Ilya Cantor is appropriately horrified at CNN or Careerbuilder’s suggestion that you write your resume in an hour.
Dear heavens, please save us from the waves of people who have no idea how to write a resume who will smear some stuff down on paper and send it off, because CNN says so.
I do think that people overthink their resumes, and I do think that people spend far too much time worrying over stupid things like how many pages it is, but honestly… I see scads of resumes every week that were clearly not thought out at all, and I shudder to think at how many more I might get because of irresponsible advice like this.
Let me give you some better advice: Because resume writing is so fraught with emotional issues- not knowing how to sell yourself properly, stress about being jobless, questions of professional self-worth- it’s easy to get writer’s block. Resist the urge to agonize every sentence as you write it
Spend one hour writing your first draft. Take an hour, write down everything you can think of for every job you want to put on your resume, ideally in some semblance of an organized fashion. Don’t think, just write. If you don’t like it, you can fix it later. Then polish, polish, polish. The key is to push past all the pressures preventing you from being able to put words on a page, because once you actually see it there, you’ll calm down a bit and be able to think about it.
I saw it as a well intentioned but a fairly stupid article. Submitting a resume you spent an hour on can burn some serious bridges with companies, especially on a particularly wide distribution.
That’s great advice Tiffany. After editing and re-editing, send to others in your circle, including some folks with a trained eye or a professional. Money and time well spent considering this is your career.
cheers
ilya
[...] was discouraged when I saw this article posted on CNN in which I echoed frightened chills from Tiffany and GetCareer. More importantly, I asked myself what I could do to stem the tide of poor resumes [...]