I’ve written and sent out countless resumes and CVs in my time as a job seeker. Â This extended experiment in futility has proven to my satisfaction that resumes are, on the whole, pretty useless when it comes to actually finding a job. Â For just about every job I have had, it was a personal contact or someone inquiring on my behalf that led to employment. Â The resume was almost an afterthought. In fact, I would be very surprised if most of my employers actually read my resume.
But the resume still commands a powerful presence in the larger ritual of the job search. One could almost wax mythological about the job search as the Hero’s Journey, requiring him or her to pass through the underworld on the way to achieving the final goal. Â The comparison doesn’t fully hold up, except in one area: folk magic.
Back in my academic days, as part of my dissertation I studied a lot about the various practices of magic in the ancient Near East, which invited comparisons with other forms of folk magic all over the world. It was fascinating stuff. Â Now, thinking back, I am inclined to think that the resume holds a place in our culture that resembles certain forms of folk magic. Its overall track record for success (at least in my case) lends additional weight to this notion.
One reason why I think this is because there are a few things on which everyone agrees: clear font, no spelling or grammatical errors, and accuracy are a given. Your resume should have those things. Beyond that, disagreements abound. Should you state a job objective or not? Give a bullet list of personal qualities and achievements? One page? Â Two? Â More? List hobbies? Add a photo? You can find arguments for any number of tricks and tips, with nothing really to verify these suggestions apart from anecdotal evidence or unsupported say-so. In addition, the amount of time one apparently has for one’s resume to make an impression has dwindled to a razor-thin 20 seconds.
This is where we start to get into the realm of the magical. In societies that believe in this kind of thing, if a magical spell goes awry, the explanation is because it “wasn’t done right.” Some small but crucial technicality was overlooked or mishandled. The true Mage or Shaman was the one who knew these precise details and would remember to insert them. Failed magic is also blamed on counterspells or the interference of gods or demons, but that’s not necessarily germane to the discussion here.
If a resume doesn’t bring the devoutly-wished job offer, conventional wisdom holds, then some little thing is wrong that needs tweaking; change the font, try a new layout, etc.
But on the employer’s side, it can be even sillier. I know someone who sent a text-only resume to Apple via their online application site, and it was nearly rejected out of hand because it was text-only! Â It wasn’t laid out in pretty fonts and colors with nice formatting–understandable if the job was for graphic design, but this was for a software engineer position. Â Am I to understand that if the World’s Most Famous Software Engineer sent a text-only resume to Apple, they wouldn’t hire him or her on that basis? Â Are they really that stupid, that divorced from the reality of form vs. content? Â Apparently so, but I digress.
I’ve read more than my share of resumes as part of hiring procedures. So I know that clarity and layout do matter. But content trumps all. Show me that you are competent, and I don’t care if you write your offering in crayon on a brown paper bag. The resume is supposed to be a form of introduction. More meatier than a business card or the calling cards of yore. But in our desperation to make sense of a bad job market, the resume takes on the aura of a phylactery against unemployment or poverty. Â If you have to decide between polishing your resume and plying your network, go with the latter. Given the amount of time and money one can spend on such things, engineering the perfect resume is frankly a waste of time, as are most of the services that exist to distribute them. Any company that puts absurd levels of emphasis on the perfect resume is probably not the best place to work anyway.
