What does a resume do?

Imagine creating an advertisement for yourself. You have 30 seconds to get a prospective buyer’s attention, provide relevant information, and distinguish yourself from other similar products on the market. What would your ad look like? This is a great exercise that I recommend to anyone writing their first resume, because it gets you thinking about your self as a commodity, not a person.

What’s it supposed to do?

When a car company releases a new vehicle, they know the steps it will take to get someone buy it. They need a marketing campaign that will get a customer interested enough to research the product, talk with others about the product, go to a dealer and test drive it, and finally buy it. The first step is to put the product out in front of the consumer and gain their attention. That’s what a good advertisement does.

Now look at yourself as the same new product. You are an untested commodity asking a potential consumer to pay money for you. Your marketing campaign is similar to that of the car company. You present your advertisement (resume), you get them to research you (examine all of your credentials and conduct a phone interview,) talk with their colleagues, and finally, invite you in for an interview. To get to that interview, you have to write an effective resume.

What a Resume Will Do For you

• A good resume will get the interest of a prospective employer quickly.
• A good resume will tell enough to get you in the door.
• A good resume will tell more about you than you intend. Your style, your ability to communicate concisely and professionally, and your attention to detail will all be a part of your resume.

What a Resume Won’t Do For You

• It will not tell the whole story.
• It will not get you a job.
• It will not make you qualified if you are not.
• It will not go away after you get the job, so don’t lie.

Gone in 30 seconds

The 30 seconds that an advertiser gets to gain your interest in a new car is more time than your resume will receive once it hits a recruiter’s desk. The average resume is given about between 10 and 30 seconds of eye time. A reviewer will look for some key words and experience level and then put the resume in a pile of those to follow-up or those to toss. If you don’t grab them quickly, you won’t make it to the next round.

Advertisers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for the thirty seconds they get in front of your eyes. For a special event like the Super Bowl or a final episode of a beloved TV show, they spend millions just for this small sliver of your attention. With huge loads of cash being dropped on such a short period of time, you’d think that they would pack as much information into their ads as possible. But they don’t. Instead they get you interested enough to take the next step by either paying closer attention to the ad the next time you see it or going to the internet or store to research the product. They find the hot button words, phrases, and images that will make you sit up and take notice.

Unfortunately, the instinct of most resume writers is counter to the reality of selling a product. Most students try to smash as much information onto a piece of paper as they possible can. They toss in high school awards, summer camp experience, hobbies, and even favorite foods.

Tactics for packing it all in include tiny fonts, even smaller margins, writing in paragraph form, and submitting multiple pages. But let’s get back to that 30 second ad for a minute. A car company isn’t going to hire an annoucer to speed read their brochure so that you can hear about every feature in 30 seconds. They just want to give you enough information to make you delve further into the product.

Similarly, a resume is not going to sell the product (you.) People don’t call up and say, “I loved your resume! Can you start next week?” An effective resume arouses an interviewer’s curiosity enough to call you up and maybe even bring you in for an interview. Stuffing a resume full of extraneous information will make your document look cluttered, will make it hard to find the key words that will intrigue an interviewer, and could inadvertently put in information that knocks you out of the running. Let’s face it. An interviewer with over 200 resumes to review is looking to get through them fast and will use just about any reason to whittle down the pile to the top 5 or 10 who will be contacted.