Here’s some unconventional career advice for you: throw away your resume.You won’t get a boring, cog-in-the-machine desk job without a resume, but if that’s the kind of job you’re after, then stick to the resume.
Companies that want to hire career bloggers may still want you. It sounds crazy, but the irony of today’s job market is that you’re going to get farther and have better job security without it. Here are just a few reasons why you may want to consider ditching your resume:
1. A resume shows employers why not to hire you.
Many employers could care less who you are and what you can offer the company when looking through resumes. They’re looking for competence, nothing else. They’re looking at what school you went to and whether you have experience, and if something’s missing, your resume will wind up in trash.
2. The best jobs are the ones employers don’t know they’re hiring for.
You’re not going to find your dream job through job listings, because the very best careers are the ones where an employer doesn’t even know that they need somebody to do a specific job. The first people to run Facebook ad campaigns for corporate clients didn’t wait for those corporate clients to post a listing; they contacted them with the opportunity. What can you offer a company that they don’t know they need?
3. Your reputation should precede your first contact, anyways.
If you’re a web designer, you shouldn’t have to show somebody a list of where you studied and who you’ve worked for; you should simply be able to show your client a few of the sites you’ve designed. If you’re a blogger, you should already have a substantial presence in your field before talking to somebody who can hire you to ghostwrite their memos or write their web content. If you don’t have a reputation yet, then you’re a lot better off keeping your current job and putting work into your blog, your web videos, or whatever it is you do rather than wasting time submitting a resume all over town.
What we neglect to consider about the resume is that you’re going to need it to get a slightly better job than the one you have right now. However, a slightly better job is going to demand slightly more time, and it’s not going to improve your life by much, and in fact, will take time and energy that you could be putting into pursuing your dream job. Build a presence, build a reputation, and build a body of work, not a resume.
Gilbert S is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.
