Resume is the first form of official communication between an employee and an prospective employer. The resume helps the employer is make an initial assessment if the candidate is suitable for the job offered by the company. It is therefore important to be create a professional and favorable impression on the employers with your resume. The resume represents a brief snapshot of your important achievements in your professional and academic life. However, in today’s world as the number of degrees, certifications rapidly evolve and professionals continuously reskill and retool themselves, fitting all that can possibly matter to an employer in a single resume is a difficult task without making the resume look cluttered.
There have been many debates on how to solve this problem of packing everything into a resume. One of the solutions proposed has often been that any job seeker create more than one resume. Preparing a resume is often underestimated as a task by any jobseeker. It takes a lot of time and effort to create a document that you think is ready to be sent to any employer for an audience for a potential job. So how many resumes do you actually need and why there is a need to create more than one resume? Listed below is a list of reasons for why one should have more than one resume
1) Declutter:
I didn’t know there was a word called declutter. Apparently there is, and the meaning is obvious. Employers don’t want to look at a document that is difficult to read and has so much information that it becomes unreadable.
Packing everything that’s happened in your life into your resume will make it cluttered. Try and aim for a resume that’s not more than 2 pages. Anything longer will start creating more questions in the mind of the employer.
A large number of qualifications is often positive but mentioning all the jobs that you have done even if they in no way help your application for the current job or connected to the profile which you have applied for makes it an unnecessary waste of time for the employer as well as the company. In fact, with so many details, the employer may most probably miss out the actual specializations of your field which would have probably got you the job. Hence, it is important to put only specific specializations in a resume to make it look decluttered and organized.
2) Hassle free:
With the first step of decluttering done, you can move to the next step. One of the most important reasons to have more than one resume is so that you do not have to edit your resume (which has everything in your life) every time you send it to different employers in different professional sectors. Editing a resume for every application that you send takes time, it also means that you will make more errors in terms of missing out on important information, grammar and english giving the employer more reasons to reject your application. You would have spent hours and hours preparing your resume and if you have to edit it on the fly to make an application it’s going to create unnecessary stress and increase the margin of error. Take the hassle out of making quick applications. Create different resumes based on the different sectors you want to apply for and be ready.
3) Statement of purpose:
Many applications cite the Statement of Purpose either in the resume or the cover letter. The statement of purpose reflects why the candidate thinks she is a good fit for the job. The Statement of purpose by its very nature will change according to the job that the candidate is applying for. If a person has only one resume, the statement of purpose will be either disconnected to the resume of will have to be force fitted to reflect the contents of the resume.
Moreover, with more than one resume which is created to be in synergy with the qualifications needed for the job profile for which a candidate chooses to apply. Hence, as a clear objective forms the soul of any resume, it is not recommended to change it every time one sends its resume to different job profiles. Hence, it is necessary to create more than one resume.
4) Highlighting Competencies:
Every resume has a focus on certain areas of competencies. It helps the employer in determining the suitability of the candidate through his resume. As a resume is a professional summary of all the qualifications, interests and experiences, it is easy for the employer to find out the competencies with a quick look through the resume. However, if a person adds too many competencies in one resume, it tends to confuse the employer. A person with a lack of clarity in the resume is not considered highly reducing their chances to be shortlisted by employers to work in their organizations. If you have many different competencies that you’d like to highlight then, create various resumes to highlight the ones which are the most important and suitable for that specific job you are applying for.
5) Precision and a Sub resume:
There are often times when people wear a lot of different hats. The hats represent the various stages of their careers or the different types of activities that they are involved in during their course of curriculum or through the company that they have worked with. Many of these activities in some way or another enhance their chances of being selected for a particular job. However, to go in to great detail about all these activities in the resume only makes it cluttered. To maintain precision, it is quite often expected by the candidates with depth of knowledge to mention the details in another resume which should be maintained just for that. Many times than not, employers may be interested in learning about the activities that the candidate has been participated in to see his extracurricular activities or interests. Hence, a sub resume, with the various different small achievements can be provided on request along with the main resume describing its purpose.
6) Relevance:
One of the most important objectives of a resume is supposed to be its relevance. All the details mentioned in the resume have to be, directly or indirectly relevant to the reader or the employer. A lot of people have had multiple number and varieties of jobs in their lives, but it is not important to mention every single one of them if they are not relevant to the job applied for. For example, a person in media does not need to mention that she worked as a nurse in a hospital as a temp for a month early in their career. It is not relevant to the work profile and writing about the irrelevant odd jobs causes resume clutter and creates unnecessary questions in the minds of the employer. Hence, depending upon the job one should create different resume as it improves the feasibility as well as the way in which the employer reviews the resume gets better.
7) If you can handle two jobs at the same time:
Sometimes, there are chances that a company is looking for an architect as well as an interior decorator. If a candidate is able to fulfill both of the jobs without affecting the quality of both the jobs done, it is possible that he/she may be hired for both the jobs at once. However, a single resume may not be able to fit the qualifications and experiences of both the jobs that a candidate has applied for and there are chances, that the employers reviewing different sections are different. Hence, it is necessary to create one resume that concentrates on architecture and the other on interior designing. One has to make sure that all experiences that qualify the person to be good at both are highlighted effectively in both the resumes.
8) Versioning, Layouts and Formats:
Writing a resume is a time consuming task and often most people struggle to figure out on where to start, what format to use. So the first version of the resume that gets prepared and is sent out is the one that has had no employer feedback.
IF you’ve made many applications without good results you should go back and change the layout, experiment with the change of words, make the resume compelling and rewriting the content. All this while creating a new version of the resume in a new layout and format. Sending this new version of the resume may give you better results compared to others in the past.
Most people miss the fact that the resume is your personal advertisement and it needs to be worked upon tirelessly till you are able to convince an employer to make a job offer to you.
Try creating different resumes in your job hunt and tell us how it helped you.
