The Modern Career & The Traditional Resume
There’s an unusual & powerful trait that your resume, your twitter account, and your email all have in common.
There’s one key thing that Facebook, Twitter, Email, the postal service, SMS, bitcoin, and the resume all have in common.
Sorry for the early punchline:
The one thing they all have in common is that they’re all widely-adopted protocols. And it’s kind of a big deal.
There has been a silent war over some major protocols over the past decade because there’s enormous opportunity at stake.
What’s a protocol?
Here’s the definition Google will give you:
But here’s why they matter:
Protocols are incredibly valuable since they establish a consistent way to do a single action. It’s the reason why Email hasn’t died, the resume still sucks, and key reason why Twitter is such an anomaly.
When they catch on, it’s incredibly difficult to turn the tide to something else since the switching costs become so enormous (I.E. network effects).
It’s a shared way of doing something so that we can all relate to one another and communicate effectively.
Why Email Hasn’t Died
Over the last 15 years, email has hardly loosened its grip on the world. In fact, it’s turned into a bit of a online extension of our own brain — a cloud storage extension if you will of what we have to remember in our own daily lives.
More and more email clients are being built, and more messages are being sent. Over 90 trillion emails will be sent this year alone. Despite many claiming that they cannot wait for something to come along and replace it, they love the little rush of dopamine when they hear their little notification go off on their phone. Myself included.
Email is the protocol for formal online communication — and widely accepted protocols do not die easily. Even the post office still exists.
New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That’s even rarer.
— Paul Graham
Twitter, the anti email.
Twitter, like email, is a widely adopted protocol to communicate across the world.
But among protocols, Twitter is very unique. It’s a company that owns the protocol and controls nearly every part of the ecosystem that is built on top of it. While there are a growing number of plugins with limited functionality and a small number of 3rd party mobile Twitter clients left, Twitter has uniquely grown to be a private company with a very rare opportunity in it’s lap.
It’s positioning itself to be a public utility, in a sense. A public utility that can capture massive returns for its shareholders.
How To Build The Next Twitter
There are only a handful of widely-used protocols out there. You have three options if you’re looking to capture a widely used protocol, like Twitter has, as a private company:
- Create your own protocol that resonates with a market, capture it from the beginning, and grow it.
- Capture a widely used protocol and attempt to take it over or create a replacement. SMS (messaging) is arguably being contested in many parts of the world.
- Capture a protocol that isn’t viewed as one, but behaves so.
Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it’s owned by a company. That must have made it easier for Twitter to spread. — PG
Avoiding The Fate of SMS
SMS (mobile messaging) has been recently contested by a number of short-text messaging services like:
- iMessage
- GChat
- Slack
- Facebook Messanger
…and so on. The “messaging” space has been especially talked about in the past few years because there has been an enormous opportunity to displace SMS for a mobile-first messaging protocol that can be owned by a private company.
An opportunity to capture what Twitter has been able to do.
The result has been a mad-dash to see what could replace this dated system and result has really yet to be decided, but Facebook is trying it’s hardest to win that space. They know very well what is at stake.
But there have been branches that have emerged amongst the chaos — Snapchat, Twitter and other have benefitted from the space and have taken parts of what would have used SMS had to still of been the widely used protocol for short messaging.
There was no private company or invisible hand to help SMS continue to innovate on top of it’s platform. Sure, it’s far from dead, but its fate it becoming increasingly clear.
To avoid the fate of SMS, it’s important to build-in some sort of system to allow innovation on top of that protocol. The protocols of twitter and email seldom change, but the platforms that are built on top of them innovate.
The Protocol of Your Career
The Resume
It’s funny to think that there’s a protocol in how you display your professional qualifications — and how your judged in the vast majority of professional settings. The Resume is the shared way we communicate our professional accomplishments and potential.
Nearly everyone has one. And there are a number of problems with the current system that make it ripe for innovation:
- The tools that are built on top of the protocol are outdated and never made for purpose of creating/editing a resume (namely Microsoft Word).
- There is not a free-to-use platform that allows you to manage your resume and communicate effectively. The whole process is often unguided and frustrating.
- The resume doesn’t paint a fair and full picture of your qualifications and abilities because there is nothing pushing the protocol forward.
There are plenty of companies trying to get everyone to switch to their own private protocol of sharing your professional brand (like about.me, workfolio, sumry, and others that are often treated as supplements) but none are centering their approach around the idea of making a free and helpful platform that starts with the resume, as it is, at the core.
The fact of the matter is that they are only adding to the growing fragmentation and continued frustration with the current system.
The Curious Case Of LinkedIn
Linkedin, especially in it’s early days, has been called “the resume killer” by many.
Yet, it has been around for over 10 years and the resume is still asked for by recruiters in every major industry.
Gayle Laakmann McDowell, Author of Cracking the Coding Interview, has articulated why this is case with few key reasons:
Different purposes, different writing
When you’re interacting with me in a business capacity, you want to know what I’m responsible for. What I can and can’t do for you……When I’m writing a resume though, I’m basically trying to show off my biggest accomplishments.
Privacy & Stale Data
Not everyone wants everything they’ve done in the past to be totally public, viewable to all. Many people are very private. Do you want to post your GPA, test scores, etc totally publicly? Most people don’t.
When you write a resume, it should be up-to-date with your most recent and relevant accomplishments. Before you send it in, you’ll likely give it a quick skim to make sure that it has the content you want…
…In fact, many job seekers are nervous to update their LinkedIn profile for fear that it might signal to their current employer that they’re looking for a new job.
Tailoring
A LinkedIn profile is basically one-size-fits-all. A lot of people want to tailor their resumes for the position, and you can’t do that with LinkedIn.If I were to apply for a job now, I would create a wildly different resumes depending on the role I’m applying for. I would focus more on one area than another. I can’t do that on LinkedIn.
The Professional Networking Platform
LinkedIn also hasn’t positioned themselves to be the resume killer — but rather a media platform where you can become an influencer by sharing content with your peers in a professional setting.
For a user, it’s just one big opportunity to spread your brand and grow your network — not replace or become a new protocol of representing yourself professionally.
But it hasn’t solved this growing problem of the resume.
The Modern Career
The those who are entering the workforce today are going to have a much different career than their parents did.
Our generation is projected to change jobs every 2.2 years, on average in their 20s. Our generation has a different set of priorities when it comes to what is important to them in a career, job, and the work that they do.
On the flip side, employers no longer just use the traditional resume and 2–3 references to judge whether or not you’re a good fit for their company. It’s become a combination of several things, as employers can now more accurately paint a fuller picture of who you are with more resources to do so.
The idea of a career is changing. The Modern Career will be very different to the one your parents had.
Similar to how the next generation of mobile-messaging has embraced media into it’s protocol, the modern resume is going to have to adjust or be displaced.
In the Interest of Full Disclosure:
Our team at ResumeRuby has been working to uplift this outdated protocol and we’ve been working on building a simple content management platform to manage your career — starting with the resume at the very core.
It’s free to use, guides you through the entire process, and helps you transform the limited view of a resume into a dynamic professional brand that’s needed in the modern career.
We help you do it without having to abandon the widely accepted protocol — the standard resume.
Mitch is building resumeruby.com and writes about startups, technology, and life.
If you enjoyed this essay, please share :)
PS — If you’re interested in working with us to help empower students and young professionals to create better careers feel free to reach out to me at mitch@resumeruby.com — we’re looking to work with great people who care, explore, work hard, and think differently.
Published in Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking
-
