When I first started looking for work two years ago, I just blasted the same resume over and over. When that didn't work, I started tailoring each resume to each position. I've got hundreds of resumes now. More than Tony Stark has Iron Man armors. To be more precise, not-a-thousand hundred.
So when people ask for a resume, I'm a bit thrown back. I don't really have one resume to rule them all. They're each custom pieces which balance my qualifications with concerns about being considered overqualified, concerns over gaps in my job history versus the thoroughness of a background check, the stretch of a title versus their willingness to reconcile that with a call to my references, the probability of it matching search terms in an automated search system with appearing shallow and copy-pasted to a real person reading them.
Does it convey this information clearly enough? Is this too much information? Do my objectives really matter for someone hiring me as a janitor? A retail clerk? A file clerk? An offshore clerk? A software developer? Someone hiring me to write copy for their sub-par website to hock sub-par wares on unsuspecting consumers?
I don't really know and anyone who claims they know is an asshole. Every HR person is looking for something different. I've been high enough in companies to see just how arbitrary and thoughtless the folks in charge of hiring are with employees. Past and future.
I've seen applications thrown into the garbage because of stray marks or a “funny way of writing their name.” I've seen management—grown-ass men in their forties with decades of experience—play hot-potato about telling a guy he's fired after weeks of just hoping he wouldn't care when they didn't call him to come into work.
Managers and HR folks aren't graded for calling in good people. They'd rather poach good people that others have hired because they don't want to develop the resources to screen, hire, and develop people. They aren't punished if they hire someone who's bad at their job, “It happens,” “I can train them,” “They're untrainable,” they say with a shrug.
There's no punishment for not hiring good people. I'm a fantastic laborer. I don't want to be a laborer for the rest of my life, but I've applied to plenty of labor positions and not gotten them. If there was some way to link employees hired/not hired and connect them to the decision-makers behind those statuses...
I'm just rambling, but while I'm courting my inner mumblr, let me recount this story. I applied to Best Buy once. It took me forty days of incessant calling, dropping by the store, and hour-long waits before I finally got my fourth interview with the store manager. By that time, the exploratory position they'd opened with had been eliminated. Not filled; they'd decided they no longer wanted explore it. The position changed from one where I'd be helping customers to one where I'd be fixing computers to checking in laptops at the front desk.
I would have wrecked that shit backwards and forwards. Any of those positions. Instead, I got a job at an AT&T U-Verse support center before they could get around to that fourth interview. They were so cautious in their hiring process and so slow that they could only get people who had nothing better to do but to apply for one job with them.
Most companies don't have that kind of draw and I imagine that explains a lot about who hires and how they get hired.
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