The New Resume Landscape

I went to dinner with some girlfriends tonight.  Job searching and resumes came up and I was surprised to hear what they were telling me.   It appears the entire landscape of resumes has changed quite dramatically since I last spent actively looking for a job.

In part, that's because it's been a long, long time since I've looked for a job.  One job was followed by another job that I got from a casual inquiry.  My resume at that point was more of a formality as they were already familiar with my experience through other work.   The job after that was another easy step via connections and people in the same product area that knew exactly what I could do and how well I could do it. 

Come to think of it, I'm not sure when I've really had to rely on a resume in my life to get a job, other than when I looked for a co-op position while in college.  That co-op with IBM turned into employment with IBM and then the other jobs followed as a result.   All that is rather moot right now as I'm not employed, busily being a mother of two toddlers and volunteering much of my time with endeavors related to the school.

I do have my resume on LinkedIn though.  I was told years ago that I'd better get my resume out there because that was, "the new thing and you simply have to be on LinkedIn".  Now, it appears that LinkedIn, while a nice place to network from a business standpoint, isn't the reference point for submitting a resume for a position.

Here are things I heard in conversations at our dinner table tonight:
- "You have to tailor your resume to each position you're applying for."
- "People put too much in their resume."
- "They don't trim out historical work or work that's not applicable to the position they're applying for."
- "Some people leave in unrelated things, making their resume longer than necessary.  It seems like they do this because they're mostly proud of what they've done, not that it's relevant."

I stopped them and asked them, "so what do you put in a resume these days?"  I was told that the best resume was one that only addressed experience and qualifications for that particular position.   They talked about how you want to look qualified but not over-qualified."   One of my friends is a project manager.  She explained, "if I was looking for a job at a drug store, my resume would list the grocery clerk work I did in my teens and the Hallmark job I had in college, and that's all."

The job search landscape has changed a lot since I last looked for employment.

The Big Boy Update:  We were going to a Mexican restaurant for lunch that happened to be in the same shopping strip as a pizza restaurant we had gone to the day before.   When we drove in, my son said something that made me laugh because it's phraseology he's never used before that made him sound much older: "pizza place, here we come!"

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter doesn't really like things in her hair, but she needs them to keep her hair out of her eyes.  She's getting better at not pulling them out.  What she does feel strongly about is what goes in her hair each day.  Some days bows are in, other days she wants the rubber bandy things.   And most of all, she wants to pick the color and hold the item (bow, clip, etc.) and play with it in her hands while you brush her hair, until you tell her you're ready for it.