A Theory of Resumes
Here’s the dirty secret of resumes.
(Caveat: I haven’t had to look for a job for a decade; I am not a career counselor; there are well-paid professionals for this sort of thing. But a lot of my friends are looking for jobs, and I read lots of intern resumes, and lots of job applications. So I think I have some clue here.)
Resumes are not a chronology of your past — the words “Curriculum Vitae” are a lie. Resumes are a storytelling medium with some really weird formal constraints, much like a poem or a patent.
The story you are telling is this: “everything that I have done in my life up to this moment leads to my putting this document in front of you.” What order you put things in, where you put detail and where you gloss over, what jobs get a precise title and which ones get a shaded title — it’s all just putting the pieces in place, so the reader can understand the story.
If the formal structure of writing resume gets in the way for you, start by telling the story in English. “I would make a GREAT project manager for company X. Here’s why: I ran three projects on my last job — which was in a different area — and built awesome spreadsheets that kept everyone on track. Company X works in healthcare, and I worked in the IT department for a hospital; I got to like the medical jargon, and have some real ideas of the considerations of HIPAA compliance.” And so on.
As a result, lots of questions about resumes become kind of self-answering, based on the ‘story’ theme:
Do I emphasize my best jobs, or my most recent jobs?
You emphasize the jobs that tell your story best.
Can my resume be more than a page?
Depends. How does the extra page enhance the story — does your story need more then a page to understand it, and why will someone turn the page?
Should I mention the fact that I dropped out of graduate school?
Depends. How does it enhance the story? Do you want it to fill in a gap, or to explain that you have certain skills, or took certain classes?
One of my colleagues, Stuart Schechter, reminds me that cover letters and resumes are two parts of a set. The cover letter helps put the resume into context, and draws out the connection between the job and your history.
As he puts it:
When I was advising students applying to companies, I saw so many cover letters which simply repeated key accomplishments from the resume. I always told them the cover letter should be like a love letter: your goal is to convince the employer the story of how you got to know them, how you’ve come to understand their needs, how everything you’ve been doing up to this point has prepared you to be there for them, and how excited you’d be if given the chance to do so. Think about receiving a love letter that covers all these topics from one candidate, one from a second candidate that focuses solely on their accomplishments, and ask yourself which suitor you would choose to meet first.
