Stop "fine tuning" your resume and, you know, just make yourself useful, or something...

Lately I’ve been reading the del.icio.us popular items RSS feed. A recurring theme in the feed are blog posts talking about ways to “improve” your resume.

The last such post, Let’s Fine Tune Your Resume, provides the ultimate example: a post pointing to other posts about “improving” your resume. Yes, a meta-resume-tuning post! The job-seeker’s dream! No wonder people complain they can’t get their “dream job”: they are spending all their time reading blogs packed with resume-tweaking wisdom!

If I wanted to hire somebody for a job (and this holds for any job), I would look for the following main qualities:

• Cares about the field/job/task. Is passionate about it.
• Has at least the minimum skill level needed for the job, and can prove it. And, by the way, being a Sun certified programmer or having an university degree only proves that you spent a fair amount of time (and money!) to get this piece of paper; it does not in any way prove that you learned anything in the process, let alone that you can actually Do Stuff.
• Is "culturally compatible" with the environment they would be working work in. "Culturally compatible", in this context, means that the candidate shares the work style and values of the company/team.

Do you think you can convince me of your deep passion for this job by adding some clever keywords to your resume? Or that you’ll trick me into thinking you have outstanding skills by improving the look & feel of said resume? Maybe you are really convinced making your resume “accomplishments-driven, not responsibilities-driven” will really help me see what kind of work culture you are comfortable with?

Here is what I think: not only all this “fine tuning” won’t help, but it might actually irritate your potential employer. There is nothing I hate more in a resume than a whiff of not-quite-honest.

When I review a resume, I want to see indications of the qualities listed above. For example:

• Indication of passion: A candidate for an engineering position has through the years held individual contributor positions in different companies; maybe they rejected possible promotions to management roles, because they like being hands on. In their spare time, the candidate enjoys inventing and building things. Maybe they blog about their passion, too (and have consistently done so for a while).
• Indication of sufficient skill: The candidate has experience in the field; maybe some formal education in it, and can give concrete examples of jobs/tasks in which said skills were successfully applied. They've done work for fun/pro-bono/etc to either improve their skills or to prove them. ("For fun" or voluntary work can also be an indication of passion; see previous point.)
• Indication of value/work-style compatibility (this is probably the hardest one to identify in a resume): The candidate has consistently worked in environments with similar work culture. The resume uses a style that seems in line with the potential employer's style. The resume does not contain keywords or phrases that indicate that the candidate belongs in a very different work environment. For example, the sentence "I am a firm believer in empowering your company by leveraging my Web 2.0 skills in order to, moving forward, maximize the ROI you bring to your customers" would automatically disqualify you for an engineering position (in my eyes, not necessarily in those of my employer, etc).

And no, I am not saying that you shouldn’t try to have a well-presented resume, or that you shouldn’t use the darned spell-checker before you mail it. And I am in no way saying it is better if you don’t bother converting the thing to PDF and just send them that nasty MS Word file, either. These are just the basic things that will prevent the reader from clawing their eyes out when they see it, no more, no less.

If you want your resume to really stand out, stop wasting time reading “fine tuning” blog posts, and get on with finding and cultivating your passion(s), improving your skills and learning what kind of worker you really are. It will show through in your resume. Really.