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The Information Age Resume

What’s on your resume? Do you have an “Objectives” statement followed by a chronological listing of your last five jobs? If so, toss it into the trash.

In the tight, fast-paced, and highly competitive job market of the Information Age an effective resume is shaped by a distinctly different philosophy than were its predecessors only a few years ago. Then, the stress was chronicling a candidate’s experience, whether or not that experience fully reflected his or her talents or was germane to the application at hand.

No more. Today’s resume is a personal marketing tool, streamlined and compelling in both form and content. Intense competition for jobs and the wide availability of desktop publishing programs have changed resumes in several ways.

The defining quality of today’s resume is functionality. Resumes today must address very clearly and directly the employer’s agenda. You must think from the employer’s point of view. You can no longer think from the standpoint of what a company can do for you, rather, you must approach it from what you can do for the company.

For example, instead of an “Objectives” statement, your resume should have a short paragraph under your name that summarizes your credentials and one or two juicy accomplishments. You want to convey both that you are basically qualified for the position and that you are particularly well suited to add value to the organization.

An effective resume must be lean, targeted to what the employer wants to know and free from extraneous information. Specificity and clarity are keys to a good resume. You should downplay or omit irrelevant personal information, such as marital status or hobbies because they are unrelated to your work experiences.

The secret to a good resume is not being restrained by your previous job descriptions. Instead, detail your accomplishments, mentioning your official responsibilities only where relevant to your achievements. The point is to define your abilities, which probably have not been fully utilized in your job experiences to date, in terms of how they could help your next employer.

In the Information Age length of time spent at a particular job is not as important as what you accomplished there. So you want to de-emphasize dates. Longevity at a single company was considered a virtue in the Industrial Age, but today it is seen as a lack of gumption. So, you should put dates of employment on the right side of the page or in parentheses after each job title, rather than in the eye-catching left margin, as was done in the past.

To help determine what your targeted employer wants, you’re going to have to do some research on the company. Call the personnel office to ask for the full job description; research the prospective company on the Internet and look for articles about the company in business journals. If this seems to imply tailoring your resume for each job application, that’s exactly what you must do in the Information Age. It’s a lot of work, but not as much as not getting the interview.

Here are some other important guidelines that will help you develop a good functional resume:

• Omit information that could trigger unconscious biases in the person screening your resume. While equal employment opportunity laws are supposed to prevent discrimination on the basis of personal qualities, in today’s hypercompetitive job market, age may be a subtle but definite disqualifier. Thus, if you are young, it might be better not to list a college graduation date. On the other hand, if you an older job applicant, do not list accomplishments that are more than 15 years old.

• Always use action verbs. Don’t use the timeworn phrase “Responsible for…” which was common on Industrial Age resumes. Instead, choose the verb that most vividly describes what you accomplished. Show a draft to family and friends; ask if it dynamically expresses you at your best.

• Quantify your accomplishments. If you helped improve productivity, state the benefits in dollars. Specify the number of persons you supervised, trained or counseled.

• Be sure to include accomplishments that resulted from team efforts. Use terms like, “coauthored”, or “collaborated” to describe your role.

• Consider making your resume slightly longer. In the Industrial Age, one page resumes were the norm. Today, three pages are acceptable for experienced candidates, especially those in the six-figure salary range. People in other income brackets should still limit their resumes to one and a half or two pages.

In the Industrial Age if you worked hard and did a good job you could pretty much be assured that you would have a job for life and if not you could easily get another one with benefits and a pension. So, a simple one page resume was all you ever needed, but not today. In the Industrial Age where change is happening daily and there is no job security, you must have a functional resume that can be quickly tailored to a specific job opening at a moment’s notice.

If you put together a well crafted functional resume it can help open doors you may never have considered when your job experiences were expected to move along a predictable continuum, buy you must always remember that a good resume can open the door for you but the rest is up to you.

Copyright©2006 by Joe Love and JLM & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.

Joe Love draws on his 25 years of experience helping both individuals and companies build their businesses, increase profits, and success coaching programs. He is the founder and CEO of JLM & Associates, a consulting and training organization, specializing in career coach training. Through his seminars and lectures, Joe Love addresses thousands of men and women each year, including the executives and staffs of many businesses around the world, on the subjects of leadership, achievement, goals, strategic business planning, and marketing. Joe is the author of three books, Starting Your Own Business, Finding Your Purpose In Life, and The Guerrilla Marketing Workbook.

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