I got a resume yesterday in email. I've been retired for 17 years, so it's been a while since I was doing any hiring, and it took me by surprise.

It came from a "friend" of mine. I don't put friend in quotes because we're unfriendly, but because it's an online friend. To me, a friend is someone, if you're not at home, they know it's OK to let themselves in, and wait for you in the living room, watching the TV and drinking a beer from the fridge. I wouldn't have any real problems with Bryan actually doing that, but I'd be surprised if he knew it was OK.

But an acquaintance is someone you met once at a PTA meeting in 1973, and there doesn't seem to be a good word for a guy who's more than just an acquaintance, but not quite someone you've established mutual sponging relations with.

Relationships We Don't Have Words For

There are a lot of relationships we don't have words for. I was eating lunch with a family, a few years ago, and Jimmy asked his mom if I was her boyfriend. In fact, I'd spent the night about three times in the prior two weeks, although I'd been careful to be gone before the kids arrived home from visitation with their dad. His mom said, "Don't be silly. Harl's too old to be a boyfriend." Jimmy then asked his mom what I was, and his mom said, "Just you hush, and eat your lunch." I leaned over and told Jimmy, "Your mom and I knew each other centuries ago when we were in school, and we like each other a lot, but we haven't scheduled a wedding in the near future or anything like that. Does that answer your question?" Jimmy beamed happily and nodded.

But back to the resume. Bryan, like many people in this depression, is looking for a new job. Most people are embarassed to be without a job, but Bryan has the courage to do what the "experts" in the newspaper suggest, and he's networking. In this case, I have put experts in quote marks because I am casting aspersions. Newspapers are not in the news business; they're in the advertising business, and articles in the paper exist primarily to keep the ads spaced apart. It's easy to get a newspaper reporter to call you an expert, because he rarely can be bothered to investigate whether anybody wants to say you're not an expert.

Networking is good advice, but sending out your resume willy-nilly is not, and that's something the "experts" never say, and rarely even know. It just happens that one of the businesses I started once was a resume service, and after I got it up and going, I did some research into the hiring process in order to figure out if there was a way I could "juice up" the resumes I was preparing for my clients. That's how I learned that resumes are viewed differently by people looking for a job and by people looking for a worker.

It Was Too Long

Bryan's resume was about a page and a quarter long, and it was full of all sorts of juicy phrases. Except for the length (too long), it's pretty much what you'd expect a reader of "What Color Is Your Parachute" to come up with. So why is that a bad resume?

Well, you have to look at things from the hiring process. I've talked to about 50 people, and it seems to be almost always the same, even though I've never heard of anyone teaching people how to do this. They determine that they need someone, and they publicize the fact. In a big company, that means telling HR about the job opening. HR will take look at the "qualifications" established for the job, and decide that you need to have a degree and seven years experience for a job at this pay grade.

It gets funny at times. Shortly after IBM brought out their AS/400 minicomputer, companies were advertising for programmers with 5 years experience with the RPG/400 programming language. Since the language itself was only 1-2 years old, the most anyone could possibly have is 1-2 years experience with RPG/400. What they should have been looking for was someone with experience in RPG programming on an S/38 or S/36 computer, and possibly exposure to RPG/400.

You Have To Lie - But You Dare Not

Consequently, you have to lie in order to get HR to pass your resume on to the guy making the hiring decision - and he's faced with resumes that are obviously lies. It's a little easier in companies that are small enough to not have HR departments, but they face a lot of resumes full of lies as well.

That's one reason why networking makes sense. If someone hears of you before they realize they are going to hire, they try to avoid the selection hassle by glomming onto you. What's more, if you're not exactly what they had in mind, they may decide to change the job to suit you, rather than find someone who fits the job better.

But going back to the hiring process, if a guy puts forth any effort at all to fill a job, he's probably going to have a stack of 100 or more resumes to go through. Some guys will go through all of them; some will just look at the top 100 or so, and ignore the rest.

A Hundred Interviews

There's no way you want to do a hundred interviews. You go through the resumes, and put them in three piles - interesting, maybe, and "no way in hell". Typically, there will be 70 or 80 in the "maybe" pile, with the remaining 20-30 divided equally in the other two piles. Ending up in the
"no way" pile is obviously bad, but ending up in the "maybe" pile is just as bad.

Think about doing Google searchs. Do you ever see page 10 of the results? Most of the time, you don't even make it to the bottom of the first page. If you didn't select your search terms very well, you may have to look at 3-4 pages, but that's not frequent.

And flipping through another page of Google results is a lot less hassle than interviewing candidates. If you aren't in the "interesting" pile, you aren't in the running. And what gets you into the maybe pile, instead of the interesting pile?

Most People Are Qualified

It's not that you aren't qualified to do the job. The unqualified - and some that are qualified - end up in the "no way, Jay" pile. No, it'll be something that raises a question on the resume.

And while everybody talks about hiring "the best person" for the job, the unspoken secret is that for most jobs, most applicants can handle the job quite adequately; the difference is whether he'll fit in with the organization. The work day is too long, and life is too short, to be working with a jerk.

For instance, Bryan worked as a tax preparer for Jackson-Hewitt nearly 15 years ago. That isn't likely to work strongly in Bryan's favor. On the other hand, if potential boss once was in a fender-bender with a tax preparer, or his girl friend ran off with the manager of the Jackson-Hewitt office, or his cousin sells carbon paper to H&R Block, it might get him demoted to the "maybe" pile.

Be Less Than You Can Be

Job-seekers, you see, look at resumes as advertisements for all the ways in which they're great employees. People seeking applicants, on the other hand, are scouring resumes for reasons to weed out applicants.

There are no hard-and-fast rules. If someone is looking for a job as a computer programmer, they need to list every computer language, every library, every protocol, etc., that they've ever worked with. That's because even if they're hiring a Java programmer, they also have some old code that's written in COBOL that they worry about because nobody in their shop does COBOL. Given two equally-good Java programmers, the one that knows COBOL code gets the nod, just in case they need to maintain that code someday.

For the most part, though, resumes really work against the job applicant. They exist only as bait on the hook, to land an interview. Furthermore, they represent a danger to the applicant as long as he has the job. If they decide someday to get rid of an employee, one of the first things they do is pull his resume out of the file, and search for things that the guy has lied about. Lies on your resume are almost essential to get hired, and yet are grounds for dismissal.

Short, Sketchy, And Hard To Get

Consequently, your resume should be as short as you can make it with as few details as possible, and you should try to avoid distributing it when you can. Instead, you want to work on your elevator pitch.

That's Big City term. Elevator doesn't refer to the place where farmers sell their wagon of corn or wheat, but rather to the box in a skyscraper that hoists people to the upper levels. An elevator pitch is a unique selling proposition that can be stated in just a few seconds. Bryan's a direct marketing whiz. Upped sales 375% in 18 months. Increased retention rate from 5 months to 18 months. Been running a staff of 60 people. Local guy, went to MT.

The Elevator Pitch

If Gene needs someone in marketing, that's enough to get an interview for Bryan, don't you suppose? And if he's not, Gene is still going to be carrying around that elevator pitch in the back of his head for a couple of days. He hears it on Tuesday, and on Thursday, he runs into Bill while on a sales call. "Hey, didn't you say you were unhappy with your marketing program? I just ran across a dynamite guy, doesn't sound like he's gonna be on the loose for long." And Bill says, yeah, I'd like to talk to him. I'll have my secretary phone your secretary for a contact number.

Oh, Lord, it's rough out there looking for a job, when times are good, and in this depression, I'd really hate to be looking. And with so many desperate people out there, I'd hate to be trying to find an employee.

Oh, and by the way? Bryan does exist, and that's a valid elevator pitch for him. It doesn't sound like he's gonna be on the loose for long, so if he sounds like someone you could use, let me know, and I'll pass along his telephone number to you.

But his resume? No. You deserve better, and so does he.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
acquaintance - advertisements - boyfriend - COBOL - elevator pitch - friend - Google searches - hiring - HR department - Jackson-Hewett - Java - job-hunting - marketing - networking - programmer - PTA - quote marks - relationships - resume - RPG/400 - the best person