The resumé isn’t dead, it’s just dethroned.
Teaching students how to build a digital identity.
Let me tell you a story about my university colleagues. It is may of 2015 and they are graduating from a small but disciplined liberal arts college out of Los Angeles. The job market is growing and unemployment is reaching a 50-year low. With four years of marketing experience and learning, they feel ready for anything, eagerly waiting to turn the tassel and join the workforce. Two weeks later, they all somehow missed the most important element of transitioning from college. Somehow, none of them had a job.
Sadly, this narrative is all too familiar among American millenials. We get this false hope that the stars will line up and everything will work out to be perfect. The internet is stacked with story after story about some college girl who dropped out, sold everything she had, and toured the world for three years to land some incredible adventure-photography gig in Iceland. We know that these stories are complete outliers, but we are still setting ourselves up for failure.
Yet aside from our disappointments about the reality of life after college, there is still one critical piece missing from the equation. Students don’t know how to get jobs, and that is a huge problem.
Career readiness is both misunderstood and poorly taught
One of my favorite podcasts right now is Millenial. The radio show documents the life of Megan Tan, a recent graduate looking for her dream career in radio production, and her struggle to work through multiple jobs for years attempting to build her dream. I won’t spoil things, but she becomes remarkably successful and many would argue that she has achieved her goals. Her podcast is growing dramatically and getting incredible amounts of media attention and love. But what makes me love this podcast so much is that her struggle is so relatable to my own life.
Ask 50 students what they wish they would have learned more of during college and 40 of them will say “how to find a job.” College is a weird time where the world is at your fingertips and you feel ready to do anything and everything. Most students don’t really assume that they will land their dream job out of college, but they do expect to be on the right track. Art students don’t expect to end up in customer service for a local SAAS startup. Engineers don’t expect to be working at Starbucks. But somehow this has become an accepted norm among college graduates.
The resumé doesn’t work like it used to
Before we look at the solution to this problem, we need to understand where we are coming from. For decades, young kids and teenagers were taught to get good grades, play sports, be good citizens to earn accolades and prestige. Later in high school, they were taught how to make a basic resumé. The purpose was to look back at your life, everything you’ve accomplished thus far, and put it on a sheet of paper. With this resumé, you could walk up to an employer who has no idea who you are, and they will be able to measure your accomplishments and make an accurate judgement of your work ethic and character.
Even job interviews were straightforward. Stay friendly, have a firm handshake, and come prepared. Boom. You just got a job, probably for the rest of you life.
It sounds a little too simple to be true. And well, it kind of is. But even today, this model can still work. Most upcoming jobs, however, are quite different. A sheet of paper doesn’t cut it anymore.
Welcome the digital footprint.
Everybody has a digital footprint. It’s what you find when you Google your name. It’s the new resumé, and it’s a lot more complicated than a piece of paper. Digital footprints can consist of any number of hundreds of tools and resources, the key is choosing the right ones. With each industry measuring you on different scales, job seekers need to know exactly where to be, at the right time.
Let’s use digital marketing for example, because that’s what I am most familiar with.
A traditional, strong resumé will have a few years of relevant experience, good education, and perhaps a few recommendations. That’s what 95% of applicants will show up with. But those who stand out will have perfected their digital footprint. What is in a strong digital footprint? Here’s a list of potential things that could surface:
- Resumé (still relevant, probably professionally-designed)
- Behance
- Dribbble
- Medium
- Snapchat
- Slack
- Trello
- Google AdWords
- Google Analytics
- CMS platforms
- eCommerce platforms
- Networks and Affiliations
- Personal Website
- The list goes on…
To people working in the industry, you will recognize almost all of these tools immediately. They are mostly the tools and resources we use all the time. But that’s exactly the point! To stand out, applicants need to have the digital expertise relevant to their industry. They need to be experts in something beyond their resumé.
Universities need to step up their career readiness curriculum
In most cases, job seekers are taught the only thing they need is a resumé. Business students are probably told to have a LinkedIn profile, but they don’t really know why.
We need to think much more critically about where we build influence on the web. It’s a basic business marketing strategy to put yourself in the right place at the right time. But we rarely do this with ourselves. Imagine running a marketing campaign solely built on billboards and print ads. Yeah, it might work if you’re lucky, but in the end, you’ll get crushed by more modern competitors.
Job seekers can’t just have a resumé. Get connected, showcase your skills. Then really think carefully about what channels are most relevant to the job you’re applying for. Is photography going to be important? Build out a great Instagram profile. Are you doing a lot of writing? Start a blog. Follow great writers and learn from them.
I am still secretly waiting for somebody to land a job at a social media agency by creating a custom Snapchat geofilter around their office.
If we want to dethrone the resumé, college and job training is a great place to start.
I will admit, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life until I got about half way through college. Even then, it was still pretty vague. I knew I wanted to write more, be a designer on the side, and have the focus of my skills be in business development and strategy. Knowing this, I dedicated the next two years to building my digital footprint. I built out my Behance profile, learned the ins and outs of Facebook and LinkedIn, got involved in international non-profit management, and built a killer resumé. In the end, I landed an incredible job doing what I love. I promise you, it wasn’t my resumé that got me hired.
What would have set me up for greater success would be to have my marketing professors and counselors tell me “oh, you want to get into digital marketing? Here’s a list of 5 tools your should be familiar with. Why don’t you build a Squarespace website for yourself, toy around with the analytics, and get your social profiles all in sync?” That alone, would have set me leagues ahead of competing applicants.
There are too many people out there that have no clue how to land a great job, and they are getting destroyed by the few that do. People are losing hope, settling for less, and businesses are losing out on potential talent. The resumé isn’t dead, it’s just become a smaller piece of the puzzle. We need to teach people how to build their digital footprint to pursue their dreams. 40 out of 50 students wish they would have had more job training. That is unacceptable, and needs to change.
Making this change isn’t going to be easy. Building your digital footprint is going to take a lot of time and energy. That’s a good thing. Your dream is absolutely worth it. Work hard, be competitive, and kick butt.
