Do You Actually Know What a Resume Is?
- Aug 3
- 5 min read
Here is something I have learned from almost twelve years of reading resumes for a living. Hardly anybody knows what one is.
Ask ten people and nine will describe a record. Where they have worked, in order, with the dates and the duties underneath. Something closer to an employment history than a pitch. And that is not a small misunderstanding, because if you believe a resume is a record, then the only way to improve it is to make the record more complete. So people add. They add the job from 2011. They add three more bullets under every role. They build a skills section with eighteen things in it, half of which are Microsoft Word. The resume gets longer and worse at the same time and nobody can tell them why.
A resume is not a record. It is a marketing document, written for one specific job, read in a matter of seconds by a person whose entire task in that moment is to narrow two hundred applicants down to eight. That is the job your resume has. Everything else people argue about online, the length, the font, whether to include an objective, whether two pages is allowed, all of it sits downstream of that one fact.
And once you take that seriously, something uncomfortable comes with it. You cannot write a marketing document without knowing what you are marketing to. Which means the problem with most resumes is not a writing problem at all. It starts about four steps earlier, with the things you were supposed to find out before you ever opened the document.
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