Nor is that the worst of it. Some of the jobs you must list may have advanced your career and some may have been taken to avert starvation, but on the form, equal emphasis is given to both. You may have excelled on one job and barely held your own on another, but on the form, you appear to be equally good-or bad-on both. It could also be that none of the jobs you held enabled you to use your best abilities, but on the form that fact isn't revealed at all. According to the resume, you are supposed to be what the jobs made of you; not what you made of the jobs, or what you are able to make of the next one.
It follows then that a standard resume based on the format of a standard application blank is likely to be a more elaborate presentation of the same weaknesses. About all that can be said for it is that it is easy to write, requiring no imagination and no foresight. Consider, for instance, the chronological resume of Richard Jones, one of the better examples of the obituary style:
You will note that an 18-year history of Mr. Jones is all there if you can find it, though the names of his employers and dates of employment are given more prominence than what he did. He uses only five words and the dates to cover four years of military service, an experience that must have affected him profoundly. The greatest weakness of all, however, is that Jones has used all that space to tell of what he has sold, and has neglected to mention what he wants to sell. That, of course, is the main fault of the obituary-type resume, but as an advertising, merchandising, and sales promotion man, one would think Jones would have done something about it.
It could be that he was too close to his own talents to think they needed selling, like the shoemaker whose own children run barefoot, but my experience with too many men indicates otherwise. So fixed in the mind of most is the obituary-type of resume that they would rather sell themselves short than fail to conform.
Here are the major reasons why the obituary-type resume should not be used, accepted though it might appear to be:
- It fails to inform an employer of your potentialities, forcing him to guess from a reading of your past history what your future value to him might be.
- It emphasizes your history, but not what you have learned from it. Almost every resume lists a number of jobs, and to the employer reading them over, they take on a monotonous sameness. Exposure to experience is not the same as learning from it, and the value of what you learned cannot be estimated by reading that you held-or were stuck with-a certain job for five years.
- It emphasizes former employers and dates of employment, an uneasy reminder to your prospective employer that if you could quit them-or get fired-you will quit him-or get fired. It leaves no room to mention the fact, unless you drag it in by the heels, that you saved or earned uncounted sums for your previous employers and will do better for him.
- In stressing your own history, you omit the one factor that is the most vital concern of your prospective employer, and that is his own future and the future of the company that holds his future. Good fellow though he might be, it's not your success he is buying, but his own.
