The Independence of Deleting Old Jobs Off a Résumé
The absolute freedom of it
“Résumés do violence to language,” A-J Aronstein wrote in the New York Times a couple years ago. “They are poetry, inverted.” When we write and read them, we “dry the joy from the bones of words,” and using these sad documents “we feed people with rich histories and full identities into the labor market’s meat grinder.” Despite our efforts, “even strong résumés hardly ever predict an applicant’s real capacity to do a job,” so hiring managers end up relying on prejudices anyway.
You know how it is. There are sections for Education (high school and college) and Experience (your formal paid jobs). You can make sections for Certifications or Skills (if relevant). You can fill space with Volunteer Activities (to plant an image that you don’t spend all your free time watching bad television). You can add an Objective, which I guess is good to have, because otherwise why are you applying to a job?
And then there are the jobs you exclude.
What to include? What to exclude?
I’ve always struggled to write and maintain my résumé.
Once upon a time, I had no experience, of course. Almost everyone has that problem when they write their first résumé. General advice says to omit your…
