The non-all-important resume

As a student, I spent a lot of time working on my resume.  I met with several counselors for suggestions.  I reworded sentences endlessly.  After meeting with each advisor, I'd change paragraphs to bullet lists and back to paragraphs.  I bought special cotton paper.  I fussed over fonts and formatting.  I adjusted the size and justification of my name.  And looking back now, it was probably all a poor use of time. 

As with any document, before creating a resume, you need to identify two things:

1. What is your purpose?
2. Who is your audience?  

I can only speak for my own experience.  I spent two years as a university recruiter for a 3000-employee technical company and also served on the recruiting team for a small IT start-up. Let me tell you what wasn't important to my recruiting team... after the jump.

The attention span of gnats
First off, there is a myth propagated by guidance counselors that recruiters have such an enormous stack of resumes that they spend no more than a few seconds on each one, and if there isn't something outstanding about your resume, then your resume will go in the garbage.  In my experience, that simply is not true.  My team would end up with maybe a couple of hundred resumes at the end of the career fair, but we would read through every one of them. We would skim for the criteria that we were looking for.  If it was written in paragraph form, I would scan the paragraphs.  If it was in bullet form, I would scan the bullets.  We weren't stupid.  We didn't need pictures.  If the information was there in any style, we would find it.

Fancy paper
If a resume was printed on fancy paper, I would think, "this person printed this on fancy paper." No more, no less. Then I would read the resume.  No one ever got (or didn't get) an interview because of nice paper.  As a student, I thought that all of these little subconscious positive feelings ("wow, that looks really nice... wow, this paper feels fantastic!") would influence the recruiter to choose me for an interview.  In my experience, that was not the case at all.  We had to document why were recommending a candidate for an interview.  Someone either made the cut or they didn't.  Fancy paper or having just the right font didn't sway that decision.  At all.

Difficult to read is backward talking
I noticed on LinkedIn last week the resume of a friend who is finishing an advanced engineering degree.  It was pretty obvious that he put a lot of work into starting his sentences with the object rather than the subject, probably to catch the interest of those time-pressed recruiters.  I wanted to send him a note reminding him that Yoda is not hiring.  "Blah blah are areas of strong experience that I have... Yada yada are the objectives I am to be fulfilling."  I'm not sure who exactly his audience is, but I'm pretty sure that they reside in this universe.  It probably wouldn't cost him an interview if I was the recruiter, but it makes a person look like a weirdo.

Simple tasks will always be simple tasks
Especially during my first couple of years at school, I tried to pad my resume by making my simple experience look as magnificent as possible. In retrospect, three bullet points to summarize my responsibilities as a field-hand at a seasonal corn maze were probably three too many. 

If you were a manager at a Subway, you can put that.  We wouldn't care, however, about all the specific tasks for preparing bread dough or cleaning the cutting boards. Again, it wouldn't keep a candidate from getting an interview, but they look silly. Remember who your audience is.

Typos! The unpardonable sin?
Here's a big surprise: I hired a person that had glaring typos on their resume.  I still don't understand why you wouldn't have a friend double check your resume for spelling and grammar, but in this case, despite his overlooking some pretty simple errors (one sentence wasn't even decipherable) he had absolutely the best experience and personality for the job.  So basically, typos will be a mark against you (obviously there is a concern about attention for detail) but there's more to life than good spelling.  (I wouldn't put this particular person in charge of writing instruction manuals...)

Stay tuned.  In a future post I'll share what IS important on a resume. 

Has anyone else wasted time on silly details of a resume?  Does anyone have any different experiences recruiting in a different industry? Share your experiences in the comments!