What’s Wrong with Me? It Must be the Resume…

As a follow-up to my first published article dealing with the perils of digital job hunting here’s something else I seem to be dealing with as a 40+ year-old making a career change. “I’m sorry? What was that? Do I know that my resume sucks?” Ah, no…

“Really, it’s not you, we had a lot of great applicants.” Or, how about this, “Good luck, we know there’s a company out there for you.”

Hmmm, these sound more like bad breakup lines than they do rejection emails from HR. Honestly though, these are almost verbatim lines from emails that I got when I started sending out resumes and for the first 30 days of my career search, every day was a repeat of my high school dating history, rejection, how depressing.

No one ever said, “Dude, you seem awesome, you have an impressive background, titles and responsibilities but your resume must have been written by a room full of monkeys sharing a typewriter.” That seems a little harsh but it at least it’s honest and helpful. I know, I know HR managers get overwhelming numbers of applicants for every job opening and responses to those not making the grade are canned for time savings and possible legal reasons.

So, you’re 20+ years out of college and maybe you haven’t needed an updated or high-impact resume. I don’t care how amazing your background is if you can’t summarize it into this tiny little box that jumps up and slaps the hiring manager in the face harder than a double Cuban Coffee you’re not going to get any attention.

Believe me, I know this and for the first time in 25 years I’ve had to put together a resume that goes against everything I’ve ever been taught in business leadership. Your resume must be all about you and scream about every amazingly awesome thing that you’ve accomplished and you must be able to do this in a way that no American has ever been taught to do in school. There may be no I in Team, and this is important, there should be no Team in your resume. It needs to be all about the I.

Sounds daunting, doesn’t it? Well it is and I’ve shortened my life trying to do it but it seems to be helping so I guess 100’s of hours of looking at what I call hybrid resumes – a little Resume/CV balance which parses out correctly and is less than two pages with the “right” keywords and number of bullets must have worked. Sure, I could’ve taken the uncomplicated way and paid someone to write it for me but I’m sorry, I think it’s better if I learn how to do it and honestly when I’m hiring people in the future I might give preference to applicants that don’t have professionally written resumes.

This being said if you need it done fast or just want to maybe jump to the front of the line a quick search on LinkedIn will bring up 1,000’s of people who are “experts” at resume writing.

Good luck my fellow job hunters, don’t let the search get you down. Just remember, “We can still be friends, right?” Lol

You probably figured this out long before now but I’m not a resume writing expert, heck I’m not even a writer. Really, I’m just a hugely experienced, amazingly dedicated guy looking for a new career in sales leadership. Okay, self-plug…