What Color Is Your Parachute? (17 page)

Incidentally, during
this
Practice Interviewing, it’s perfectly okay for you to take someone with you—preferably someone who is more outgoing than you feel you are. And on the first few interviews, let them take the lead in the conversation, while you watch to see how they do it.

Once it is
your turn
to conduct the interview, it will by that time usually be easy for you to figure out what to talk about.

Alone or with someone, keep at this Practice Interviewing until you feel very much at ease in talking with people and asking them questions about things you are curious about.

In all of this,
fun
is the key. If you’re having fun, you’re doing it right. If you’re not having fun, you need to keep at it, until you are. It may take seeing four people. It may take ten. Or twenty. You’ll know.

A
resume
is very attractive to an employer, but not for the reasons you think. It offers an easy way to cut down the time employers have to spend on job-hunters. It only takes a skilled human resource person about eight seconds to scan a resume (thirty seconds, if they’re really dawdling), so getting rid of fifty job-hunters
,
I mean fifty
resumes
, takes only half an hour or less. Whereas, interviewing those fifty job-hunters in person would take a minimum of twenty-five hours. Great time savings!

A
resume
is very attractive to a job-hunter. It seems to offer an easy way to do your job-hunt, and to approach an employer. No maddening
phone tag, no taking the bus, or driving the car, or sitting in someone’s outer office for a blue moon, only to be rejected after all of that. No, with a resume you just take a piece of paper, summarize your qualifications, and mail it to the organization, if you have a particular target in mind. Or post it on the Web if you have no target and you want to cast a wide net—an
Inter
Net. And voilà!—so the myth goes—with your resume “out there,” you will automatically find a job. In spite of the statistic that we already saw:
less than 10 percent of all job-hunters or career-changers actually find a job, when they start with their resume.

Who perpetuates this myth of the magic resume? Well, everyone. For example,
some
employers—trying to get rid of you, will say,
“Send me your resume”
instead of
“goodbye”
as their way to close out the conversation. Of course,
sometimes
they really do want to see it! And,
some
coaches who know you will pay them for a concrete product, more than just for handholding and advice. And
some
resume websites, who know that having
content
on their sites (like, “how to write your resume”) will hold visitors longer than just a list of job-postings. And job-hunting authors:
some
of whom emphatically tell you that a resume is the way to go, because it enables them to show off how good
they
are at writing a resume. And some of them are
very
good!

Of course this is a cynical reading of various parties’ perpetuating of resumes; many simply believe, honestly and sincerely, that a resume works, and works superbly, and is the best way to job-hunt.
In spite of that 90 percent failure rate statistic.

Simply this: Resumes and Interviewing are
not
two separate subjects, but one.

The primary purpose of a resume is to get yourself invited in for an interview
(with a prospective employer, of course).

The primary purpose of that interview is to get yourself invited back for a second interview.

If you keep these two simple truths always in front of you, as you go about your job-hunt or career-change, you will be ahead of 97 percent of all other job-hunters or career-changers.

A resume
is
one way
to get yourself invited in for an interview. There are other ways, even preferred ways, if your resume fails. Know what they are.
For example: getting introduced there, by a mutual acquaintance or friend (a contact of yours, a business contact, a personal contact or friend, a family contact, or anyone you’ve ever met and know well enough to have their name and address or phone number).

A
resume
is more akin to a
business card
, than to a
biography
. Evaluate every item you are tempted to include in your resume by this one standard: “Will this item help to get me invited in? Or will this item seem too puzzling, or off-putting, or a red flag?”

I repeat: mention nothing (in your resume) that might keep you from getting invited in. If there is something you feel you would ultimately need to explain, or expand upon, save the explanation for the interview.

A
resume
on paper
(not by e-mail) first presents itself to
the fingers
, before it presents itself to
the eyes
. Picture this scenario: an employer is going through a whole stack of resumes, and on average he or she is giving each resume about eight seconds of their time (true: we checked!). Then that resume goes either into a pile we might call “Forgeddit,” or a pile we might call “Bears further investigation.”

Yes, the employers’ first impression of each resume is how it feels to their fingers, as they first pick it up. By
the message from their fingers
they are either prejudiced in your favor before they even start reading, or prejudiced against you. Before their eyes read even one line. Usually they are not even aware of
why.

A resume to a particular employer is best not sent solely by e-mail, these days. That route has been overused, and abused; many employers, leery of viruses, will not even open attachments anymore, such as your resume. Send it by e-mail if you must, but always send a nicer version of it by the postal service, or UPS, or FedEx, etc.—nicely laid out or formatted, as they say, on good paper; using a decent-sized font, size 12 or even 14 (makes it faster to read), etc.

“
Depending on resumes
” poses three dangers to your job-hunting health:

1. Resumes may create depression in you, and vastly lower your self-esteem. This is the greatest danger, by far, of depending on resumes.
   Why depression? Well, if it were just a matter of trying a job-hunting method that didn’t work very well, it might be okay. You pick yourself up, and go on, still keeping good self-esteem. But in fact, the danger of resumes is that if you believe in them, and they don’t work for you, you start to think something is really, really wrong with
   you
   . And if some of your friends tell you their resume actually got them a job
   (not true: it actually got them an interview)
   , you may feel lower than a snake’s belly. Many job-hunters never snap out of the depression and feeling of worthlessness that follows. Every resume should carry a warning label: “Using this may be hazardous to your mental health.”
   

2. Resumes make you feel like they’re
   out there
   , working for you. They make you feel as though you’re really doing something about your job-hunt. But in fact they may be moribund or comatose. That is, they may not be getting read, at all, even when posted on an employer’s own website. As for posting on general sites, well, Pete Weddle, an expert on recruiting, once got some resume sites on the Internet to tell him how many employers actually looked at the resumes on their sites. (Sit down, while I tell you the news.) A site that had 85,000 resumes posted: only 850 employers looked at
   any
   of those resumes in the previous three months before the survey. Another site with 59,283 resumes posted, only 1,366 employers looked at
   any
   , in the previous months. Another site with 40,000 resumes, only 400 employers in months. A site with 30,000 resumes, only 15 employers looked in, during the previous three months. So, you send out your resume or post it on the Internet, confident that employers are reading it, when—in a depressing number of cases—nobody is. Some employers, in fact,
   hate
   resumes (I kid you not). So many lies, on so many resumes. So much exaggeration and distortion of job-hunters’ actual experience and knowledge (40 percent of the time, according to studies).
   

3. Depending on resumes may cause you to give up your job-hunt prematurely. Resumes can be a useful
   part
   of anybody’s job-hunt, but they should never be your entire plan. You can send out tons of resumes, or post them on every resume site on the Internet, and not get a single nibble. Fifty-one percent of all job-hunters who base their job-hunt solely on mailing out or posting their resume,
   get discouraged, and abandon their job-hunt by the end of the second month. “Oh well,” they say, “obviously there are no jobs out there.” Au contraire, there are 30,000,000+ jobs out there, as we saw earlier in this book. Resumes are just the wrong way to find all but a portion of them.