With the explosion of professional networking sites and the instant accessibility of information that we seem to crave, combined with the compulsion for self-promotion, I can’t help but wonder if the traditional, paper resume is bidding us a slow farewell. Honestly, how can it compete with the on-demand world of social media? If the resume wants to save itself, it needs to adapt to remain relevant.
Resumes themselves won’t become obsolete, just the mode in which they are transmitted. No longer will you need to coordinate your paper and envelopes, print out your resume, and mail it off to countless hiring managers. You will, however, need to maintain an up-to-date electronic resume that is ready and waiting to be viewed at any time.
This electronic version of your resume can be marketed in numerous ways. You may have a blog, website, or link that directs traffic to your resume. The downside? You are competing in a vastly larger field where it is easy to be overlooked. The upside? Your resume is always out there working for you.
Trends ebb and flow and in order to keep up you need to be open-minded, flexible, and willing to learn; if you do that, you should be fine. Just for fun, here are some things that and are no longer with us, or won’t be for much longer!
Albums
Cassettes (CD’s can’t be far behind),
Walkman
Answering machine
Fax machines
Polaroid film
Regular mail
Pay phones
Floppy disks
VCRs
Whether you need a resume to print out or put online, the experts at ContempoResume can help by creating a customized resume that gets results. Call 800-764-8709 to speak with a certified resume writer.
I agree with the premise of this post, and I’ll take it one step further. The proliferation of social media vehicles (both professional and otherwise) make it imperative that job seekers present a unified image of themselves online.
When I contact anybody professionally, I submit my website – http://www.alexnbrown.com/ – which I inform them contains much more information about me than a basic, paper resume can hold.