If your CEO knew what was going on with your companies hiring protocols; the defecation would hit the ventilation….
If all the résumé writers in the world (all 6 billion of them) convened at the summit of mount boilerplate, entered a massive resume writing laboratory and created what they believed to be the next super power most mightily efficient and effectual résumé ever known to the master screeners of human resources and the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) geek squads of America, and then asked 50 CEO’s for their candid opinions; here would be the results of the meeting faction: 10 CEO’s would like it, 10 would find more things wrong with it, 10 would absolutely hate it and 20 won’t even show up because they know resumes are a waste of time.… I know, because I’ve been running résumé focus groups for nearly 20 years.
Resume Advice is Useless
I’ve learned that asking for a résumé opinion is like asking somebody what color they like better red or blue or how many feet in an inch or what color is a circle or is yellow round or square or What Color is Your Damn Parachute (are you kidding me with that book)? He should have called it What Color is your Platitude! It’s all crazy talk that will probably never end butt fortunately I have this forum to mournfully vent my frustration…
How You Use it is More Important Than How You Write it!
No one résumé will ever please the masses. And the minute you think your close, somebody will come along and tell you your résumé sucks. Therefore, when it comes to résumés, the only thing that is ALWAYS is that it must ALWAYS be used properly to get the right result. I.e. do everything you can to get it to the decision maker and follow up aggressively. Email it and US mail it with a handwritten envelope (guys, have your wife do the hand-writing). And at all costs, ALWAYS leverage a contact and drop that person’s name a hundred times if you have to. Unfortunately, job-seekers are second class citizens in this market. Only you need to love your resume and only you need to love you; the rest will take care of itself!
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