Amy Gallo of the Harvard Business Review gets it: writing your resume is the worst.
It's painstaking to reduce yourself to bullet points and then to get the formatting just right. And then when you're done, hitting "Send" on a cold job application often feels totally futile. In an age when resumes are easily uploaded online, the hunt for jobs seems more competitive — and discouraging — than ever.
But Gallo says you need to pay attention to the way new technology changes the resume game. As she explains in her article for the Harvard Business Review, in an age when employers are often reading your resumes in PDF on a screen, the rules are different.
Gallo says there's one old rule you can definitely drop in the digital age:
But Gallo says there's some conventional wisdom that's timeless:
At its core, a resume should be more than a list of your responsibilities.
"A resume is really a marketing document," said Gallo, "I think people, unfortunately, often think of it as a record of their work life — which it's not. You have to think of the hiring manager as the consumer, as your customer, and you're trying to sell yourself."
For more insights, listen to Gallo tear apart Money Talking host Charlie Herman's resume. (And he thought he had a good one.)
*Special thanks to Rebecca Ungarino for production help.