An interesting post on eduFire. Koichi writes: “once my generation takes over, the resumé is over – here are ten reasons why.”
All great points, there are drastic changes afoot, yes in education and the path of our employment. I agree that a resumé is mostly a waste of time. The ease of email blasting further diminishes the value of the document and the HR departments no longer distinguish between a spam and a job applications. The post indusial world is nonlinear and that makes the essential task of comparing one resume to the other virtually impossible. The nonlinear part is going to accelerate rapidly, the nominal educational and work related benchmarks will move past the current canonical standards.
There is also a built in fundament flaw in the resumé format. No only it’s awkward to write your own promo but it’s the least trustworthy communication, especially when a person is “100% honest about herself”. Often people who make a living teaching how to write resumés recognize the flaw and try to tell you that it’s all about a cover letter. I find this puzzling. In order to write a genuine cover letter one needs to know a lot about a company and also about a person who will be reviewing the resumé and the cover letter. Even with the well documented companies it’s virtually impossible to write a focused and targeted cover letter BEFORE an interview. The result of this is that most cover letters are generic templates stringing clichés, which makes them even more useless than the resumé itself. The question remains, if there will be any formal introductory document in the future?
Illustration via Irina Blok