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The
BLOG
Black and White and NOT Read All Over
Think about the last time you read a print newspaper. What did you do? More than likely, you scanned the headlines of the front page first to see if there was anything there that really caught your eye. Since these stories are on the front page, you assume they are the most important and newsworthy.
You may see something that really grabs your attention on the front page so you read the first sentence of the story. If the story is written well, it will follow basic journalism style and address the “who, what, where, when” in the first sentence or two. You decide with that first sentence if you want to read the rest of the article more closely or just continue skimming the headlines.
After you are done with the first page, you turn to the inside pages, again skimming headlines. You may pick up a “From the Front Page” continuance or you may just glance quickly at other stories to see if they have interest. By the time you make it through the front page section, you have covered several different categories of news – local, national, international, and maybe some business news. These categories are ordered in importance to the profile of the reader. A local paper may lead with local stories while large papers such as the Washington Post or New York Times may lead with national stories or even international pieces.
Sometimes, you jump directly to a section that might contain a certain piece of information you are seeking such as the weather forecast, the stock report, or the obituaries. You know what you are seeking and go directly to that category.
Why am I talking about how a newspaper is read? Because a newspaper is read almost exactly the same way a resume is read. Most people who write their own resumes never think about how the resume is read and what the reader is seeking in the document. Most people are too concerned trying to make sure they have the right keywords in the resume or that they have not misspelled something or how to handle a strange career timeline to think about the document itself. So let’s look at how a resume is read and the purpose of placing information in certain places in the resume.
Like a newspaper, the most attention is paid to the first page above the fold. In a resume, that is the summary section. A good summary is like the lead headline of a newspaper. It gets the main message across to the reader. The reader wants to know the scoop and the summary should provide the “who, what, when, where, and how” of a candidate’s career. In recent years, use of the summary section has degraded into a listing of soft skills and intangibles rather than summarizing the information that a reader wants to know. Poor summaries are vague strings of ephemeral adjectives like “detail-oriented” “highly skilled” or “results-driven”. These phrases and words don’t tell the reader what he wants to know! A summary should, well, summarize! A good summary tells what the candidate’s job focus is going to be (usually naming a job title), tells in what industry(s) the candidate has experience, informs the reader on level of experience or number of years in the field, and the area of expertise.
(To be continued in Friday’s blog!)
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