Stop Relying On Your Resume

Many of you keep doing it.  Relying on your resume to tell your story.  To introduce yourself.

And to establish your personal brand.

It doesn’t matter if it is a highly professional resume.  One that meets all the basic hurdles for success.

It won’t happen.

If you are sitting at home weeks after taking a big stack of resumes to the post office.  Or having recently hit “submit” on a few hundred websites.  Or perhaps worse, clicked just once and had your resume sent all over the globe.  In one fell swoop.

In that case, you’ve now applied for a bunch of jobs where you aren’t qualified.  Congratulations.

It’s tempting, of course, to look for ways to be highly efficient during job search.  And you should.  As long you are also effective.

If you read the recent guest post by Ryon Harms, you heard his story about how he found his new job in less than 6o days.  Thom Singer’s recent guest post also shared similar comments about  the type of work that drives success in job search or career networking.  He said career networking is not magic.  It is hard work.  Takes tenacity.

So when I hear people telling me about all the resumes they’ve sent out recently, I think about the gap between efficient and effective.

Because after the resume blast, there is a sense of comfort.  Time to pull out a nice cigar (I don’t smoke) and a bottle of your best wine.  And wait.  Soon the e-mails will begin finding their way back to you.  The phone will begin to ring.  And your interview schedule, like your dance card, will again be full.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.  And even adding a really good cover letter doesn’t solve the problem.

Resumes don’t have a mind of their own.  They don’t have a heat seeking computer chip that will inevitably find the right job for you.  And a hiring manager that sighs with happiness when your resume crosses their desk.

So until someone invents that, you’ll just have to stick with being strategic.  Finding a job through smart thinking and other new technology.  If you are thinking about blasting out a few more resumes this week, try focusing on these five ideas instead:

1.  Make sure you have specific and clear job search objectives.  If you don’t, write them and sign up for my Watchlyst.

2.  Create a career networking business card and a one-page career networking bio.

3.  Re-invent your elevator pitch to include the objectives above.  And learn how to better deliver your elevator pitch.

4.  Determine who you should be networking with to find the right job in your industry or function.

5.  Identify two events happening this week where they (or people like them) will be networking.  And go there.

There’s hard work in the advice above.  It’s not as easy as clicking “submit” or tweaking your resume prior to shipping.  But it’s what works.

And this way your resume doesn’t have to work so hard.  Poor thing.

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