Back in October, Dave Lefkow wrote an entry on ERE.net, an executive recruiters’ site, that screamed out to me with its alignment with my research.
My Blog is My Resume (registration may be required to see the full article) talks about “the changing dynamics of the Web’s second generation” and the implications of those dynamics for recruiters. But his article also has implications for job-seekers. Here are a few excerpts:
Privacy is no longer an issue. This generation seems quite comfortable publishing all of the gory details of their lives online. Some of these details will shock you. Get used to workers who are perfectly functioning members of the work world, but who perhaps make decisions in their personal lives that you find appalling.
Many job seekers, growing up in the level playing field that is the innovation economy, will often expect to be judged by their ideas, not their experience. Resumes will become irrelevant (or at best, a meaningless formality that describes your work history, not who you are). View this discussion on Robert Scoble’s blog to see what I mean; it’s the inspiration for the title of this article. If this attitude exists, outside of the system or not, think about whether you could even interview someone like Robert with your current process.
My quest is to discover or create the resume — or whatever morphed form of the resume may evolve in the future — that does tell who you are — through storytelling. That’s a big part of what my dissertation research has been about — but I’m not there yet. I’ve learned that the resume is the hardest piece of career-marketing communication to turn into a storytelling vehicle.
Responding to other points in Lefkow’s article, a respondent noted that the new generation still craves personal contact. Again, I think this is where storytelling comes into play. If we can learn each others’ stories, we can increase the sense of personal contact.