Your resume sucks and it isn’t going to help you.

Posted on | January 15, 2010 | 4 Comments

It’s no fun watching my friends cart their resumes off to job fairs and pass them out like some backwards suit-and-tie version of halloween, only to come back feeling even more hopeless and depressed about their bleak futures in burger flipping (assuming someone doesn’t invent a machine to do it cheaper).

Guess what? Your resume looks just like every other 8×11 sheet of paper in the entire room from more than arm’s length away, and it definitely doesn’t stand out when it’s buried under 300 other resumes that company’s HR staff is dreading having to sort through tomorrow. The lower you are in the pile, the higher the odds are stacked against you.

So do something about it. Do something to be different and get some recognition. If your resume is the only tool you’ve got, you’re just like almost everybody else. And almost everybody else will probably still be unemployed in six months.

Use twitter for 30 minutes a day.

Quit it with your ill-informed scoffing about it being “another Facebook status” and hear me out. I’ve been using it long enough to know what I’m saying. On twitter, the value comes from who you follow. If you follow people who talk about what they ate for breakfast, you’re not going to get anything out of it.

The whole point of using twitter is that it makes even the most important people very accessible and easy to have conversations with. On two occasions I’ve received computer help from well-known people in the tech industry because we’d had the same problems and they had the solutions. There’s someone in your field that will talk to you on twitter, and you don’t have to have a reason to talk to them. Just follow them and start replying to their updates.

Be friendly. Authentic friendly, not “I want to get something from you” friendly. That will put you on their radar (a good argument for using your real name on twitter — recognition). Then when you need to find a job, you’ll have friends that are in a position to do something to help you. 30 minutes of that a day is enough for you to find some people to follow, reply to what they’re talking about, and start making some connections.

Use LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is like Facebook for resumes, if Facebook was actually good for something and didn’t break every seven seconds. It’s more effective than a resume because it streamlines the whole process of telling your future employers what you’ve done, where you’ve worked, and who you are connected to. Your connections can write recommendations, which create “social proof” that you are as awesome as you say you are. Employers love it when lots of people talk about how awesome you are because it means they’re not hiring someone solely based on experience and just hoping they don’t suck as a person.

Can a two-page paper resume show your future employer how awesome super-qualified professional people think you are? I don’t think so.

Not every company is using LinkedIn to search for employees, but you don’t need to reach every company. You only need to reach the one willing to give you a job.

Start a blog.

This is probably the most useful thing you can do for yourself, so if you hate writing, suck it up because it’s a lot more fun than being unemployed. If you want to show companies how much you know and what’s important, start writing about the things they’re doing.

Use RSS feeds + Google Reader to track information about your industry. Link to stories on other web sites and share your own thoughts on them. You don’t have to write all-original content. Just curate important news from many web sites into one blog that makes you a one-stop-shop for a certain type of news.

It doesn’t have to be an essay. On the popular Apple blog Daring Fireball, John Gruber frequently posts links to important stories with only a few sentences about what it is and why it’s important for his readers. I look at John Gruber’s site every day and I think, “Geez, this guy knows everything about Apple.” That’s the kind of impression you want to leave on the people with the power to offer you a paycheck.

When you write about a company, send its PR manager an e-mail letting them know what you wrote about. Send it to the Boss or the CEO too, and there’s a chance they’ll see it. If people at the company are on twitter, let them know using an @ message there. Companies love positive press. Don’t underestimate the value or impact of your opinions.

As a side effect of that, when you go up to companies at a job fair you have a conversation starter. “Hi, I’m such-and-such from super-awesome-blog.com I wrote about your company doing this-and-that back in November.” That’s a lot more compelling than “Hey, here’s a piece of paper and I’d really like you to give me a job because I think I’d be okay at it.”

Now…

If any of you job hunters are still unemployed in six months and you didn’t take any of this advice to heart, I’m going to print out a copy of it and staple it to your forehead. Get cracking.

Joseph Rooks' blog

about writing, creativity, technology, and doing things that matter.

Your resume sucks and it isn’t going to help you.

Use twitter for 30 minutes a day.

Use LinkedIn.

Start a blog.

Now…

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