Discussion on:

Four things that make your resume look dated

This is good advice however with tip 4 I think it is good to have a couple of references with contact numbers or email, particularly a former colleague or supervisor. Googling is for HR people. My secretary can quickly send an email to a reference ... she has more important things to do than Google people.

Do NOT include references until they are specifically requested (by a hiring company, not a 3rd party recruiter). It's not respectful of your references' privacy to send their info around freely.

And for 99.9% of people found NOTHING (of value to you).... unless you actually have a criminal record, or scored a goal in Nowhere United's victory over Hicksville Town in Jan 2009. Talk about having a journalists eye view of the world.

I had one company tell me they NEVER Google / Facebook / etc. because it could show something that indicated my age or race.

Very very interesting.

Seriously - age? Most resume's I see either have and age or date of birth mentioned on them. And even if they don't, if they get to the interview stage there will be something else that will indicate their age - you'll see them. Normally looking at a person gives you a pretty good indication of how old someone is.

Dye your hair. Choose a natual colour though, and don't forget your eyebrows.
Then lather your face in some cream that makes it go all puffy, but not of course shiny.
Last but not least have a waistband that's nearer to your knees than your nipples.

Fools them every time...

I don't know many hiring managers who have the time to google search every candidate. So the resume is still the thing that gets you chosen for the next stage. Once you have the list narrowed down to candidates you'd like to interview, you might then google them.

I've only googled after the interview by the way, and only when they have mentioned having done something of note, like creating great webpages. But I can see where the use will be more prevelent going forward.

you will get 'About 1,590,000' hits on my name. but sometimes, with younger people who have been tagged in photos etc, it is quite a bit more fruitful.

Any prosepctive employer would struggle to find any information about me online. I regularly google myself and there are only one or two brief mentions.

you and got loads of hits.

I thought the the photo of a young lady licking gravy off you was a bit strong though...

Yum.... mmmmmm...Yorkshire Pudding.

Aside from Ms. Bowers own personal opinion, is there any evidence pointing to these new resume standards across the entire employment industry? I didn't seem to get the memo that all of what was once considered important in a resume suddenly obsolete.

I've taken technical writing. So has my S.O. And I've seen articles contradict both (already contradicting) points of view. It's completely up in the air, and what satisfies one person will ignite a fierce pet peeve for someone else.

So, in MY opinion, about the only things you can really count on:

- Have the relevant info easy to find.
- Use enough white space (and formatting) to make it look uncluttered.
- Keep it short, and highlight major accomplishments.
- Check for errors!!
- Try to stand out -- in a good way.
- If you get the interview, ask for the job.

Any time I get advice from anyone else on anything else to do with resume writing, I apply copious salt and consider it at best a single person's opinion.

FWIW, I no longer use an objective either. If I don't get the job because I didn't have that on my resume, well.. chances are I would've had the wrong colored shoelaces anyway.

The sad truth of today is that it does not matter how perfect the contents are in your resume, nowadays if you do not have that all important internal contact or reference your chances of getting the job is less than zero. How many times I have heard the words; "So who recommended you for this job?" or "So who do you know that works here at this company?" at interviews. If the person that referred you is someone important in the company then you are hired, no further questions asked, otherwise you will just get the normal "Thank you, we will call you."

You are perfectly right . That is the game we play today. Insider Reference can easily get you the job. With over ten years experience till can't find job. Politicians can get you the job with just a phone call

And in the last 8 years I've hired 8 people.

None of them were people recommended by others internally. Even though we actually have had a reward process in place for recommending good candidates. All of my hires have come through internet postings, recruiting fairs, ads or agencies.

I have only worked one place in the past decade where I knew someone there before I started. So no, I don't think there's any sad truth there...

I've hired quite a few over the years and those that are recommended by colleagues usually disappoint. I need people that are a good fit.

Someone correct me on this:
1. The objective statement tells people how much you want to work with them and what you expect from the environment.
2. Formatting? OK this is fair enough.
3. OK. Basically "cut the BS"
4. Wrong. If anyone googles me they are guaranteed to find 100 or more different people. This changes from country to country, from industry to industry and from position to position.
If you are looking for a CEO position you need to know the previous CEO or the board members. If you are looking for a sales position it is different from a developers position or from an IT management position. I can't help but feel that this article is simplified so much that it does not add any value. Toni don't use this article when you apply for a journalistic or any other position. I can't see that this article is from an award-winning writer.

I purposfully and intentionally have used aliases my entire 16 years on the net. You won't find a thing, good or bad about me personally, and that's how it should be. Some creepy HR person trying to spy on your history all over the net making ill-informed judgement calls in out of context snippets of your(or more likely someone else's) life is a ludicrous way for them to try to do their 'job'. Only an idiot keeps their social media life open to the public and tied to their real identity. Please release your bowers, Techrepublic.

I agree that only an idiot would put their life openly online for all to see. Unfortunately the world has a large percentage of idiots.

are happy with you.

I agree, today the objective is to be a remediate, to solve a problem for the employees. This is done, only after you have gained their attention. This is done by listing skill sets first, if the position is technical, or by listing positions where one has demonstrated the abilities sought. I agree with the article, overall. However, formatting is first reviewed by the scanning computer, right? So format and font should be first and foremost scannable by the computer, right?

I can get a job picking fruit at minimum wage without a resume or references at all. But who wants to do stoop work all day in the hot sun for peanuts?
Conversely, if I wanted a C-level job, I'd have to do a lot of face to face shmoozing, and get a half dozen guys and at least one woman to say I'm a nice guy, have done wonderful work at a manager level, and am chomping at the bit to do more and higher level stuff. In which case it's all about personal references and a resume is almost a second thought. (Assuming of course that I wasn't building my own business; in which case I'd be the one eventually hiring additional C-levels.)

The pay for picking fruit is considerably less than minimum wage. Agricultural work is governed by separate rules. You are, however, allowed to work a lot of over time and employ young children to make up the difference.

I have to agree with the "references upon request" part of this article. It always seemed silly to me to put on the end of a resumes as it's quite obvious that the employer would ask for them any way if they were interested in checking them.

Maybe I'm out of touch, having not been active in the job search market for 5 years but last I checked, objectives weren't all that bad. Is it the term 'Objective' that is now distasteful? Should we use 'Executive Summary' instead? To me, they are very nearly the same thing, but I could be mistaken. I will say that if you are going to use the objective, don't shy away from pronouns: that anti-pronoun mentality IS very dated.

Going slightly off topic, I received an email from a recruiter the other day offering me an interview about a ColdFusion developer position because the word "ColdFusion" turned up in my resume. Well, I've never been a ColdFusion developer; I managed a ColdFusion server farm 5 years ago, which might as well have been antiquity. My point is, I think HR recruiting processes these days are very flawed. There needs to be some kind of movement that brings HR recruiting practices into true alignment with a department head's candidate search objectives.

Between HR's abuse of keyword searches and potential candidates being turned away because a particular head hunter was turned off by a resume's structure or use of "dated" lexicon, it's hard to know which way is up these days. Truth be told there are more job openings than there are candidates these days and while there are myriad reasons as to why that could be, one reason HAS to be that HR/recruiters are not doing a good enough job locating and placing talent.

Reading proof has become a lost art. Even our newspaper, published by a major nationwide company, had a front-page caption above the fold: "[company] won a grant to built a new [something]..." "To Built"? Front page? The spell-checker cleared it, so it must be OK.

Spell checkers are helpful, but there is no alternative to good proofreading. Especially now with adaptive-predictive dictionaries, there is no end to the hilarious gaffes cranked out by computers.

Proofread your resume before you send it. If language is not your strong point, pay a professional to put the "finishing touches" on your resume.

There's no point in being labeled "illiterate" or "stupid" because a computer made a mistake.

I remember an HR person at a large company, who was also a friend; told me about this qualified applicant who said he had designed many "networks and cups"; misspelling "CPUs" was all she could talk about, not how good he might be at the firm.
Do 9 things right and then 1 thing wrong, what do people remember?

Is she sure that it was misspelled? CUPS is an acronym for Common Unix Printing system (cups). There are a lot of odd acronyms in the IT industry and it could be easy to mistake one of them for a misspelled word.

Bill

Sure, the people he may be working with will understand the "techno-babble" but if your resume doesn't get read you're wasting your time. It won't be taken seriously unless it's properly spelled, grammatically correct English.
Remember that "human resources" will see it first and they almost certainly
don't understand the "technobabble".

but then you resume becomes unreadable if you don't abbreviate anything assuming they actually know what they're hiring. Points in case:

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server (TFS)
Department of Defense Information Technology Security Certification and Accreditation Process (DITSCAP)

The list goes on.

If you're hiring someone for a technical position, then the CVs should go straight to a technical person to review. A HR person might have a list of acronyms to look out for, but they will have no way of judging a technical CV on anything other than how nicely it's formatted.

Exactly the same way that you wouldn't send a marketing CV to a technical person to review.
Would you ask HR to fix a broken Exchange server? Why would you think that they can accurately judge an exchange administrator's CV?

the more done perfectly ... the more it is easy to remember the smallest failure. Too bad we don't remember this in ourselves.

Yore wright. Ware wood whee awl bee without SpellCheck?

I can't count the number of CVs I 've seen with people experienced in "intergration" (most common) or "systums" or "developement".... IT pros are not literature majors and it only helps our own porpoises if we remember that, and simply use the spellcheck!

At the large institution where I'm employed--I coordinate two programs and direct a third--I see a great many resumes. But they come through an organizational process during which all formatting is stripped down to a bare minimum. Everything comes to those of us making hiring decisions left justified.

An applicant who leaves a statement about references off the end of his or her resume appears to us as someone who has sent an incomplete resume, indicating an inability to complete work. In fact, we expect at least three references to be listed.

We do expect you to know something about us and for that to be indicated in the resume. We want to know how resourceful you are, and that needs to be indicated by a display of your knowledge about our organization and the position for which you are applying.

The constant use of first person is like going on a blind date with someone who constantly talks about him- or herself. Not likely leading to a second.

I value the time and privacy of my references and would not consider giving out their contacts details until the offer stage. The last thing I would want as a referee is to suspect that my personal details were being given out to anyone who asked, which is in effect what you are doing if you list them at the end of a resume. At most I would include the statement that references would be available on request somewhere in the cover letter, however I tend to take it for granted that if you are applying for any job you would have a list of referees available at the appropriate stage and omit that detail entirely in the initial application.

Line up your references in advance, then after the interview, tell them about the interview and what the hiring group were interested in knowing. That will give your reference the time to prepare. If, of course, you trust your reference, and if you don't you shouldn't use them.

You should also consider using different references for different positions.

I'm leery of providing references at all. I received a vague e-mail "we saw your resume on blah-blah-blah" and they asked for 3-5 references and a current resume. I provided it to them and, as usual, never heard from them again. However, the solicited my references for work. "I hear you are a hiring manager for ..." I'm betting these bastards had no interest in me but were trying to find clients.