Why Resumes Don’t Work

I have disliked resumes for a long time. This is not to say that we don’t need them; unfortunately we do. They are a necessary evil in the land of branding and and worldly success.  But I have to say they are the root canals of the job search, but without the anesthesia.

My problem with these is not only that they all look the same (they do), or that most are uninteresting (they are), or that everyone thinks that more is better than less and packs these babies to the point of bursting.

My issue is that every resume I have seen requires serious heavy lifting on the part of the reader. It is up to them (!) to decipher what your value is, what problem they have that you are the answer to, to digest all the tasty morsels and bon mots that you are serving-up.

Think about it: what if you were to write a personal narrative– no more than a hearty paragraph long–that accompanies your resume on its critical mission, so that BEFORE scanning your CV, I would know how to think about you, I would have your brand embedded in my brain, and I could then turn to your resume merely as a form of corroboration for the narrative I had just read?

Isn’t that the object of all marketing? To separate a product from its competition, to stand out from the crowd, to create its own “category of one, ” separate and distinct from all the wannabes around it?

Stay tuned: examples will abound!

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