Static or Dynamic?

I wrote a piece some months back entitled "Leave your Resume in the Car" which was about the fact that when people employ you, they employ YOU and what YOU bring and generally make the decison to hire on "soft stuff". This supports a recent survey out of the US that gave the following statistics relating to the interview.

33% said they made the decision to hire or not within 90 seconds and this was supported by 47% saying it was through lack of knowledge of their company, 38% on grammar and confidence, and 33% on fidgetting. The biggies were a whopping 70% on appearance, 65% on clothing, 67% on failure to make eye contact, and 55% on how the candidate dressed, acted, and how they walked through the door. Only a small 7% said that WHAT the person said affected their decision to hire. There were a whole lot of others such as waving your hands around and not smiling as well - annoying things that made employers say "No".

Now for those who have a wonderful CV, this should be quite enlightening and make you rethink how you go about presenting yourself, because whilst you may have the skills, if you inadvertantly pick your nose during the interview, you'll blow it (excuse the example....). And in the content of your CV, if you blather on about the detail of the jobs you've done, and the wondeful things you have achieved, perhaps you're turning prospective employers off before you even get to first base - consideration! Appeal then follows.

I often say to people that in the end, no matter what, if the client likes you and you like them, then you've got a pretty good chance of getting together.

So that brings me to the next step in this. Should we ditch resumes entirely? Because in reality, they are a static singularly dimensional document of a slice in time of YOUR evaluation of your career to date. Does that respresent you the best? The next step are the likes of LinkedIn profiles as your "presentation", and whilst I hear you saying "but they are simply a copy of my resume on line", they are not. Yes, they have some of the content of your CV, but they tell a much bigger story about you, because your profile tells other things. Not perfect, but better, because you can change it, update it, improve it. Slightly dynamic. Once a prospective employer has your resume, that's it. Static.

I'm not going to go into too much detail here because that's for another time and place, but the future is about presenting yourself completely differently (and I might add clients presenting themselves" entirely differently) and in a way that is really dynamic and representative of what and who you are, and what you can bring to and do for, an employer. And ditto for the companies (again, another story on this).

Resumes are an historical document that were designed for posting and then faxing, and both these media are almost dead. So why are we still using them in today's age of technology? A very good question, even if I may say so myself! I'm hoping that in years to come, we will be viewing examples of resumes at MOTAT and saying "Wow, is that how people used to get jobs?"

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