Last week, Michael VanDervort blogged on RecruitingBlogs.com that resumes must die. He asked the question: Are resumes obsolete?
To illustrate the flaws of resumes, he took up a large chunk of his entry with his own fairly lame resume from 2007, which he had built using a Careerbuilder template.
He then condemns “Careerbuilder for creating a template that takes 23 years of professional work experience and turns it into a jumbled, difficult to read mess.” He also says the resume doesn’t represent who he is in 2009.
I don’t disagree that VanDervort’s 2007 resume is a mess, but just to play devil’s advocate:
- Don’t use marginally effective job boards like Careerbuilder.
- Update your resume if you want it to represent your current professional self.
VanDervort goes on to say, “I would much rather have my current body of social media work representing me in the market place than even a cleaned and pretty copy of this resume.” He says an ideal resume would contain things like his LinkedIn profile, his tweets on Twitter, and results about him from search engines.
OK, good argument for a Social Media resume like mine. Personal-branding guru Dan Schawbel’s quintessential article on how to create a social-media resume is here.
VanDervort also cites the argument “your blog is your resume.” This line, which I’ve discussed on this blog and here, is starting to feel a bit shopworn and really applies to a very small subset of job-seekers (techies and social-media strategists, perhaps). Not that I’m the world’s most brilliant blogger, for example, but I’ve never had a flicker of interest from an employer based on this blog or any of my other extensive social-media efforts.
Louise Fletcher, who runs the excellent Career Hub blog, reacted to VanDervort’s post over on CollegeRecruiter.com, (especially his contention that his resume “does nothing to communicate anything at all about me that I would want to put out if I were job searching”) writing:
People say to me all the time “I can’t capture who I am in a resume” and I always ask them the same question: Why not? Is it because words are just not adequate to describe the wonder that is you? Unlikely!
More likely it’s because you are being limited by what you imagine a resume should be. If you step outside the box (sorry for the cliche!) a little, you might see lots of ways to convey who you are and what you have to offer a company.
Yes. What the world needs is an outside-the-box incarnation of the resume.
Fletcher and virtually any professional resume writer can do a far better job than VanDervort in crafting a compelling resume.
But the drum I’ve been beating for a long time is that a new form needs to emerge. The key is in these words, “a resume that captures who I really am.”
In other words, tells your story.
To support his “death to resumes” argument, VanDervort cites a blog entry from marketing author Seth Godin in which he asks the question, “Why bother having a resume?”
I would cite Seth Godin, too, for my argument for the Storytelling Resume. In fact, I have cited him in my book, Tell Me About Yourself, but in a different way:
Godin … does not believe marketing without story is possible: “Either you’re going to tell stories that move people, or you will become irrelevant,” he writes.
If marketing products and services without storytelling is not possible, then neither is it possible to market oneself without storytelling.
The Storytelling Resume must and will emerge.