“Kill the Résumé.”
Last weekend, I headed up to a job fair in San Francisco to promote Job4Joe to employers and job training representatives. There, I met Jakob, a long-term unemployed marketing professional. He told me story after story about how he was dismissed, how the job market is racist. . . all that jazz.
He also said, “We should kill the résumé. What good is a piece of paper, anyway?”
In a way, he was right. Résumés are mere pieces of paper with nothing more than ink printed on them, just as a college degree and a cover letter are. Nevertheless, I told him that résumés are needed because they provide a quantitative aspect to the current process. What stood out to me was his perseverance to get himself back into the game. No one would ever tell a long-term unemployed person, “You’ll get a job tomorrow.” It’s not true. There are reasons behind why people are unemployed for such a long time, and the best that they can do is promote what’s innate in themselves: the holy trinity of intelligence, perseverance, and resourcefulness.
Of course, a bit of creativity is the icing on top.
