Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

A Rant about Resumés

I do the occasional interview. Lately, I’ve noticed that a lot of the resumés we get seem to follow a very specific, and very troubling, template. Back in my day, when hair bands roamed the earth, the general preference was for one-page resumés that succinctly hit the highlights: pithy summations of the important elements of your career, and nothing more.

Things appear to have changed since I was a stripling programmer. The new template, as far as I can tell, lays out the following set of rules:

1. Make your resumé at least seven pages long, preferably more. Anything less and you’re not trying.
2. Use a very tiny, very close-spaced font, arranged in giant, eye-killing, soul-crushing blocks of text. If the interviewer isn’t half blind and weeping by the time he’s gotten to the end, you’ve failed.
3. No white space! White space denotes weakness.
4. List every technology that you’ve worked with, read about, heard about, dreamed about, fantasized about, or imagined. And, just to be safe, make up a couple of new ones, especially if you don’t have enough material to fill up your seven pages.
5. Use acronyms whenever possible. If something isn’t susceptible to acronymization, then tack on a few generic filler words until it is. Some candidates: “methodology”, “process”, “methodological process”, “framework”, “design pattern”.
6. List everything you’ve ever done, up to and including the little house you drew with your Logo turtle in 1983, and that time you installed Windows 95 on your grandmother’s Dell.

I’m generally very hesitant to give people career advice — because what the hell do I know — but I feel like I need to make an exception here. Because this is, of course, madness. The purpose of a resumé isn’t to lay out your career in exhaustive detail. It’s to give whoever you want to work for an idea of who you are, where your skills lie, and what you have to offer them.

I can’t speak for everyone who does interviews, but my first thought when I see these explosions of text posing as resumés is not that the person has a lot to offer — it’s that he’s hiding something.

Obviously, this isn’t coming out of nowhere. The Monsters and Dices out there — along with the general, Google-propelled atmosphere of keyword searches as the sine qua non of knowledge gathering — clearly reward an expansive, kitchen-sink approach. So I can understand the temptation to cater to their very specific, very search-oriented, strengths. Once you’ve moved on to actual humans, though, you really should find a way to indulge the preferences of their squishy, organic CPUs.