My Hybrid Resume Review

Those of you who follow this blog know that I mostly write about Chess here. I have another blog for my main writing. I do a lot of different things and have a lot of skills. Because of this, when I had the task of creating a resume for my recent “Project and Portfolio II: Creative Writing” class, I created one that is a mix of my skills and experience of 3 main areas.

My writing skills are what I feel are the most impressive, however, my grocery store experience is where most of my paid professional experience has been. Therefore, when I created the following resume, what I was going for was to emphasize how my experience writing as an author, speaking to customers in a grocery store, and my computer skills and knowledge of software all work together to qualify me for many types of jobs.

Of course, on this site, my main focus is that my communication skills have improved to the point where I can probably teach anyone Chess.

But the truth is that these skills, while they may not be impressive to employers, are the backbone of all the content I have published in my books and on my blogs and social media.

For example, most employers don’t know much about Chess. They also don’t know what LibreOffice, Inkscape, or the work that goes into writing a publishing a book.

I submitted that resume for my Portfolio 2 class and this was the professor’s response.

Here are my recommendations:

• Omit the summary, or at the very least, shorten it to a few words. Most human resources departments make a preliminary decision about which résumés should result in possible interviews in about 7 seconds or fewer. If a résumé cannot be skimmed well in that short span, the résumé and applicant are instantly rejected.
  
  (Generally, a summary section appears first on a resume.)
• Add more relevant skills. As a student, your chief qualifications are neither degrees or work experience, so make the skills list as impressive as possible without lying. Creative writing is not a skill, but a collection of dozens of skills.

Keep up the good work.

All best wishes,

John King

I appreciate his feedback, but I take issue with the fact that managers at companies are skimming through resumes in 7 seconds.

What this means is that people creating resumes to obtain jobs must necessarily shorten and omit details that may actually be VERY important to whether or not they are qualified for the job. The impatience of employers to read resumes is very much a problem.

However, what I am doing is quite different. I am trying to manage different jobs of working at Walmart, doing online college, teaching chess, and writing books and blog posts. Therefore, my resume is longer because it tries to accomplish more than one thing.

And in the unlikely event that I ever did have a stable full-time job working for a company as a writer, I would hope that the people in charge of decisions would be people willing to read. Reading and writing books is an old art that has almost been lost these days because of the modern constant stimulation of videos on social media. From the beginning, it was not this way.

And if you are one of the people who has read this post till the end, then congratulations! I think you are more qualified to judge someone than someone who only looks at a resume for 7 seconds. Let me know how you think a resume should be written.