During the Great Recession, I helped a number of people rework their résumés, mostly successfully.
Résumés often seem like a simple list: when did what happen, using what technology / skills, and in what context. All well and good, and easy enough (once all the details have been collected). These various "whats" should include all the various keywords that hiring managers may use in their database search for someone doing a particular type of job. So these keywords are included to force a résumé to be included in the results of such a database search. The audience for a résumé's keyword section isn't a human being at all: it's the computer (specifically, the database search algorithm and the limitations a hiring manager might place on that search).
"Keyword" sections in a résumé, and sometimes "skills" sections, are often used as a place to dump all the acronyms, synonyms, odds and sods that could be used in the database search. These lists aren't for human consumption.
But good résumés also present one's professional life, and as such should imply a consistent story. The résumé shouldn't include everything, if including it all doesn't help that story be clear, consistent, and coherent.
Do I mention on my résumé that I did paint crew on my college campuses to work my way through a couple of summers? How about the many part-time retail jobs? Volunteering at an Irish festival, organizing the guest suites? Or volunteering with some senior citizens to help them learn the Internet / email / AOL back in the 90's? Oh, and what about the occasional community college English class that I pick up, when I think I'm ready to face a few more stacks of undergraduate papers to grade?
No, of course I don't mention those part-time jobs or that volunteer work: those experiences don't fit the story of the kind of work I would like to be doing (even if painting a fish mural in the basement of one college dorm was a silly way for the paint crew to spend a hot Friday afternoon when we got ahead of schedule).
Of course, this makes some people, including some hiring managers, squirm. I guess there really was a time back in the 1950's or 60's when a résumé really could also be an accurate tally of a professional's life story, because people's life stories included only a few jobs in one industry, usually working up through one company. Such a professional's life story is easy to read from the listing of all that person's work experiences and education. Such stories are just not as complicated, or messy, as our modern, life stories.
So now there's a tradition that one should somehow include everything, even if the resulting document is long and disjointed. Even if a completely inclusive résumé can't now clearly imply a story--easily read between the lines of the listed jobs and education--because our lives have so many stories in them.
To write for the human who hopefully will see a résumé, that résumé still needs to create a cohesive, clear, implied story. People can get their heads around stories. From these implied stories, we can get the gist of what the person is like. We can see whether a person would fit with the rest of the company and whether that person will succeed with the work that needs doing.
But those stories have absolutely nothing to do with what that database is going to need during a keyword search.
These two conflicting audiences--the one that needs terms, lots and lots of terms; the other that needs a clearly implied story--force résumés to be in conflict with themselves. Including both the list and the story to fit the needs of both audiences is unwieldly. Not writing for the database will mean a human may never see the résumé. Yet not having a story means the hiring manager will likely drop the résumé in the round file in a second or two. (Most hiring managers will look at a résumé for around 9 seconds, I read recently, before they decide to toss or to make a phone call. That implied story had better be clear, and quickly clear, to inspire someone to call.)
Databases may make finding résumés easier, but they're not giving hiring managers the information they really need about the possible candidates. Writing for that database--while often necessary--creates documents that inherently fail to answer questions the hiring managers are actually asking: Who is this person? Would this person succeed at the work that needs doing? Would this person fit with us?
The solution often is to find a way to get a story-based résumé to the hiring manager after they make a phone call but before the interview. Better yet would be to skip the database altogether, getting the story-based résumé into a human's hands from the start.
Consistently the people who I helped get a job during the Great Recession found some way to get a story-based résumé into a human's hands as quickly as possible Sometimes my clients skipped the database stage completely, networking to find people who might have work that suited them. Sometimes, when being phone screened, my clients asked if they could send an "updated" résumé. Those "updates" were the same content, but written so a human could see a human's story, without all those keywords.
Résumés are professional life stories: mini-biographies, vibrant with a person's life and living. Yet now résumés have become lists, and lists are things, not lives. The conflicting audiences for résumés force one document to merge two conflicting genres, making it work at cross-purposes.
And we wonder why writing them is so very frustrating, and reading them is so very, very dull. Using résumés, in their traditional form, is not efficient, not appropriate to our current lives, and not engaging, yet impossible to avoid. Résumés are a construct: ones that are necessary only because we've not
moved to more efficient and effective ways to make the human-to-human
connections needed to place people in the right work.
If you are working on a résumé, or reading them, I wish you well. The documents in front of you are far more dull than any person could possibly be.
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