When I talk about resumes and cover letters, I’m opinionated and direct, and I’ll always tell you exactly what I think. That’s my own characterization of myself, anyway. Others have called me rude, insensitive, arrogant, and other, more R-rated terms. But usually the people who knock me are students who have never had a full-time job, or teachers who have never been given the authority to hire anyone for a full-time job. Rest assured that I respect everyone’s right to their opinion – I just think my opinion is usually right. Hey, that’s what makes it my opinion, right?

Here’s the deal about why I wrote this book. I’ll make it brief:

I’m 30 — older than you, but not a dinosaur. I still clearly remember applying for scholarships, internships and jobs. If you’re lucky, your high school or college may have devoted a whopping one or two class periods to showing you how to do a resume. Or maybe you didn’t even get that: perhaps you’ve got one of those “career counseling” offices at your school, with services that are available to everyone – and used by no one.

I’d rather help you get a job than stroke your ego. There are already way too many people in the world who would rather kiss your ass and send you on your way instead of taking a little extra time to help you identify and fix your flaws. You know many of these people already – they’re your teachers, friends and parents.

I would rather tell you the truth about the weaknesses in your resume, have you go fix them, and then get a job — than tell you how nice, perfect and wonderful your resume is, and then watch you send it out and get no callbacks. Remember, the time to correct your resumes is NOW, rather than after you send them out. I wrote this book to stop you from making mistakes that could cost you interviews, so if I’m looking at your resume and find a lot of suggested changes, then that’s good. No changes, that’s good, too. Only good outcomes. Also remember that opinions differ on a lot of these things — I’m just going to give you mine.

Always a good question. Personally, I can’t pick up any kind of how-to or other instructional book these days without thinking: Who is this person, exactly, and why should I listen to what he/she has to say? What have he/she done to be anointed a so-called “expert”? So let me make my case in the following two paragraphs – quickly, so we can get down to brass tacks on this resume business:

While I was getting my master’s degree in journalism at the University of Missouri from 1997-1999, I was named one of four Pulitzer New Media Fellows. Sounds fancy, eh? One of my primary jobs was teaching online resume writing….

What’s the point of a resume, anyway? I mean, if you want the job, why don’t you just send a letter and ask nicely if you can have it, pretty please with sugar on top?

That’d be nice – sure would eliminate a lot of time spent polishing (and padding) a resume. But of course, employers would like to hire someone who can actually do the job, so they ask for a resume. Now, this doesn’t always equal hiring success; even with resumes to guide them, most employers routinely screw up and hire the wrong person now and then – someone who not only isn’t ideal for the job, but someone who absolutely cannot perform the job duties whatsoever. If you think I’m exaggerating, I’m not. This happens, and it happens often. Here’s an example of it happening to me. Funny story – funny now, anyway.

I mentioned earlier how, during my time at Cox Interactive, I got an early promotion that led to the exodus of several of my colleagues. I wasn’t given the budget to replace them all, but I did get to replace my calendar editor. This is the person who ensures that all of the sports, music, and other entertainment events going on around town were dutifully entered into our website’s calendar so that our audience would find something fun to do if they came looking. And every time they found something fun to do, they’d remember they found it at our site, and – we hoped – become loyal, repeat visitors to our site. Those are important in the website-building world.

A calendar editor doesn’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar; in fact, it’s better if she’s not. A Rhodes Scholar would get really bored really fast with the tedium that is calendar maintenance. In fact, because it’s just repetitive maintenance, perhaps the job should’ve been called “calendar janitor”; using the word “editor” conjured up visions of midnight dealines, last-minute rewrites and gleefully cranking out the scoop of the day, none of which would ever, ever happen to the calendar editor. The job basically consists of entering hundreds of lines into a form, day after day after day. Lather, rinse, repeat. If ever there were a cog in the machinery of Internet media, it is the calendar editor.

And not only did the job require no special knowledge, it also happened to pay extremely well — $35,000. That’s not CEO money, but for data entry in a cushy office where you can bring your headphones and drink free Starbucks all day, it’s an incredible gig. Knowing that, it should be very easy to find a good calendar editor, right? Right.

Except when it’s not.

I had several applicants, all of whom seemed to have a strong pulse and at least 8 working fingers, which is just about all you need in the way of physical prowess to be a calendar editors. But one applicant stood out. Not only could she breathe and chew gum and the same time, but she was actually a former calendar editor for our chief rival website! And at that time, the rival was eating our lunch, so getting their old calendar editor was a giant coup. Not only could she do the job in her sleep, but she’d bring us tips and tricks from the competition that we’d never seen before! We’d have a pipeline to every event in every corner of the Phoenix metro area, from the U2 concerts in the arenas to the back-alley cockfights on the south side. Life was good. Problem solved.

To this day, I don’t know what the hell happened with that lady. All I do know is that she showed up….

This is the single most important concept of this book, and I repeat it several hundred times (seems like, anyway) throughout the book. This seems obvious, but honestly, most people don’t really understand this until it’s pointed out to them. Ask someone what their resume is, and the answer goes something like, “it’s the thing you send out to get a job.” Well yes, but no, not really. It’s much more than that, and you can’t approach it quite that haphazardly. Here’s why:

You, like everyone else in the world, are a complex person with many skills, faults, likes, dislikes, aptitudes, challenges, etc. You could fill a book writing about your personality alone. But you don’t have time to write it, and even if you did, I, your prospective employer wouldn’t read it. I’m busy. Really busy. I have an entire, 50-hour-a-week job to do, and that doesn’t count this whole process of sifting through resumes and doing job interviews. Plus, I prefer crime novels anyway.

So we’ve established that I don’t want to read your life story – at least, not now. But you still want the job, so you have to tell me something about yourself, and it does need to be substantive. Needs to be long on substance and short on B.S. that I’d rather not waste my time reading. And this, my friends, is why God created resumes.

Resumes exist for you, the applicant, to succinctly tell me, the employer, everything I need to know about exactly why I should hire you — and not a bit more (did I mention you’ll hear that a lot before you get to the end of this book?). Later on in this book, I’ll examine in some pretty fine detail what you should and shouldn’t include in your resume. But first, before you even start your resume (or start to make changes to it, which you’ll almost certainly do after you’ve read this book from beginning to end), here are a couple of things you need to know first.

Many people, especially those applying for their first real job, have a very “wishful-thinking” scenario in their heads about what happens when they send their resumes off to a prospective employer. In this scenario, the boss usually sits at a huge desk in a pristine office with a lovely view. His eyeglasses (or her eyeglasses – you choose, it’s your fantasy) are dropped slightly down on his nose, and with every line he reads, he nods ever more approvingly, more assured than ever that you’re the best person for the job. He picks up his phone and calls Smith in the corner office. “Smith, have you seen the resume for this Jane Doe? Wow! Now that’s who we need!” He hangs up. He hits the speakerphone call button again. His assistant answers. “Justin, we need to get this Jane Doe in for an interview right away. Please call her and set something up this week, today if possible.” Justin the Assistant calls you and tells you that Mr. Boss likes your resume and would like you to come in. You do. After 10 minutes of getting to know each other, your suitability for the throne is confirmed, and the job is yours.

Now, here’s what really happens. Your resume arrives in the HR department, where it’s opened and placed in a stack with hundreds of others. The stack continues to grow until the HR department determines it’s gotten big enough. Then that stack is delivered not to the boss, but the unlucky slug that gets the job of sorting through them all. This unlucky slug probably isn’t excited about the prospect of sifting through 800 resumes, since his other job responsibilities haven’t decreased any, and this will only pack his schedule more tightly than it’s already packed.

But he doesn’t want to be responsible for hiring a dud, so he takes the task seriously. Over a period of days, he sifts through the resumes, hoping to weed out the 90 percent of resumes that all sound the same and discover the exceptional ones………..

but more than likely, it’s in the middle. <emphasize the “I won’t get that far” angle. Remember that I as the employer will never get my first impression from you, yourself. I’ll get it from your resume. You may be the most charismatic and knowledgeable person alive. You may have the straightest teeth around, spring-fresh deodorant and a fantastic interview outfit that makes you look so fantastic that no one could see you in it without offering you a job. But it doesn’t matter. If your resume sucks, you’ll never get the chance to show me any of it, because I won’t want to interview you.

Ever thought of it that way? Makes sense, doesn’t it?

How? Because everyone and his mom has access to millions of job listings. Used to be, if you lived in Iowa and saw a job opening, you could be pretty sure that you were only going to be competing with other Iowans for that job. But not today – thanks to the Monster.coms of the world, millions of people from Tokyo to Texas to Timbuktu all have access to that little Iowa job listing.

And that’s not all. Your worldwide competitors don’t even have to air-mail their resumes across the pond. It’s all done in one click of the mouse.

Now, at first, you probably think that’s a great thing. From the comfort and privacy of your computer desk, you can apply for 200 jobs around the world in just a couple of hours, right? Sweet!

Well…ok, that’s pretty sweet, I’ll give you that. But the picture gets dimmer when you realize that, because it’s so easy to do, millions of other people are out there doing the same thing. They’re applying for the same jobs you’re applying for, flooding the employers with thousands and thousands of resumes… and burying yours underneath them all. Each resume that comes in is one that might be better than yours.

So thanks to the Web, every job posted today will get hundreds of applicants, if not thousands. The person in charge of reviewing the resumes – who almost always has other, more time-consuming duties than hiring new people — doesn’t review these all right as they come in. I know, I know – in your mind, they grab your envelope the minute the mail carrier drops off the mail, rip it open, and immediately read it carefully, marveling at all your accomplishments. They can’t help but smile about what a fine individual you must be.

What really happens is this: they get tossed in a pile or an email folder, and when the time comes to finally review them, there’s a stack. A fucking HUGE stack.You might be at the top — that’s good, because the first one is always remembered fairly well. You might be at the bottom — that’s good, too, because the last one is the freshest and easiest to remember. But likely, you’ll be in the middle, and that’s not good. People in the middle get forgotten much more often than those at the top or bottom – that’s a simple fact that you probably learned in Psych 101.

For this one particular life exercise — finding a job — you have to unlearn all the nice self-esteem lessons about how unique you are and how no one else is like you, blah blah blah. But there are ways to differentiate yourself.

As an employer, my time is valuable. Employer mindset is that simply by picking this up and looking at it, I’m doing you a favor. This is especially true now, in a situation where there are 100 people applying for every job and internship you post. So before I even lay eyes on it, you owe me to make the content of this resume worth my time to read it. Everything you include on it should be worth reading. Most people don’t – most people screw up in some way. Making it worth my time involves many things:

My agency once managed a very large online events calendar for a major news website in Phoenix, where I live. It was a very important job, but it didn’t require a great deal of experience, so we placed an ad at Arizona State University, looking for an intern to handle the job of editing the calendar. We got dozens of responses, but my favorite one went something like this:

Dear Mr. Barsch:

I read with great interest about the job of calender editor with your company. I think I would be an excellent candidate for this job, because I currently work on the events calender for my church, and am very aware of community events and also good with computers. I am excited about the opportunity to become your calender editor and look forward to talking more with you about this opportunity.

Sincerely,
Jane Doe

Maybe I’m biased because I’ve been a fairly decent speller since I was young, but come on – are you kidding me? The average fifth grader can spell the word “calendar,” I guarantee you. And if you can’t – hey, get up and walk to one of the walls in your dorm room or apartment. See that big thing with all the squares and numbers on it? Check the cover, and I guarantee you’ll see the word “CALENDAR” written somewhere on it. Copy that spelling. That’s all you have to do to get it right.

Against my better judgment, I couldn’t resist writing this girl back. I don’t consider myself to be a crusader for correct spelling, because that’s a losing battle if ever there was one. Usually these things just get deleted, but some people are begging for a little correction. And I told myself to feel good about it, because my “tough love” might actually help this girl someday. So I wrote her back, and my response went something like this:

Dear Jane,

Thanks for your inquiry about the calendar job. I wanted to be frank with you and tell you that you were eliminated from consideration for the job due to the fact that you misspelled “calender” three times in your email. To be honest, I couldn’t trust you to do error-free work as a calendar editor when you’re unable to spell the word “calendar.” I wish you the best of luck in the future.

Best regards,

Josh Barsch

I didn’t expect her to feel good when she received it, but sometimes you need to hear the unpleasant truth in order to improve, right? Well, not according to Jane. She actually wrote back.

Dear Mr. Barsch,

I don’t know why you had to write me back just to tell me about my spelling. I would have liked it better if you had not written me back at all. I am not a perfect speller, but I still think I could have done a very good job.

Jane Doe

So much for trying to be helpful.

Many people today tend to say that spelling on your resume matters less depending on the nature of the job you’re applying for. They say things like, “What do you expect? I’m in marketing!” or “I spray for termites. Don’t expect me to win the spelling bee.” But that’s not the point. No one expects you to be a perfect speller or grammarian in your day-to-day life; however, your resume is supposed to be your one-time, absolute best possible effort. It’s not just you — it’s you and the dictionary and whoever you can find to proofread it, taking as much time as you need to make this ONE document perfect. Yes, perfect – no errors whatsoever.

Whether you like it or not, if you misspell words on a resume, you are telling your employer that you’re lazy, and that’s the worst possible thing to tell a potential employer. We think, “Wow, if this person is putting his/her best foot forward on a resume and it still looks half-assed, then can you imagine how half-assed his/her work is going to be?”

So how do you get your resume into tip-top, error-free shape, even if you can’t spell worth a damn? For starters, of course, use the spell-check function on your computer program. That will catch most of the obvious errors. But once the document is spell-checked, give a copy of it to friends, teachers, spouse, children or whoever else you know that’s a better speller than you are. Ask them straight out, “Would you mind taking two minutes to check my resume for mistakes? I’m not a great speller.”

Don’t be embarrassed to say you’re not a good speller – trust me, you’re in good company. Once you’ve had a few people glance over it for errors, you should have an error-free document. It doesn’t take long, and it can make the difference between getting the job and getting your resume tossed in the garbage.

Most of what I just said about spelling applies to grammar as well, although there is one slight difference: most people, including your potential employers, are not masters of grammar. You can screw up a little here and there, and it’ll go unnoticed. For instance, should you say “if I were a rich man” or “if I was a rich man”? Unless you’re applying for a copy editor job at a newspaper, it’s not a big deal, because copy editors are just about the only people in the world who know every grammatical nuance of the English language (by the way, the answer is “were” – I used to be a copy editor). On the other hand, if you misspell “calendar,” that’ll jump out at everyone who sees your resume.

If you don’t know the difference between “their” and “there,” “its” and “it’s” and “your” and “you’re,” then don’t leave college yet.

As a humor columnist for my college newspaper, The Capaha Arrow at Southeast Missouri State University, I was long-winded and often wrote longer columns than space would allow my editors to print. Seems I loved the sound of my own voice (and if you’ve gotten this far into this e-book, I doubt you’re surprised). So my adviser gave me an excellent, if politically incorrect, piece of advice: “The ideal length of an article is the ideal length of a woman’s skirt,” he said. “Long enough to cover everything, but short enough to make it interesting.” And the same holds true for resumes.

If there’s one rule that just about everyone has heard about resume writing, it’s that you should keep your resume to one page. But is it true? As usual, the answer is, “it depends.” If you’re a college student – especially an undergraduate student – then 99 percent of the time, the answer is yes, you should keep it to one page. If you’re some kind of wunderkind who was speaking five languages and taking community college classes while your peers were double-dutching and making Pinewood Derby cars, then you may have an argument for a second page. If not, then stick to one page. And I really do mean 99 percent of the time, so this probably means you.

Yes, but: Inevitably, when I talk about the one-page rule, I get at least one or two students who raise their hands and say, “But I’ve accomplished SO much and I’m in SO many activities and have SO many accomplishments, that I just can’t fit all my important information on one page.” My answer? Unlikely. Certainly, some students are so busy achieving that, when it comes time to get it all down on paper, it just won’t fit. But all that tells you is:

a) You need to be more choosy about what you include in your resume. Your future employer can live without knowing some of this stuff.

b) The things you do include, you need to write about more concisely.

c) You need to use the formatting tools in your word-processing software to your advantage.

Again, I don’t say this to discourage you high-achievers out there, or to suggest that you shouldn’t be proud of all your accomplishments. You should. And I know how you feel. I graduated summa cum laude, got a string of writing awards, was in a half-dozen honor societies, etc., so I know what it’s like to feel like a hotshot coming out of school. However, you have to realize that none of the slave-to-the-grind, real-world employers out there – people who don’t know you from Adam – has the time to recognize each accomplishment and be as proud of you as you, your family and friends are. That’s just not on their agenda, and it’s never going to be. What IS on their agenda is to find someone to fill the position in front of them. And you can save them time by fitting all of your relevant information onto one beautiful, concise page. Trust me, it can be done.

Keeping your resume to one page will seem difficult at first, but it’s not that bad once you learn a few tips and tricks. The tips have to do with the content you do and don’t include, and the tricks are in the formatting.

• 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.)

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: