rigid thinking applies to the resume. If you think I'm a lone wolf fighting an impossible battle, listen to what Jim Challenger, president of a respected Chicago outplacement firm, has to say about the resume: "Still heralded as the key to winning a job, the resume is today's number-one deterrent to getting a job. Many rely on the resume as an almost sacred tool and expect it to do everything for them in the job search. It never did and never will, especially now, with large numbers of job seekers competing for far fewer jobs."
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, RESUMES DON'T WORK?
Before I continue debunking the resume, a little history. For over 70 years, resumes landed job searchers interviews. By the late 1980s, they were all but useless. It's all because the world changed. Technology gave us high-speed communication linking practically every crevice of the world and creating a "global marketplace." Tack on fierce competition for markets among the industrial powers, and matters grew worse. America, once the world's standard bearer and trendsetter, lost its foothold. Japan sprinted past, ascending as technology's superstar. Japanese companies were efficient and productive, while their American counterparts wallowed in mediocrity and inefficiency. The writing on the wall couldn't be clearer; Cut costs and improve efficiencies or perish. As a result, payrolls were cut with a vengeance. Welcome to the 1980s, the decade that gave us downsizing, the sterile buzzword for mass firings.
You get the picture. With millions of people chasing fewer jobs, the resume suddenly became an inefficient interview-capturing tool. But try to tell this to job searchers, especially people like you who've worked for one company for 20-plus years. Reading about the brave new world in Time or Newsweek as you sit safe and secure behind an old mahogany desk on the twenty-fifth floor of a Fortune 500 company offers a new reality that's hard to relate to. Dealing with it firsthand is a sobering truth that s hard to accept.
Not More Resume Books
To make matters worse, there's nobody out there waving flags to tell you that resumes don't work and job getting isn't what it was when you were hired back in the 1960s. It has to be confusing, especially when you find an entire section of a bookstore selling resume guides. There are-are you ready?-about 70 resume books in print and at least 25 to 30 more in the works.
Don't think the profit-hungry publishing industry will stop peddling these consistent revenue earners. Churning out resume books is good business. Selling books is no different from hawking candy bars or toys. Barring a catchy title like Knock' Em Dead Resumesly it's not as if one resume book is radically different from the next. How many ways can anyone explain the difference between a chronological and a functional resume?
More Proof, You Say?
I'm not through. Since we're fighting crowd mentality, I've got some more to say about the resume before laying out a far better alternative. As the market grows more competitive and companies continue to pare ranks, not only are job seekers churning out more resumes; they're going to incredible lengths to get them written and distributed to prospective employees.
If all the resume books aren't bad enough, lazy job searchers can buy easy-to-use resume-writing software programs. Just fill in the spaces and, voila, instant resume. If that's a hassle, the Yellow Pages are full of resume-writing services that will do the job for you. They tout themselves as specialists-professional resume writers, if you can believe it. (What's next, a degree in resume writing?) They promise a resume that will bring results. Most of these folks are either hacks or quacks, or both.
One resume-writing company in Shawnee, KS, charges clients between $500 and $1000 to write their resumes. For an additional charge, the outfit will mass-mail the resume to potential employers from a database of 10 million names. One job searcher spent $8000 to blanket the country with 10,000 resumes. The mass-mailing produced 14 interviews, but no jobs. The only ones profiting from this technique are the heads of these services. Last year, the Shawnee Company grossed $3 million. You've heard of junk mail. Now there are junk resumes.
Outplacement specialist Challenger advises job seekers to avoid mass-mailing resumes. He estimates a return of only 1 to 2 percent, making it a monumental waste of time and money.
Still, other eager job hunters are faxing resumes. For many, the fax has become what the word processor was 10 years ago-a tool for quickly getting a resume into an employer's hands. Job searchers would think twice about the fax method, however, if they knew over burdened employers were scrapping these messages as soon as they popped out of the machine. Many annoyed employers, deluged with faxed resumes, are getting revenge by pulling the plug on their machines. Why waste expensive fax paper on resumes that will be trashed anyway?
The newest rage is sending resumes electronically. There's even a new term for it, electronic networking. And would you believe a brand new resume book, Electronic Resumes for the New Job Market (Resumes That Work for You 24 Hours a Day), tells you how to write an electronic resume so it can be easily read by a computer and incorporated into a job bank database available to employers who are looking for job candidates? There are plenty of job banks, catering to all professions and specialties. The trick to writing an electronic resume is knowing which words trip the computer best.
(Depending upon the job, employers have favorite words for their computers to routinely search.) It sounds impressive, but once again, all you're doing is succumbing to the herd instinct. You're killing yourself trying to design a resume that will stand out in a database. It reminds me of a massive Broadway cattle call in which thousands of actors audition for a single role. Some of them may have star potential, but if they don't stand out from the crowd, they won't be noticed. The same rationale applies to the electronic resume. Yours is one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of resumes that, hopefully, will stand out in someone's database. Naturally, database and job bank advocates-usually, owners or promoters of the related services-advise job searchers to list themselves with several electronic databases for broad exposure.
What s next? If this keeps up, desperate job searchers will be stuffing their resumes into corporate ventilation systems on the remote chance they will miraculously blow on to an employer's desk. If you're saying to yourself, "There's got to be a better way," you're right.
