Your resume should be doing a lot of work for you. Many people have resumes that grow and grow over time. That may seem okay, as we do add more capability and expertise to our list of skills that we are ’selling’ when we are looking for a new job or a new career. But over time, your resume can grow more ineffective -as you add in more and more.

It’s natural, especially in these days of harder economic times, to want to include everything that may catch the eye of ’someone’ that may have a need - and hopefully will choose to call us in for an interview. But the ‘everything + the kitchen sink’ approach is not one that you should be using on your resume.

Let’s revisit what we think a ‘Resume’ is. If we look in the dictionary, that may not help us. One listing that I saw simply said, “1. a curriculum vitae. 2. a summary.” Okay, but that’s not much of a help or a direction to follow.

A Resume:

What is it? It is, and should be, a simple ‘Sales Sheet’ on a hot product (you!) for which you want to help create ‘desire’. The key word here is simple. It truly needs to be just a single page in most every case. And the information you do choose to include, needs to be valuable to the reader and be very easily ‘absorbed’ within just a few seconds (really, within just 3 to 5 seconds of ‘look time’). So, be sure to do extra work on your formatting.

Things like your address, phone number and hobbies are not really important. Dump the hobbies and make your contact info very small - they will find that information if they want to call you in. Focus the value of your resume on your contributions and accomplishments that should jump off the page. Those are items that they may be looking at, and then imagining, how you can bring those type of accomplishments to their team - should they choose to hire you.

Copyright © 2009 by John Crant