Resume Length

• There, I said it. Whew. I feel better now. There are some things that happen every day in this world that make absolutely no sense, but they keep happening anyway, just because that’s the way it’s always been. This phenomenon explains, among other things, why every Yanni CD goes platinum, why Pizza Hut keeps stuffing different crap inside their pizza crust, why all 26 Wayans brothers continue to get movie roles, and so on.Go ahead and add the resume objective to this list, because if you’ve never realized how utterly stupid a concept this is, then I’m about to tell you. I am a psychic. Did you know that? I’ll bet you didn’t. But I’ll prove it, because even though I’ve never met you or talked to you, I can predict with absolute certainty what your objective is in sending your resume. I promise, I can do it. You ready? Here it comes…TO GET THE JOB.Right? That’s why you’re sending the resume wherever you’re sending it – because you want the job – a job, the job, some job, any job. Now, I have a confession to make: I’m not a psychic, just a smartass. The point here is: the objective is always the same, and everyone knows it: You want the job. And that’s good, because I, the employer, am the one who posted the job. I did that because I wanted to get resumes from people like you who want the job that I posted. That whole process pretty well goes without saying, right?

  Then WHY do people waste 20 percent of the space on their one sacred resume page explaining, basically, why they’re sending me this resume? I know, I know: the answer is, because somebody, somewhere along the line told you that’s what you’re supposed to do. Well, I’m telling you it’s not. Go directly to your resume right now, highlight the objective, and cut it out. Now. Seriously, right now, go do it.

  You may be afraid to do this. You may think, “but EVERY sample resume I see has an objective, and EVERY book includes an objective section!” Be that as it may, please, don’t be afraid. No employer in the history of mankind has ever picked up a resume and said, “Wow, this is a fine resume, except…there’s no objective! Maybe they don’t really want the job and just sent me the resume to confuse me. Someone’s playing a trick on me, because without an objective, I just can’t be certain of why this resume ever landed on my desk!” It does seem ridiculous when you think of it like that, doesn’t it?

  If you can’t bring yourself to remove the objective from you resume – well, I tried. But if you’re going to include it anyway, let me give you a piece of advice (sigh, not that you’ll probably listen, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt). Be honest. Say you want the Widget-Maker job that you saw in the paper. Don’t attempt one of those fantastically awful snowjobs that go something like this:

  ”I am seeking a challenging, growth-oriented position where I can develop my communication and organizational abilities and utilize my…”

  Ugh. I’ve read passages in O.J. Simpson’s book that are more honest than resume objective statements like these. Stop already! That’s not what you’re “seeking” – you’re seeking the job I have. Since you sent me your resume, I can only assume you want it, regardless of whether it’s challenging or stimulating or gives you the goosebumps. And don’t forget, this can backfire on you, too. Maybe I’m ready to offer you a $50,000 job that doesn’t have much growth potential. Does that mean I shouldn’t call you and give you the job? (Professional Hint: No! Take the job, take the money, learn as much as you can, then jump ship to a better company later.)

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You read that correctly: I said you can leave your GPA off your resume. Slowly back away from this e-book, breathe deeply, calm yourself down, and re-approach the book at the next paragraph.

Hey, you’re back! Good. Here’s the deal about GPA: As far back as you can remember, classroom grades have been the only standard measure of intelligence, so naturally, we’ve been taught to treat them as important. I won’t rant and rave here about how your GPA predicts absolutely nothing about your intelligence, common sense, ability to succeed, etc – but it’s true. And even if it was ever a good predictor of anything (which it wasn’t), the last 10 years so have seen a new problem arise: grade inflation. Grade inflation can be summed up as follows:

At some point in the recent past, someone decided that the horror of seeing the letter “D” or “F” on a report card did much more long-term damage to a kid than, say, not knowing how to read, write or spell. Lots of parents agreed, and convinced schools that even though Johnny still doesn’t know what a comma is, he still deserves a B in English. Consequently, if you want to get a D or an F in 2005, you pretty much have to shoot your algebra teacher in the back with a rocket launcher while he’s balancing equations and the chalkboard. Either that, or keep Tylenol in your locker. Then you’ll be expelled for sure.

Anyhow, the point is this: Nowadays, just about everyone has a GPA of 3.0 or above. Everyone. So what, you say? Well, it means if everyone has a similar GPA, then nobody’s GPA matters anymore. That’s it, plain and simple – if everyone’s GPA is the same (or close), what’s the point of even looking?

Yes, but: I can hear it already: “Yes, but today’s students are smarter than ever! Classes are more advanced, students are better prepared, and their achievements get more outstanding every day. It makes sense that the GPAs are higher.”

It’s absolutely true about the students being smarter than ever, and the achievements, and all that. The stuff that today’s top students know and master and achieve is just mind-boggling. Considering the latest generation has been pushed harder than ever – and earlier than ever – by parents to achieve great things, makes it no surprise. But that just proves the point: if the best students are even better today than before, then why does everyone look the same on paper? If it weren’t for the grade inflation phenomenon, the top students would stick out more; but as it is, they simply don’t.

My advice is to omit your GPA from your resume altogether. I’ve beaten the grade inflation reason to death already, but it’s not the only reason to exclude it. There’s also the fact that a high GPA, influenced by grade inflation or not, indicates very little about your suitability for any particular job. That’s because the things you have to do get an “A” in a college class are completely unlike the things you have to do at a job to be successful. Let’s look at this a little more closely, shall we?

Generally speaking, there are three principal tasks you have to perform in any given college class. They are:1) Tests; 2) Papers & Projects and 3) Showing up. Occasionally you’ll have a class that gives you extra points for discussion or participation, but for the most part, how well you do each of these three things determines your final grade in any particular class. Now, let’s work backward:

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Did you ever see the movie “Hardball,” the inspirational tale of Keanu Reeves teaching love and teamwork to a group of poor inner-city kids? Neither did I, but I caught about 10 seconds of it one day while I was channel-surfing. I caught the part where Keanu, tears in his eyes, tells his ragtag group that “One of the most important things in life is showing up, and I’m blown away by your ability to show up.”

I wanted to cry, too, because that’s some really dumb advice. It may fly for little children, but in reality, you’ll never get a gold star just for showing up. You actually have to do stuff and do it well after you show up in order to be considered a valuable employee. But that’s not necessarily true when in college.

More and more professors are making attendance a part of students’ grades. Some do it for egotistical reasons — their feelings are hurt when students decide it’d be more interesting to sleep than to listen to them lecture, so they require attendance. In other cases, parents pressure universities to require attendance, to ensure their hard-earned money isn’t paying for classes that their sons and daughters are skipping in favor of watching an all-day Simon & Simon marathon on TNT (not that I’d know anything about that). Regardless of the reasons, the outcome is this: you can now get a good chunk of an A just by dragging your tired bones into class in pajama pants and big fuzzy slippers.

And let’s not forget that the majority of college classes don’t even count attendance at all, especially at larger schools. You can make a total of two appearances all semester – one for the midterm and one for the final – and as long as you can perform well on those two days – that’s two days out of 110+ days in a semester – you can get an A. Obviously, this does not reflect how things really work at a job. You actually have to show up every day and on time, and when you get there, you have to work for about 9 hours straight, with an hour in between for lunch.

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• • Acing midterms and finals is still the number one way to leave college with an excellent GPA. Exams are supposed to cover the most important concepts and skills that a class has to offer and reveal to what degree you’ve mastered all these concepts and skills. So why is it that test scores don’t necessarily give an accurate forecast of how good you’ll be on the job?There are several reasons, actually. There’s an incredible difference in the way “tests” are perceived in college, and in the world outside college. First, let’s get clear on what tests are supposed be: a yardstick to measure how much knowledge you have about some given subject at some given point in time. That’s pretty much it. Note that I didn’t say it was the final day of reckoning at the Crossroads, the day you must match wits with Satan himself about organic chemistry or Constitutional Law for the right to live the rest of your days above ground. It’s just a TEST to see where you are right now. And in the grand scheme of your life and career, “where you are right now” is very near the beginning.

    But the college system doesn’t treat you that way. It treats you – in every class, at the end of every semester – like you’re at the end of the line. Know everything by now, or else. Or else you’ll get a bad grade. And because of that, students go about their learning process differently. Instead of learning as many concepts and skills as they can for the long-term, they do something different: they start preparing for tests.

    If you’re a college student now or have been a student any time in the last 10 years, you know what I’m talking about. Rarely does a student (and I’m speaking for myself here, too) attempt to read, learn, synthesize and retain all of the material in every course’s syllabus. Believe it or not, that’s what most of our past generations of college students were expected to do – learn everything the teacher covered in a semester, because you never knew what was going to be on the midterms and finals when they rolled around.

    That almost never happens now. Most professors tell you what’s going to be covered on the big tests. Many will even review some questions from the actual test with you. Many will hold big review sessions during regular class hours – the class hours you’re paying them to teach you new stuff, not old stuff. Some will even GIVE YOU THE DAMNED TEST so you can go home and study it. That’s right – they give you a piece of paper with some questions, you go home and find the answers to those questions, you come back the next period and transfer those answers onto the same piece of paper, and voila – you get an “A” on the test.

    Now, many of you are undoubtedly saying, “Yeah….so?” And I probably would’ve said the same thing when I was in college – whatever freed up my time to drink more beer and meet different girls was fine with me. But my point here is different: it’s not to stop partying and start studying all the time – far from it. The point is, if you’re going , you might as well be studying something useful that you’ll remember, rather than 40 questions on a test that you’ll forcefully shove out of your mind once you’ve dropped the answer sheet on your professor’s desk.

    There isn’t too much professors can do about this – it’s simply the way the educational system is set up. The one remedy that’s sometimes available is the ability to take a class on the pass-fail system, rather than for a specific letter grade. I have long been a big proponent of pass-fail classes, and still recommend to any student to take a class pass-fail any time you can. But I’ll talk more about that later.

  • What are the possibilities? You have a low GPA — definitely leave it off. You have an average GPA — why include it? What does it add to your application? It’s strong — ok, but it’s still just GPA, and employers know that the stuff you did to get that GPA are very different from what you’ll do at a job. You don’t go to work from 9-10 and 2-4 on MWF and 12-3 on T and TH. Work is different.

    Exception — if you have a really, really high GPA, like summa cum laude high or a 4.0, maybe you should include it. There’s still a “wow” factor there, because the likelihood is your boss didn’t graduate with that high of a GPA, and it still impresses some people. That said, remember that most bosses know that your GPA doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a good employee, worker, whatever. Worst, least knowledgeable person I ever had to work with was a 4.0 student, undergrad and grad school.

    Yes, but: Some students and parents (especially parents) think I hold GPA in low regard because I never had a very good one myself, and that I’m simply giving you the “I never had a good GPA, and look at me now!” line. Sorry, wrong answer. I was the salutatorian of my high school class with a 3.96 (we didn’t have those highfalutin’, five-point AP classes in Box Elder, South Dakota, thank you very much), and I got my B.A. in English with a 3.9. Am I bragging? Not at all – just telling you from personal experience that a high GPA means very, very little to anyone outside of your dinner table. In fact, let me punctuate this point with a final anecdote:

    One of the biggest regrets I have about my college education is dropping my French minor. I loved studying foreign languages, and to this day, I still do. But in the middle of my French III semester, I abruptly dropped the class. Why? Because I thought I was going to get a “B” and that would hurt my GPA. Let me be clear here: That decision was asinine beyond words. I cannot describe how stupid it was for me to do that. Never once, in the history of my life, has anyone asked me what grade I received in French III. Ever. But because of that choice, there ended my formal French study. There ended my quest to master that beautiful, romantic tongue – to saunter off to Europe and meander through France, Switzerland, Belgium, wooing lovely francophone girls into jelly with my rugged American exterior yet oh-so-cultured mastery of le francais.

    But thanks to my absolutely silly pursuit of few extra hundredths of a point on my undergraduate GPA, my French stinks. I’ve been to Montreal and Paris and stammered like a fool each time, relying only upon the locals’ goodwill toward English-speakers to get by (lots more of that in Montreal than Paris, by the way). Oh, well. I was in Paris on my honeymoon anyway, so I guess my wife would’ve put a stop to any lovely-French-girl wooing even if I could’ve managed some.

    Don’t be like me. Learn what you want to learn and forget about the GPA. You will never, ever regret it.

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If you like to water ski, or play shuffleboard or crochet dog sweaters, good for you. As an employer, I don’t give a damn. If this resume is truly your one-time, one-page, rehearsed best effort, then your personal interests don’t belong anywhere on it. If you can’t talk about yourself for one measly page without bringing up the fact that you like jet skis and golf, then you’re probably not the right person for the job.

Yes, but: But aren’t your personal interests an expression of your “real self” – the person behind the paper, the human being that these people would be interacting with every day if they were to hire you? Yes indeed, and that’s another reason to OMIT the personal information, regardless of how wonderful a guy/gal you think you are.

Here’s what you’re forgetting: On a personal level, your boss may be a complete jerk (this has been known to be the case – just ask anyone who’s ever had a job). He may like what you hate and hate what you like. He may annoy you, and you may annoy him. Your love of reality TV may lead him to think you’re a nitwit. Your passion for three-wheelers may bring to mind those little bastards who ride their Razor scooters up and down his street at night, robbing his hard-earned sleep.

So why risk bringing up such irrelevant things in the first place? After all – and this is the most important part – no one who needs help on the job badly enough to necessitate hiring someone is going to hire you based on the things you do outside of work. It’s what you can do for your boss on the job that will get you hired.

After reading the previous pages, you may think I’m a complete stiff who’s totally against having fun at work. Nothing could be further from the truth; in fact, I’ve always made my job as much fun as I possibly could and encouraged everyone around me to loosen up and do the same. But I do after I’ve already gotten the job.

There’s a time and place for your personality to come out. That time is after you’ve got the job, and that place is the water cooler, lunches, meetings, etc. Once the papers are signed and you’ve got a paycheck, that’s the time to get to know the people in your office. You won’t like everyone, and everyone probably won’t like you, either. But that’s fine if you’ve already got the job – working with people you don’t like is as inevitable as death itself. You just don’t want them ganging up on you beforehand and convincing the boss that you aren’t worth hiring in the first place.

Here’s a real-life example: if someone sent me a resume and included the

. Same goes for social Greek organizations, and most service ones, too. If you had big leadership roles in the organizations, OK, but if not, skip it. An employer is thinking, how can you help me? And these things don’t help.

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• Everything I said about personal interests also goes for social Greek organizations, and also most service fraternities. SomeYes, but: Aren’t fraternities and sororities great for networking after college is over – including job-market networking? Yes, they’re definitely great for networking. And I must confess that I never joined a fraternity, so I don’t have personal knowledge of exactly how far a frat-brother connection will go in the way of landing you a job. My conversations with Greek friends and acquaintances, however, indicate that such a connection is sometimes enough to get your foot in the proverbial door. In light of that, I might make one exception to the above rule: If you’re applying for a job where you know that one of your fraternity/sorority members works and has hiring discretion, then you may want to sneak your affiliation onto your resume. Again, I emphasize this approach only for jobs where one of your Greek brethren has some pull. Otherwise, in a normal job-opening situation where you’re going in cold, fraternity and sorority membership won’t impress the person reading your resume.

  Yes, but (Part II): “Greeks do lots of charity work, so my association with a fraternity or sorority is relevant for that reason.” It’s true that Greeks do a lot of charity work, but charity work is not the reason for their existence. So you can’t claim a “halo entry” for a fraternity the way you could for, say, working at Habitat for Humanity. Most of your employers have been to college, and whether we were Greek or not, we know that the primary reason a person joins a fraternity or sorority isn’t to do charity work. There’s plenty of charity work out there that doesn’t require pledging, hazing, and dues. And that’s not a knock on Greek life at all – to each his own – but let’s call a spade a spade.

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• Almost without exception, you should not put high school achievements on your resume. Unless you cured a disease or saved the world from certain destruction and have the newspaper articles to prove it, leave this stuff out. Why? Because things were different in high school. You were competing against a hodgepodge of 16- and 17-year-olds thrown together by the caprices of geography. Many of those teenagers had no interest whatsoever in competing with you for grades, awards, honors, etc. Some others dropped out altogether to (pick one) join a gang, deliver pizza full time, follow Phish around the country, or smoke cigarettes at the mall.The fact that your accomplishments bested those of your above-mentioned peers five years ago is not impressive to a present-day employer. It’s not that you can’t still feel good about it. Hey, I still treasure my high-school discus medals and that time I took third out of 150 competitors in an English Literature competition. But I don’t put it on my resume, because no one who sees my resume would care.

  The reason you don’t include that stuff is that you’re into a much higher level of competition now. Everyone you’re competing with wants exactly the same thing you want: the open job. And there aren’t any slouches competing with you anymore – those guys smoking cigarettes at the mall (yes, they’re still there, five years later) are not the ones competing with you now. Everyone you’re up against has a similar background, education and skill set. Because of that, it’s important that you emphasize your recent accomplishments – ones that you’ve carved out for yourself against your current crop of competitors, rather than people from the past who weren’t really breaking their necks to compete with you in the first place.

  Yes, but: “What about major accomplishments, like becoming an Eagle Scout?” There are indeed some accomplishments that mark a person for life, and garner praise for many years – even decades – after they’re earned, even if they’re earned during a person’s high school years. In this case, I’d make an exception to the above rules and include the accomplishment on your resume. For example, there’s no way I’d leave “Eagle Scout” off my resume (especially since I dropped out of Cub Scouts the first time they asked me to tie a knot).

  There may be other awards that carry similar weight, but I’m not aware of them, so your decision whether to include such an award in your resume will be up to you. But before you take the natural step of assuming your award or accomplishment is prestigious enough to include, ask yourself one question: When you tell people who don’t know you about your award, do they have to ask you to explain what that is? Or is it an accomplishment, like Eagle Scout, that everyone instantly recognizes? If it’s the former, then it probably doesn’t belong on your real-world, job-market resume.

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