Here’s the first, Big lie no.1: The résumé is your friend, a useful tool.
The truth is, the résumé works against you.
Résumés dampen your prospects and constrain your options. Among the many reasons consider these three.
It’s limited.
o The résumé has to be 1-2 pages. Not much space to contain your career, your prospects, the special features and traits that make you you.
o Some of the most important things about how you contribute don’t fit on a résumé, for example your competencies or your preferences or your special insights.
o You need to use keywords and standard layouts and structures in your résumé, further stunting your ability to present a nuanced, specific picture of yourself.
o You need to recount only your experience and your achievements, citing relevant numbers, ideally revenue or sales and profit and maybe company valuation figures in dollars. You won’t have space to recount the real challenges that you overcame or how hard it was to get results.
It’s irrelevant.
o The factors that really matter in getting the right job for you – the primary predictors of on-the-job performance – are much less influenced by experience or skills than most people think, yet these are the things reported on your résumé.
o It doesn’t mention what you really enjoy doing, or what aspects of your job you do especially well.
o The résumé reveals the past and your interest now is to create the future.
It’s inaccurate and misleading.
o Of course you don’t bend the truth… But counselors counsel you to “tailor” your résumé to the requirements and jargon of the job. Present yourself as the ideal candidate for the job in question, you are told, “adapt” your résumé to that purpose.
o The résumé fails to highlight any of the highly relevant, often dominant context of your work – the economic conditions in your industry at the time, or the company culture, or the style and behavior of your boss. These matter – hugely, as it turns out.
o About 25% of new hires admit to having given less-than-accurate information during the recruitment process. Well, why not? That’s what they were consistently advised to do.
You are so much more complex, rich, intriguing, subtle, valuable and human than your résumé could ever convey. We all are. Who starts a relationship, of any kind (even professional) with, “Hi! Want to get to know me better? Read my résumé.”? Your résumé really isn’t you.
Should it be a surprise that our résumé-dominated recruiting systems today generate such consistently bad fit between person and job?
So why use the résumé at all?
Reliance on résumés is legacy behavior, learned long ago when all we knew about or cared about anyone was his or her skill. Yet still today, when we know so much more about what really matters in a job and what really defines an effective worker, the recruitment world continues to rely heavily on this central, limited, irrelevant, misleading and inaccurate document. No one wins. It’s a sad state of affairs.
Yes, the résumé remains the central document in the recruiting process in all but the most high-performing organizations. In most cases, if you work through recruiters they will ask for your résumé.
It’s ironic, then, that hiring managers at employers don’t usually read your résumé; machines do. A quarter of recruitment managers read less than half of the job applications they receive, while the majority of recruiters spend less than 5 minutes reviewing the information of each candidate. But they, or their screening systems, can and do eliminate you in a click if your résumé doesn’t tick several required boxes.
Résumés rarely get you the job but they will often screen you out of the job.
Why should the recruiting world keep looking at résumés expecting to find accurate, relevant, performance-predicting information when we know it isn’t there? Aren’t we smart enough to know that if we drop our keys in a dark street, looking twenty yards away under the lamppost isn’t going to work?
Do we rely heavily on résumés at Matchpoint Careers? Of course not.
Your friends tell you the truth and they understand the real value and richness of you. So should – so must – your employer. Don’t believe the lie. The résumé is not your friend.
