By Romy Misra

The jobs which aren’t filled by referrals are filled by resumes, the unfortunate pivot of college recruiting. The company barrier you have to clear based on a piece of paper and how well you write it, but can’t be over a page.

Walk into your university career center and the first thing you will be coached on the importance of having a great resume and why you should spend time on it every day making it look good.

(Just in case you are new to the resume business: the ‘great resume’ reflects all your leadership roles in college, has active verbs (my university career center actually distributes a list which should be used), shows the impact your intern experience has on the organization, even if it didn’t have any.

What a glorious waste of time. So this system has students focusing on making great resumes all the time.  As a consequence, resumes are both highly exaggerated and incorrect portraits of students.  For companies it is equally tough as well, trying to dig behind the fluff and figuring out who the correct person for the job is.

In most cases the resume gives an inaccurate picture of the person. Even to make the first cut in a company. For instance, students join student organizations to have it reflect on their resume and prove they have a rounded personality. Worse some leading student organizations make it part of their recruiting pitch that being a member makes it look good on the resume.

The resume focus is not successful, makes students do some things for all the fake reasons (to put on your resume), yet it exists.

We need a recruiting system where actions speak louder than words. Especially resume words.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 10:34 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.