By J.M. Auron Quantum Tech Resumes
The job market is tough these days. That’s not news to anyone in tech. But, too often, an IT job search can be made even tougher by following the resume misinformation that’s everywhere on the internet these days.
Resume misinformation—like much else on the internet—often gets recycled until it seems true. It’s a rare day that I don’t see resume advice that just isn’t accurate—and may be destructive. Unfortunately, lots of very solid tech pros follow this internet chatter in good faith—and that slows down their job search significantly. So in this article, I’d like to take a few minutes to start to address a few very common IT resume myths.
Resume Advice and myth busting
1) The All-Bulleted Resume
I’d thought all-bulleted resumes had become extinct. I was pretty happy in that thought. But now? Not only are they everywhere again, they are being presented as the only way to write an IT resume.
That’s not a good piece of advice. Here’s why.
All-bulleted resumes are unclear, unstructured, and hard to read. Bullets, in any document, exist to visually highlight specific, important information. To make something stand out. To bring something from the background to the foreground. So if everything is bulleted? Nothing is bulleted. In an all-bulleted IT resume, absolutely every piece of information—from a major accomplishment to a necessary but uninteresting job task—looks exactly the same and is given the same visual weight. Nothing stands out, so there’s no way to scan a resume and see what’s most important or impactful. That means the hiring authority has to get out a magnifying glass and go through every bullet to see what’s actually important. That’s time consuming, and hiring authorities don’t have a lot of time.
What do I suggest and use in my IT resume writing service?
I make a very clear distinction between duties or actions, and results. I write actions—whether a client’s day-to-day job mandate or the actions supporting an initiative—in a paragraph format. I then save the bullets for the hard, clear accomplishments. This approach creates an IT resume that’s clear and scannable while providing a distinct visual indicator of your biggest accomplishments.
Bottom line? Use bullets on your IT resume—but only for the things that really stand out.
2) One-Page Resumes
This is another one that makes the rounds periodically. It’s back now—and may be even more destructive than an all-bulleted format.
People are drawn to a one-page IT resume for what seems to be a good reason. We’ve all heard that hiring authorities do an initial resume scan in 0.0000000003 nanoseconds, right? So we need to keep the resume short to make sure they can read it!
Well, hiring authorities do go over a resume pretty quickly—the first time they read it—though with nothing like the speed one sees online.
That’s not a reason to cram a career into one page. Here are two reasons why.
First, no matter how fast the initial read may be, the hiring authority has to see something of value in your IT resume to merit scheduling an interview. If you’ve cut your 5-, 10-, or 20-year career to fit in maybe 400 words on one page? There’s a really good chance you’ve cut out some—or all—of the reasons you might get a call.
Second, while we hear a lot about that lightning-fast initial scan, what’s generally not talked about is that the first quick read is just that—the first. If a hiring authority does see something of interest, if something stands out in a candidate’s career (because it’s not buried in a million bullets), the hiring authority will want to know more before scheduling a call.
Because an interview takes time and the hiring authority wants to know that that time will be well spent. To do that, the hiring authority needs to have enough content to determine what a candidate can offer in a new opportunity. That requires more depth of content than is possible in one page.
As a professional IT resume writer, how do I handle this? Unless I’m working with a new grad, my resumes are almost always two pages. The distinction between actions and results I mentioned above makes the document scannable. I also focus on the current or most recent job on page one, with deeper detail, and earlier career discussed more quickly on page two. This showcases my client’s accomplishments in a quick, readable way—while providing enough depth to show what my client has delivered.
3) Customizing your Resume for Every Job
No. You really don’t need to customize your resume for every job.
I hear the gasps, the groans, the angry retorts. How dare I suggest this? EVERYONE knows that you have to tweak your resume for every job. Reddit says it! LinkedIn says it! ChatGPT says it! It must be true!!!
It’s not, though. I’ll explain why.
This myth goes back, I believe, a very long time—to the ancient days before computers. Days when people typed out resumes for each job, and then mailed those resumes.
Yes. The days when dinosaurs ruled the earth.
Since people were typing each resume by hand—and only sending out a few—rewriting the resume for each job made perfect sense.
We don’t live in those times. The myth continues, as myths do, though the rationalization for the myth keeps changing. A few years ago, it was to show HR that you’d read the job description. Now, the rationalization is the need to hit every keyword. There may be another rationalization in the future, if the ATS loses its place as the #1 job search bogeyman.
But regardless of the rationalization for this myth, tweaking your resume for every job is insanely time consuming—and that’s time that can be better used in other aspects of the job search. It’s also error-prone—every time you edit a document, the likelihood of errors increases.
So what do I recommend to clients in my IT resume writing service?
First, take the time up front to get clear on your goals. Then, if those goals are all relatively closely related, write a resume to address them. If you’re a platform architect, or a CTO, or an IT manager, or a developer, every job you’re going to apply to is going to be fairly similar. The slight differences in job descriptions really are unlikely to derail you—because a well-crafted, targeted, well-written resume will address the bulk of every job description you’re applying to.
That means you can send out more resumes in the time it would have taken to customize each resume.
Final Comments
I’m sure I’ve ruffled a few feathers in this article; I am a very direct guy. But I feel it’s important—and worth the time—to help job seekers look at some of the resume misinformation out there with a more critical lens.
I hope you’ll find some food for thought in this article, and perhaps some new approaches to crafting your resume and proceeding with your job search.
Bio:
I’m J.M. Auron. As a leading professional IT resume writer As a leading professional IT resume writer</a>] for more than a decade and a half, I’ve helped thousands of tech professionals—from developer to CIO—with best-in-class IT resume writing services, LinkedIn profile optimization, and tech career coaching. My goal is to help IT professionals get interviews, get offers, and move into better jobs.
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