Summary

Making a Hiring Manager smile starts with understanding the difference between a resume that markets you, and one that just lists everything you have ever done. The first persuades and inspires, and latter bores and frustrates. When you make Hiring Managers smile, they usually call you for an interview.

The Problem

If you ask a hundred people, What is a resume? You are likely to get one pretty consistent answer: My resume is my job history. And a quizzical look that says: "Everyone knows that!"

Well, that would be the wrong answer. All you would have to do is ask a Hiring Manager what she wants to see in a resume. Chances are, she won’t say she wants a job history of all her candidates. So what does she want? And what is a good resume? These would be very good things to know before sending yours out into the void.

The Job History Resume

To define what a resume is, you have to define what it is that makes a Hiring Manager smile. Jane is a Hiring Manager, and she has a vacancy on her team. She has two other employees pitching in to cover what needs to be done, and she still has tasks backing up. What Jane would like (what would make her smile) is reading the resume of an eminently qualified candidate, a candidate who seems to know exactly what she is looking for in this open position. A candidate who read the job description, and addressed it.

So, what did this candidate do to make Jane smile? Did he send her a job history that lists everything he has ever done in all his jobs, including lunches and potty breaks? Probably not. The open position required a person with some very specific skills, capabilities, and accomplishments. The writer of the winning resume showed Jane that he had what she was looking for. He illustrated that he was the solution to her staffing problem. That is what made Jane smile.

The Marketing Resume

So, if this candidate didn’t cheer up Jane with a job history, just what kind of a resume did he send her? He sent her a marketing resume that was written specifically to address the requirements in the job description. After all, that description is a clear explanation of the capabilities needed to do the job.

A job history resume doesn’t change, unless you are adding a job to it. It is designed and written once, and is supposed to work for all jobs for which you are applying. Good luck with that!

A marketing resume, on the other hand, has a very specific and narrow purpose: to answer, persuade, inspire, and influence. It attempts to answer a particular call for help, to persuade a single Hiring Manager that you are the one she is looking for, to inspire her to get excited about your possibilities as a candidate and to influence her to call you for an interview.

Marketing resumes, unlike job histories, have to be refreshed every time you apply for a new position, since most new positions differ in some way, and require fresh answers, persuasion, inspiration and influence. It is more work than writing a job history once and using it for every application. But it is what is absolutely required to make Jane smile.