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Responding to Karen Steele and Eric Ray's posts on what criteria
we use to evaluate resumes:
I immediately 'file-13' any resume with typos and/or
grammar/punctuation/spelling errors. My rationale? One's
resume is of immediate importance to a writer; if a writer cannot take
the care to get his/her own resume (and cover letter) up to
snuff, then I cannot reasonably expect that person to give
my docs the care they deserve. Subjective? You betcha.
Arbitrary? I don't think so.
I look for things like unexplained gaps in job history, which,
as Karen points out, can be pretty effectively covered up by a
functional resume. I also look for someone with 'butterfly'
syndrome - moving from job to job frequently, *or* with
predictable regularity.
Obviously, I look for descriptions of duties, responsibilities,
or accomplishments which are applicable to the job I'm trying
to fill. This is where the ability to tailor one's resume to
a specific job posting comes in handy. If my job posting lists
experience in an IBM mainframe environment as a requirement, I
probably won't call you in for an interview if your resume or
cover letter does not indicate that you meet that requirement.
I rarely look for experience with the specific publishing package
I'm using. If your resume indicates experience with one or more
of the popular packages, I assume you can learn the specifics of
any oddball combination I might be using. I *do* want to see
mention of the environments/tools you use (PC/Mac/workstation,
DOS/Windows/UNIX, FrameMaker/Interleaf/QuarkXpress/Ventura/MS Word).
In my own resume, I have categories for operating systems and publications
systems.
Unlike Karen, I have no basic suspicion of functional resumes. In
fact, I recently updated my own to be functional - mainly because
I found myself repeating similar types of duties/accomplishments
across multiple jobs. Generating a functional resume allowed
me to get the document to a single page. I did, however, include
the chronological title/company/from-to information which
Eric mentioned.
I don't get too excited about paper, font choice, or layout - unless
something strikes me as just being *unbelievably* bad.
FWIW,
anne halsey
sr tech writer, storagetek
anne_halsey -at- stortek -dot- com
