Candidates! You Are Not da Vinci and Your Resume is Not Art

 The days of putting a "Help Wanted" ad in the Sunday paper and receiving 2 or 3 resumes the following Tuesday are long behind us. A few years back, a partner and I decided to try one of the generic job boards to advertise for a sales position in Atlanta just to see what happened. We placed the ad on a Friday and by the following Friday, we had received over 200 responses. Painstakingly, we reviewed each one and submitted 10 to the hiring manager for review. Three of the ten made it to a phone screen with the client but never proceeded any further.

My point is not to disparage career boards. After all, few even read print papers nowadays. What I am disparaging is the exacerbating amount of time that it took to read 200 resumes.

Your resume is to help get you an interview with me, and subsequently my client. It cannot be crafted to get you the job. Interviews, not resumes, are intended for color commentary.

No one should have to stare at your resume like the Mona Lisa wondering why she has a faint smile. Nor do we have time to theorize about opaque passages as one would read the multitudes of theories of the Last Supper.

So, what should you do then?

What if I told you about a baseball player who had:

• 20 years of experience
• Successful at "hitting, base running, and fielding",
• Drafted in 1992,
• Ranked 44th out of 100 Top Prospects, and
• Played for teams like Greensboro Hornets, Tampa Bay Yankees, Albany Colony Yankees, Columbus Clippers, and NY Yankees.

Okay, so what!

Or, I could tell you about the player who:

• Played in 5 World Series,
• Had 3,465-lifetime hits, 544 doubles, and played 2,747 games,
• Had a batting average of .358,
• 14 All-Star selections,
• 5 Golden Glove awards,
• 5 Silver Slugger awards, and
• 6th all-time career hits

I think Derek Jeter is perhaps most proud of the latter description!

I understand that we are not all MVPs. However, we all have a quantifiable value. Especially if you are in sales.

The point is when brushing up your resume you should consider it like the back of your baseball card: #'s, %'s, $'s, and the value of time.

I don't know about you, but reading a tome usually helps put me to sleep.